Sunday 22 February 2004

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Morrowind, but some things are the same in every world ...

Hydrogen and ignorance

According to some thinker whose name I have forgotten, the two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. (Google says Brian Pickrell is credited with that, and Frank Zappa with something very similar. Whether they actually invented it is anybody's guess.)

While trying to think a bit ahead for a change, I find it hard to see anything beyond 2007 when the Large Hadron Collider will start trying to produce microscopic black holes. The idea is that these will evaporate immediately, providing us with the first observation ever of Hawking radiation. This should be very informative, since there is a debate about whether black holes lead to randomizing of the information that falls into the black hole along with the matter and energy. If the radiation from the black hole is truly independent on the input, then information does not follow the laws of thermodynamics and this is bound to weird out most rational scientists.

Of course, there is always the small problem that if Hawking was wrong about the (so far unobserved) radiation, the black hole will not stay microscopic long. In fact, it is bound to eat our planet for breakfast. This is generally considered a bad thing except by a few angsty teenagers who aren't getting any and think suicide just isn't enough to make up for it.

***

Scientific curiosity is nice, and I'm all for letting loose genetically modified corn and cattle and see what happens. But erasing all life in the known universe is kinda over the top. Especially since we are bound to find out more about these things anyway soon. You see, we are kinda in the middle of a paradigm shift right now, and that's not the best time for such gambles. The sad fact is that nobody really knows how the universe works anymore. We did, less than ten years ago. But not anymore.

It was really nice and tidy, the Big Bang and then cosmic inflation and our universe (among many others) coalescing out of a bubble in the cosmic foam. Sheer poetry. There was certainly some disagreement on the details, and particularly on the history before the Big Bang. But by and large, things seemed pretty clear. And then the facts came and destroyed it all.

With the new generation of electronically enhanced visual telescopes, and the Hubble telescope in space, we got a lot of new data on really remote objects. And they did not perform as instructed. It turned out that the universe seems to expand faster and faster, not slower and slower, as if some unknown anti-gravity is blowing it apart. Also there seems to be heaps of dark matter in the universe which no one really knows what is. Not just a little, but lots and lots. The latest estimate I saw indicated that less than 5% of the universe is matter and energy as we know them. That is kinda unnerving, don't you think? That we don't know spit about almost all of the universe? Then there was the change in one of the cosmic constants, which is rather a contradiction in terms. Constants are supposed to stay constant.

And yet we still have the same theories, of which the wheelchair hero Hawking is considered a leading theorist, if not THE leading theorist. Even so, I heard nothing of him predicting any of these discoveries, and I haven't heard of many dramatic changes to the theories we heard ten years ago.

It is as if we attend a murder case in court, and several witnesses are brought in one after another and tell us how the burly, bearded attacker pummeled the poor guy to death with his bare hands. Then photos are brought in that show the victim was stabbed to death, and a bloody high-heeled shoe that was found at the murder site. The witnesses are given a new chance to explain, and they tell the same story, except now the attacker stabbed the dead guy as an afterthought and pulled this shoe out of his pocket and dipped it in the blood.

It does not seem nearly as credible the second time around.

***

Being wrong in the realm of science does not necessarily mean you're stupid. It is more likely to be ignorance, which is quite justified for a species that just recently realized that the planets did not actually wander around randomly (the name "planet" means wanderer). Even so, it is natural to feel stupid, and try to defend the theories of the past. So I believe a new generation should be allowed to grow up and make their own theories based on the facts we know today, and the facts we don't know yet. I believe this should be allowed to take place before we do any groundbreaking experiments that involve rocking the powers of the heavens.

There are after all plenty of other things we can do. New and larger telescopes in the Lagrange points or even on the far side of the moon, where the lights of civilization will decidedly not disturb the view. Sending some astronauts up to the moon to make a base there and look at the stars and gather samples of the native minerals; we've pretty much used up the last batch. Of course there is the risk that occasionally some mishap may kill an astronaut or a whole ship with a team on board, which would be lamentable indeed. On the other hand, young people die in war of disputed value even as I write this, and the money poured into poorly justified war is plenty enough for a good moonbase if diverted that way.

What kind of future do we want? Do we even want a future at all? Sometimes I have to wonder, because actions speak louder than words. I firmly believe the universe is made such that a species can not conquer space until it has conquered itself. This is a safeguard I would not hesitate to build into any cosmos I'd make, and I'm not even the most Intelligent Designer around. Or so I really, really hope.