From
Big Bang to Overpopulation
The
history of the Universe -
with special emphasis on planet
Earth
and its greatest problem –
and
some of the curiosities and
problems of its inhabitants –
written for curious everyday
persons of all ages
as told by
the quark
to
Siegfried Eckleben
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Siegfried Eckleben
ISBN 978-99945-71-37-6
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Hierdie boek is ook
beskikbaar in Afrikaans met die titel
VAN OERKNAL TOT
OORBEVOLKING
ISBN 978-99945-71-39-0
Dieses Buch gibt es auch in
deutsch mit dem Titel
VOM URKNALL ZUR ÜBERBEVÖLKERUNG
ISBN
978-99945-71-38-3
Contents
About "FROM BIG BANG TO OVERPOPULATION" by Prof. Obermair
First Forces
Inflation!
More Forces
Quarks!
The Great Annihilation
Hadrons, Protons & Neutrons
The Constitution of the Universe
Nature
Imperfection, the Mother of all Evolution
Nuclei
Atoms
And there was Light!
Atomic and Gaseous Clouds
Hyper Stars
Black Holes: irresistible suckers
Galaxies
Stars
Interstellar Medium
Molecules
Sun or Sol
Planets: The Wanderers
Moons
Hairy Comets
Interplanetary Matter
Planet Earth
General
Primordial Cosmic Rotation
Chapter 2: ‘ORGANIC’ EVOLUTION
Outside Interference
Souped-up
Giant Molecules
Replicables
Membranes
Reproducibles
Third Atmosphere: the Oxygen Revolution
First Auto-elimination
The First Rift: Animals and Plants
Unicellular Life - in Southern Africa
Kingdom Animalia
Viruses – Arch Enemies of Life?
Did multicellular beings replace unicellular ones?
Stepped Evolution
Sex!
Marine Life
Landlubbers, the Great Divide
Primates or Finger Animals
Lemurs and Monkeys
Higher Primates or Hominoids
Earthlings
or humans
Chapter 3: LIFE AND INTELLIGENCE
Stepping Stones
Survival of the Fittest, the Quickest, or the Luckiest?
Tracing Heritance
Helping Hands
Many too Much – or Much too Many?
Invisible Life
Intelligent Life
Extraterrestrial Life in the Solar System
Transmission of Life from Planet Earth to Space
Intelligent Life in the Universe
Transcendental
intelligence
Chapter 4: FROM MAN-APE TO APE-MAN
Hunters, Gatherers and Carrion Eaters
Fire!
Languages
Wanderers and Conquerors
Clothing
Dwellings
Getting Things Rolling!
Muscle and Steam
Tilling the Land
Camps, Settlements and Villages, Cities, Nations and Countries – War and Peace and Empires
States and Governments
Economies and Inequality of Distribution
Sensory
Perception on Earth
Chapter 5: DIFFERENCES TO OTHER ANIMALS
Are they really that different?
Earthling Intelligence
Linguists
Bypassing Evolution
Why is this animal so naked?
Greed or the Accumulation of Material Wealth
Posture
Earthling
Sexual Behavior
Chapter 6: COMMON BELIEFS AND FALLACIES
Mysticism, the Basis of Earthling Development
Earthling Affinity for Mysticism
Astrology: overriding genetics?
Earthling
Fallacies and Inconsistencies
Chapter 7: OVERPOPULATION – The Root of (almost) all Evil on Planet Earth
The Impact of a Population on a Planet
The Unheeded Warning of Easter Island
Is More Population Sustainable?
World Conferences on Population Growth
World Conferences on Sustainable Development
Pollution is no Recent Invention
Land Mines
Over-deforestation
Over-fishing
Over-wastage
Over-criminalization
Nuclear Waste Heaps
Over-consumption of Energy
The Scissors are opening
How
to close the scissors
RESUMÈ AND OUTLOOK
The Drivers
Can evolution catch up with technological development?
Bad News
Good News
Homo conscius or Homo prudens?
For Better or for Worse?
About “FROM BIG BANG TO OVERPOPULATION” by Prof. Obermair
What does science tell us about the birth of our Universe, about stars and galaxies and black holes, about elementary particles, the formation of atoms and molecules and their growing diversification, about the beginning of life and its evolution on earth?
In this book an omniscient quark named Yog tells his answers to all these questions for everyday persons of all ages. Indeed, as a witness to all events from the Big Bang to the present state of affairs on planet earth, Yog gives a precise and scientifically sound account to the author Eckleben, who has made a wonderfully intelligent, intelligible and moreover entertaining and often quite amusing tale out of this vast amount of knowledge, all done with a clever use of everyday language without complicated terminology and mathematical formulas.
Having taught advanced courses on cosmology on graduate student level for many years, I can confirm that the facts about cosmic evolution and organic evolution presented by Yog's ghostwriter Eckleben give a pretty good and accurate picture of present day scientific knowledge. It will attract and satisfy many curious readers, in particular young ones, even if they have (yet) had very little scientific education.
Further quite amusing chapters are devoted to a sketch of human societies and behavior as seen from Yog's cosmic-comic point of view. It appears that the quark and his interpreter agree on the certainly likeable engineers' conviction that most personal, social and global problems arise from a lack of rationality and shall be solved in the future with a more scientific approach. In spite of some doubts I do sympathize with their point of view and hope with them for a further development of mankind leading to 'homo prudens', the rational and responsible being that may use its dominating role for the benefit of all life on earth. This, of course, is the hope of all educators and I wish that the book finds wide distribution in schools, public libraries, among teachers and students.
Dr.
Gustav Obermair
Professor of Theoretical Physics
University of
Regensburg
GERMANY
April 2007
About the Book:
From BIGBANG to OVERPOPULATION tells the history of the universe from the beginning to the present. What distinguishes it from the too many others about this subject is that it is told as a story by an eyewitness - by Yog, a quark – who has accompanied the process from the start. Quarks are the oldest elementary particles in existence. Everything in the universe is ultimately made of quarks and electrons – everything organic or inorganic, alive or dead, including you. This is why they know about all and everything. Because quarks have no emotions, Yog reports in an objective, detached way.
Yog describes the inorganic evolution of the universe, including galaxies, stars, planets and moons. It relates the story of biological evolution on Earth from replicable molecules to humans. Yog is currently part of a human, which gives it detailed knowledge of humans too. It illustrates the main differences between humans and other animals – including their abnormal sexual behavior - and some of the more peculiar characteristics of humanity. Yog identifies the key event that distinguished man from beast and identifies the three principal driving forces behind earthling development. It finds that earthlings have bypassed and overtaken biological evolution and predicts that evolution does not end with present day Homo sapiens but proceeds towards a more rational being. It identifies the principal problem facing earthlings - overpopulation - and even speculates about the future of planet Earth and humanity.
From BIGBANG to OVERPOPULATION uses everyday language intended for the average curious person of any gender – from teenagers to pensioners. There are no formulas, diagrams or curves. Apart from tenacity and perseverance, no special knowledge or talent is required.
About the Ghostwriter:
Siegfried Eckleben was born in Weimar, Germany on Labor Day, May 1st, 1944. (It started with labor and he's been laboring ever since). His family fled the Russian Zone of post war Germany in 1949 and emigrated to what was then South West Africa. He grew up and attended school in what is now Namibia and subsequently qualified with a B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Having lived and worked in a number of countries in Southern Africa, North and South America, Australia and Europe, he has now returned and retired to Namibia – and established another residence on one of the Azores Islands in the North Atlantic.
The enigma of the endless universe and often used, but seldom understood concepts, such as eternal and infinity awed and intrigued him since childhood and eventually drove him to research and find Yog, the quark – to write the first part of this book.
The peculiarities of the humans of different cultures that he encountered during his lifetime motivated him to write the second part.
Siegfried speaks five languages and has written articles in English, German and Portuguese.
Chapter 1: COSMIC EVOLUTION
Although initially there were no eyes yet, this narrative is an eyewitness account of the history of the Universe. It was compiled roughly 13.7 billion years after creation of the Universe or 4.6 billion years after the formation of planet Earth - or at the beginning of what is termed the 21st century by the majority of earthlings. It is intended for universal or cosmic audiences that may not be familiar with planet Earth and its inhabitants.
To exemplify the time scale of the evolution of life on planet Earth, l would like to equate one day of 24 hours to the duration from the first living cells to Homo sapiens. This ‘life day’ starts at zero hours, just after midnight of the previous day. For a full 18 hours, only unicellular beings populate the planet. At six in the afternoon the first multicellulars appear. Mammals start to evolve at 11 pm. Man-apes and primitive Homos appear at one minute before midnight. Homo sapiens trundles onto the stage between two and three seconds before midnight! The intriguing question is - what form of life will appear at midnight? Hopefully something meriting the designation Homo prudens, prudent man!
If you would like to become acquainted with the fascinating story of the evolution of the Universe, the evolution of life on planet Earth, the bypassing of evolution by earthlings and the current major problem on planet Earth - all you have to do is:
READ ON!
In the beginning, there was extreme dark, infinitely hot temperature, zero size and utmost density. ALL and EVERYTHING, matter, space, time and energy, were condensed into ONE SINGLE POINT of infinitesimal small dimension and infinite density! Unimaginable to present day earthling minds!! And by any standards a singular, unique, exceptional phenomenon!!! Earthlings have called this point a singularity, a simple non-descriptive word that cannot do it justice at all.
Then (due to an act of creation?) an immensely intense, tremendously bright and extremely hot flash occurred. Our Universe was born in this terrific burst, which many earthlings term the Big Bang. I will use this moment as the ‘creation date’ and the beginning of time of this universe. If the Big Bang was an act of deliberate creation, it immediately raises the question – by whom and for what purpose?
In that infinitesimal instant immediately after BigBang the primordial mass-energy embryo Universe was rapidly expanding from its initial ‘zero’ size; adjacent points of space-time were propelled away from each other at incomprehensibly great speeds. At the same time this extremely small and intensely hot speck was cooling down at an enormous rate from its initial temperature of more than a nonillion sizzling degrees. All fundamental forces were still combined into the one and only super gravitational Primordial Force that caused the terrific expansion.
Please do not be perturbed by seemingly large or small numbers or scientific sounding expressions – neither in your daily life, nor in this book. I have chosen the simplest way of expressing information in earthling language; there are no formulae, no graphs, no curves, and no diagrams to confuse readers. If in spite of that, the terminology seems bleak at times to some readers, I beg them to read on – let the Universe’s and planet Earth’s story unfold – do not let yourself be discouraged by intricate sounding words or numbers.
To enhance the ‘earthly’ perspective for the discerning reader, I will often use an illustrative time scale of earthling generations {25 years}.
We will now follow the sequence of events of the cosmic evolution by taking periodic ‘snapshots’ at significant points on a nonlinear time scale, commencing with mind-boggling short times and continuing through to mind-stretching long ones.
None of the many earthling languages have words or expressions strong enough to adequately describe such extremely short or long durations, such acute temperatures or the tremendous intensity of radiation. Nevertheless, since one of the intended goals of this tale is to convey earthling mentality, I shall confine myself to use only earthling terminology and endeavor to describe cosmic events as accurately as is possible under this limitation.
First Forces
At an infinitesimal short time after BigBang - by comparison, an earthling eyewink would seem eternal - the Primordial Force generated at BigBang started to separate into the Gravitational Force (comparable to its present form) and a Super Force. The embryo Universe was still super dense, super hot and super radiant, only about the minuscule size of one elementary particle (such as a quark, but we had not been born yet), and expanding and cooling at a stunningly rapid rate. The extremely intense concentration of mass-energy caused an immensely strong radiation field; the early ‘postnatal’ Universe was fiercely radiant.
Inflation!
After another unimaginably short duration – even to a quark like me - the Universe underwent an abrupt, tremendous inflation at superluminal speed – awfully much faster than the speed of light. The ‘natural laws’ had possibly been promulgated, but had not taken effect yet; the ‘speed limit’ of absolute speed or the speed of light had not been imposed yet!
If earthling languages are inadequate to describe cosmic phenomena and orders of magnitude, this is much much more so in the case of universal inflation. The diameter of the Universe expanded from a minute septillionth of a centimeter, (smaller than the size of an average atom) to a comparatively immense, enormous 10 centimeters, about the size of a tennis ball. This means it expanded by the gigantic factor of a 10 with 25 zeros in that incredibly short instant! This extremely intense inflationary period ended as abruptly as it had started. The Universe then reverted to its normal – ‘merely’ super rapid – expansion.
More Forces
Another mind-boggling fleeting instant after BigBang, the Universe had cooled to about an octillion degrees. That is a 10 with 27 zeros. At such intensely hot temperatures it does not make all that much difference whether one uses the earthling temperature scale of Celsius, Kelvin or Fahrenheit; they remain unthinkably hot!
The Gravitational Force had strengthened and commenced to exert its influence, but there was still very little mass in the Universe to exert it on. Most of the mass was still in the form of radiant energy. The other existing force, the Super Force, started to divide into the Strong Force (comparable to its present form) and a Weak-Electrical Force. Temperature, radiation and energy levels continued to drop at a terrific rate, yet painfully slow in comparison to that previous ultra steep inflationary peak.
Quarks!
After another infinitesimal fraction of an earthling eyewink’s duration after BigBang, the first quarks were born! We whirled out of this still scorching hot, dense universal womb furnace at terrific speed into the rapidly expanding embryo Universe. For a short gleeful instant, we were freee to go where we pleased, in an extremely hot froth – but to us, exciting, comfortable and pleasant. The intense heat kept us agile, dashing to-and-fro, wiggling and swirling in a chaotic, hectic spree.
As is the case with most earthlings, I have no recollection of the time before my birth, and my memory of the turbulent time immediately after my birth is rather vague and blurred. There was a rapid succession of events, things happened quickly! Maybe there was something, maybe there was nothing before my birth. Maybe there was something, maybe there was nothing before BigBang. If I were an earthling, I would not be able to imagine that there could have been nothing. There must have been a beginning of it all; but at the same time, there must surely have been something before such a beginning!? And there must be an end sometime; but surely something must come after that end!? I shall later describe the weird functioning of the earthling mind in more detail.
During my career through the Universe and eventually planet Earth, I was part of many configurations and organisms. To present an all-round view, I will use the pronoun I as referring to me, Yog, the quark; and the pronouns we, us, our, either as the plural of quarks or signifying the being or entity that I was a part of at the time.
Where I use terms of magnitude or esteem, such as large, small, fast, slow, immeasurable, incredible, unimaginable, improbable, inconceivable and the like in this narrative, these are also to be understood from an earthling’s point of view, perception or understanding.
The Author and its Clan
My name is Yog and I am a quark. My career in this Universe has taken me from just after BigBang through cosmic evolution and biological evolution to my present position as an infinitesimally minuscule part of an earthling.
Yonder is my distant cousin Hurt. We are both quarks, or more precisely, I am a quark and Hurt is an antiquark or krauq. We are not on ‘speaking terms’. Although we have an extremely strong affinity for each other, we have never met face to face. Just as well, or neither of us would be here to tell the tale! It is better that we never meet physically, that Hurt remains a literally very distant cousin, because we would annihilate each other in a short gleeful burst of energy if we ever met up closely!
During the first infinitesimally small fraction of a second after BigBang, all matter in the Universe existed in the form of quarks and krauqs. Quarks are the most important particles in existence. Everything is made of us. Everything! Quarks and electrons are the tiniest building blocks of everything in this Universe.
All objects in the Universe are composed of quarks and electrons in some configuration. Since we are the universal building blocks, we permeate everything and know about everything: physical, inorganic matter, organic matter, antimatter, any matter and all that matters. Since energy is related to matter, we know everything there is to know about all forms of energy too. This Universe consists of 73% of what earthlings have termed dark energy, 23% dark matter and only 4% white energy and white matter. Since we are part of everything, our experience extends to dark energy and dark matter, whereas earthlings can only perceive the measly 4% of white energy and matter that makes up ‘their’ Universe.
We are timeless. We have been here since just after the beginning of time and we will be here at least until the end of time.
We are indestructible. Molecules can be cracked, atoms can be split or fused, but the quarks involved in these processes survive, unless our antiquark ‘krauqs’ and we annihilate each other!
What we do not inherently know about are emotional matters. Since we quarks are not capable of feelings, we cannot sense or understand them. That is why my narrative is completely objective and unemotional. I tell it as it is. At the time of compiling this overview, I am a minuscule part of an earthling, and have been part of many beings before him. In order to give readers an insight into typical earthling mentality, and the sometimes obscure and often emotional or irrational manner in which earthling thought processes function, I will occasionally quote or comment from my earthling, other earthlings, their media, literature and schools of thought. Comments from my earthling are denoted as follows:
> The first time is always the most difficult. <
Now let me introduce my clan. I shall do so in earthling terminology although the earthling designations committed against us range from absurd through bizarre to ridiculous, as you will now see. Our quark clan consists of three families. So do leptons for that matter, but they are of lesser importance than we quarks, so I shall only mention them where necessary. Each quark family consists of six flavors - can you believe it? Each of these flavors can be adorned with one of the colors red, green and blue, according to the names earthlings have called us! We quarks are much smaller than the smallest wavelength of what they have called ‘visible’ light, that giving us colors overstretches even the most fertile cosmic imagination! Mine, the first family, are the up and down flavored quarks; the second family are the charm and strange quarks; and the third family are called the top and bottom, or sometimes even truth and beauty quarks.
What names! We up and down quarks are slim, light and handsome. The others are heavier and more ungainly. We up and down quarks are the building blocks of the Universe. The others have no real purpose in life, like so many earthlings.
All quarks are electrically charged, some positively, others negatively. I have a positive charge two thirds that of an electron. Some of the less important members of our clan have negative charges of only one third. Strictly speaking, we quarks should have the underlying unity charge. After all, we are ever so slightly older than electrons. Unfortunately, earthlings discovered the existence of electrons first, so their charge was taken as the basic unit.
In addition to all that, we quarks spin. We all have a so-called spin of one half.
Now if that little family tree confused you, don’t worry, most family trees do – even without the constituents being called ridiculous names!
Also part of our clan are tenacious little things aptly called gluons that glue us together in our respective associations, as we will see later. These are ostensibly flavor-blind but color-conscious. Under certain conditions, we quarks can change color, emitting or absorbing a gluon, but let’s leave these gory details for some other opportunity…
The most ludicrous result of earthling scientists’ efforts is no doubt the misguided system of denominations and nomenclature they have arbitrarily chosen for us quarks! Categorizing us into up and down, charm and strange, top and bottom or even truth or beauty quarks is downright ridiculous. However, ascribing flavors, colors and spins to us must confuse all but some weird elementary-particle-physicist-earthlings profoundly. Either earthling languages are inadequate to describe the most fundamental building blocks of this Universe aptly, or these quark designations must have started as a practical joke taken seriously by an audience with a different sense of humor than the originator, or maybe none at all.
I, Yog, by this ridiculous classification, am a blue-colored, up-flavored quark, and Hurt would probably be a blue-colored, antiup quark – but not a down quark!
I shall not elaborate too much on family gossip, or details of other elementary particles in this narrative; our objective here is to tell the story of the Universe and planet Earth with special emphasis on Earth’s highest form of intelligence - earthlings.
The Great Annihilation
My own recollections begin about one attosecond, or infinitesimally less than a flash of thought, after BigBang. From the wild and reckless swirling and swarming about, we particles started to attract our antiparticles. An irresistible, intense force of attraction compelled us to collide and annihilate each other wherever a particle and antiparticle came within attraction range. Once the minimum distance was reached, there was no escape. The two particles abruptly changed direction to a collision course, shot towards each other at terrific speed and exploded in a head-on collision with a burst of energy – all this at still-sizzling temperatures of some trillions of degrees. Since there were slightly more particles than antiparticles, sometimes more than one particle surrounded an antiparticle, but whoever had an advantage ‘won’ the suicidal race, resulting in annihilation of the pair. This Great Annihilation was the starting point of evolution, the first natural selection process. The survivors were those particles that, for whatever reason, succeeded in not coming within attraction range of a corresponding antiparticle. In this immense and intense annihilation process, most particles vanished, only an incredibly small fraction survived. For every 30 million pairs there was only one surviving quark! I was one of them – I escaped, I made it, I survived! Countless times in those fleeting, turbulent moments I had felt the pull and the urge to annihilate, but I always managed to get away by a fraction of a nanometer! We survivors provided the building materials for the present Universe. Everything is built from us and a few less important other ingredients!
Hadrons, Protons & Neutrons
Then, the newly forming natural forces - gently at first but growing ever firmer - started to constrain us. As the strong force increasingly pervaded the early Universe, we occasionally at first, but then more frequently, experienced its gradually growing constraining influence as we swirled about. I was swirling around at joyful dizzying speeds with myriads of other quarks that had escaped the Great Annihilation. We were seemingly countless myriads, although every one of us was the survivor of 30 million pairs! What an elated feeling! And then - again we felt a pulling force, the strong attraction of other bodies, but this time they were quarks, not krauqs. There was no danger of annihilation. The only reason to attempt escape was to remain single, free and roaming. In these immense masses of madly swirling quarks I was soon attracted to a very interesting red down quark (so-called by quirky earthling scientists – and please note that any resemblance between the words quirk and quark is purely coincidental). We kept swirling around each other for some infinitesimal instants, mutually enjoying each other’s company, mildly attracted to each other, the distance between us decreasing gradually, but we were not locked into a configuration yet. Eventually, a so-called green down quark swirled by and attracted both of us. It was attracted by us as well, so we formed a threesome, which is the form of companionship quarks prefer. As we got closer together, the attraction increased progressively until it became irresistible. An instant later, we smacked together and were now closely but securely held together by the strong vice-grip gluon force. Every time three quarks were gluoned together, a hadron was formed, either a proton or a neutron depending on the combination of quarks involved. In our case, we formed a proton.
That is how we surviving free quarks were forced into place to form configurations of protons and neutrons, which, together with electrons, are the building blocks of atoms. After the initial wild swirling in intense heat and the hectic annihilation spree, each quark was now firmly locked into a hadron configuration. I felt constrained but secure.
The Constitution of the Universe
At about 100 picoseconds (still not anywhere near an eyewink’s duration) after BigBang the Weak-Electrical Force had started to separate into the Weak Force and the Electromagnetic Force, so that the Universe was now governed by the four components of the grand primordial force which will control it till its end: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. These four fundamental forces are the underlying framework of the Universe. They cause and govern all and everything:
* Gravity governs the behavior of mass or matter. It causes bodies to attract each other; the larger the bodies, the stronger the attraction; the nearer the bodies to each other, the stronger the attraction too. It is the weakest of the four forces but has infinite reach, although it weakens rapidly with distance. Nothing of any mass escapes the long arm of gravity.
* The Strong Force controls hadrons and the cohesion of atomic nuclei, and thereby us quarks.
* The Weak Force governs the behavior of lepton particles, the most important of which are the electrons, which are almost as old, and almost as important, as we quarks.
* The Electromagnetic Force governs the assembly and status of atoms, molecules, liquids, solids and plasma.
Like everything else in the Universe, we quarks were now rigidly subjected to the influence of the natural forces. The four natural forces had been irrevocably imposed upon the Universe.
Somewhere during this time, the three universal constants of nature had crystallized out. Later these were to be named by earthlings
* the speed of light
* the quantum constant, and
* the universal gravitational constant
We did not notice the inception of these constants, as they didn’t affect us perceptibly. The constants may not have been all that constant in the beginning. Rumors have it that absolute speed (as the speed of light should more aptly be called) was higher in the early stages of the Universe. If it was, we did not notice, just as the passengers in a commercial aircraft are not aware of the speed of the aircraft as such, or whether it is increased or decreased gradually by the pilot.
I came to regard the four natural forces and the three fundamental constants of nature as the Constitution of the Universe, the underlying code of law for everything - perhaps imposed by one or more “Founding Fathers”?
Nature
The concept of Nature as used by earthlings is the result of the sum of the natural laws. Earthlings are trying to deduce and formulate these as ‘laws of science’, such as physics or chemistry. All of them are based on the Constitution of the Universe, i.e. the four fundamental forces and the three universal constants. These laws were imposed upon this Universe shortly after BigBang, they govern all processes and forces and fields, but they do not have preferences or direction. Earthlings tend to use terms such as Nature, Mother Earth, Evolution, Providence, Fate and the like as if these were individuals or entities that cause or perform certain actions intentionally with the purpose of achieving certain objectives. Nature is generally perceived as being good, noble or pure. Natural has a positive, unnatural a negative connotation. Despite the fact that natural catastrophes have haunted Earth throughout its history and continue to do so; despite the fact that ‘dear mother Nature’ has ‘tried’ to eradicate life at least five times on this planet, and when ‘it’ didn’t succeed in eradicating all forms of life, it made life extremely miserable for the survivors during countless generations. Nature is not somebody that does something with intent. Nature is simply the result of the interaction of all natural laws in this Universe.
A large faction of earthlings is firmly convinced that the sole purpose of Nature was to produce them in the present form of Homo sapiens, the one and only goal and culmination of evolution. Another faction, which includes most religions, believes that everything was created in its present form and will remain at this evolutionary level. Since earthlings have only recently attained a stage of consciousness and reasoning, their difficult and frustrating quest to understand the Universe, nature and the natural laws is somewhat like trying to discover the rules of a tremendously complex game only by watching and analyzing a continuous match of the game, without even knowing the purpose or intended outcome of the game.
About 30 microseconds after BigBang, I knew of no free quarks, we were all in either a proton or neutron configuration. Life in earnest had started! There was no escaping, no frolicking, no more free roaming.
Rumors persist, however, that there are still some surviving ‘free’ or ‘wild’ quarks and krauqs roaming about the vast expanses of the Universe.
Imperfection, the Mother of all Evolution
Soon after the Great Annihilation, I began to notice a strange new phenomenon: Imperfection!
At BigBang, all matter–energy had been concentrated in one single dimensionless singularity. After BigBang the embryo Universe expanded, inflated tremendously and then expanded again at terrific rates, but uniformly in all directions. If it had continued to do so, it would have remained uniform in all directions till the end of time, whether it was expanding, contracting, or just hanging there. It would remain Homogeneous and symmetrical in all directions forever. There could be no lumping – much less clumping – of matter, forming gases, clouds, dusts, and eventually celestial bodies.
But the Great Annihilation had been chaotic and random. In other words, it just happened where and when it happened, annihilations occurred when a quark and a krauq happened to come too close for comfort. These annihilations were not uniformly spread. Consequently, we surviving quarks were not uniformly distributed either. Initially this was hardly noticeable for two reasons:
First, we were spread very few and very far between in comparison to the dense crowds before – after all, each one of us was statistically the sole survivor of 60 million krauqs and quarks!
Second, the force of gravity, which causes bodies to attract each other in relation to their masses and distance from each other, was still imperceptibly weak due to our small and widely distributed masses. Gradually, at first not noticeably, this started to change as energy was converted to matter. Each one of us exerted a very weak gravitational attractive force on the others. Since the force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the attracting bodies, it only becomes significant when the bodies are really close to each other. If you find that difficult to understand, don’t lose sleep – just believe me! This is why we didn’t notice gravity until much later. Where more of us happened to be concentrated, they slowly tended to drift closer together. This went largely unnoticed in the frantic expansion that was in progress, but it gave rise to the first imperfections, the first anomalies in the expanding baby Universe. The distribution of matter was, strictly speaking and however slight, not uniform in all directions any more. These initially small, barely discernible local imperfections were the seeds of later accumulations of matter and the uneven distribution of matter in the Universe that eventually gave rise to solid celestial bodies and ultimately to the evolution of life.
(As we shall see later, mutations – which enable biological evolutionary innovations – are also imperfections in the replication of DNA molecules.)
Without imperfections or anomalies no evolution would have occurred, things would have continued the way they were forever and ever, and we quarks could have roamed freely throughout the Universe ‘happily ever after’.
Nuclei
Around one second (about five eye winks) after BigBang, due to further expansion and cooling of the Universe to below some tens of billions of degrees, we protons and the neutrons could no longer resist the ever-strengthening strong nuclear force and were eventually forced towards each other to ultimately fuse into atomic hydrogen and helium nuclei. This process called nucleosynthesis by earthlings took about three minutes, by which time we had cooled down to a few billion degrees.
In a moment of distraction, our proton swirled too close to a straying neutron, again there was the rotation about each other, the distance decreasing, the intense attraction growing irresistible within an instant, and with a violent collision we were forced together into a hydrogen nucleus, still swirling about at a dizzying speed and still at a scorching but steadily decreasing temperature. Actually we had formed what earthlings were later to call a deuterium nucleus, an isotope of hydrogen. Don’t let that bother you, I mention it only for completeness of my curriculum’s sake.
And the searing radiation was still intense but gradually diminishing. We hydrogen nuclei were the simplest creatures, consisting only of a proton and a neutron; simplicity and serenity at its most elementary level. The helium nuclei were twice as complex, containing two protons and two neutrons. Confusingly complex, it seemed to us at the time. Little did we know what was to unfold later regarding nuclei and atoms and ever more complex structures…
At some stage during our nucleonic existence, I noticed new particles, photons and electrons, swirling about amongst us; gradually at first, but in ever-increasing hordes. Photons are the smallest particles of light, immensely small blips of light so to speak. However, we did not attract each other yet due to the scorching temperatures still prevailing in the Universe. A primordial froth or plasma began to form, composed of hydrogen and helium nuclei, electrons and photons. The froth was still opaque. The Universe was not transparent yet, because the photons – the carriers of light – kept hitting electrons that seemed to be everywhere. While we still deemed helium nuclei to be the utmost in complexity, having everything double that we had single, the strong nuclear force coerced even more complex nuclei together, lithium and beryllium, having three and four protons and neutrons respectively!
This state of nucleonic swirling lasted for a seemingly never-ending long time in comparison to the hectic explosive type of evolution we had experienced up to now, namely for 300 thousand earth years! During all this time the Universe was expanding and cooling, myriads of us ‘founder-generation’ particles were swirling around in what seemed to be a stable, comfortable state of thermal equilibrium. Not as exciting as the previous flitting hectic stages, but still radiant, pulsating and ‘a lot hotter than hell’.
Atoms
Roughly 300 thousand years (12 thousand earthling generations or 47 trillion eye winks) after BigBang, temperature and radiation in the Universe had decreased to below 3600 Kelvin.
(Kelvin is a temperature scale named after one of the eminent earthling scientists, Lord Kelvin. Zero Kelvin is called Absolute Temperature, the lowest possible temperature in the Universe. This is where all movement stops – even that of elementary particles like me. At Absolute Temperature everything is truly frozen, even electrons and quarks. I will express temperatures in Kelvin from here onwards.)
3600 Kelvin is the ionization temperature of hydrogen, which permitted the first formation of atoms. As the influence of the electromagnetic force began to surpass that of temperature, we nuclei and electrons started to attract each other when we strayed within range. We tried to remain an independent hydrogen nucleus, we managed to dodge many electrons, but it had to happen sooner or later, the attraction was increasing all the time. A precocious electron had ventured too close, it was diverted from its course to rotate around us, the radius decreasing until the mutual attraction became irresistible and it fell into place. It was a tremendous happening! As the electron ‘clicked’ into its orbit, we felt a bump and then a balanced and secure, serene state. We, our nucleus, had attracted an electron, thus forming one of the first hydrogen atoms. The electron orbited around our nucleus at a dizzying speed and at the cozy distance of 50 billionths of a millimeter. An unimaginably small distance by earthling standards. At last we were complete, a stable configuration! I was now part of a hydrogen atom, the basic raw material and fuel used to blaze and build this Universe. Soon there were countless myriads of other hydrogen atoms like us, still swirling around but slower, more stately, the temperature dropping but still incredibly sizzling, a stable state of affairs, it seemed - again.
To earthlings, atoms are tremendously difficult to visualize since they are so enormously full of emptiness! The nucleus is so small and so massive (or ‘heavy’), the electrons are some thousand times smaller and much less massive; on the other hand the distances between nucleus and electrons are so unimaginably vast as to be earthling mind boggling. If we could magnify our hydrogen nucleus in size and mass to be one millimeter in diameter, it would ‘weigh’ 1.7 million tons! Or, in other words, a little atomic nucleus ball the size of a pin head would have the mass of a medium sized mountain! Our only electron would be about one thousandth of a millimeter diameter and ‘weigh’ 900 tons. But this invisibly small thousandth of a millimeter electron would orbit around our one millimeter nucleus at a distance of about 50 meters! And those 50 meters would be densely packed with nothing but emptiness! So atoms consist of extremely heavy nuclei with lightweight electrons swarming around them at tremendous distances with lots of nothing in between.
The simplest of these atoms full of emptiness, our hydrogen, was formed by a proton plus an electron swarming around it. (There were other rare forms of hydrogen, but let’s not worry about them yet.) The next more complex atom, helium, was produced by coercing together two protons plus two neutrons plus two electrons. The next in line was lithium with three protons plus three neutrons plus three electrons comprising the atom. And so on and on, until very much later heavy atoms with about 100 of each of the three constituents were formed. Earthlings have even ’made’ atoms beyond the naturally occurring ones – in laboratories. The higher the number of ingredients becomes, the more unstable these atoms tend to become. They then only exist for minute fractions of a second and only under laboratory conditions. I eventually noticed that the numbers of protons and electrons of an element were always the same, but the number of neutrons can vary, giving rise to isotopes of that element.
My earthling, with his weird sense of humor, likes to tell the following corny story:
* Two atoms meet on the street.
One says I’ve lost an electron!
The other says Are
you sure? The first replies Yes, I’m positive.
And there was Light!
With the formation of atoms, the Universe started to clear up, to become transparent. As electrons became bound into atoms there were few free electrons left to impede the flow of photons. Photons could now travel and spread light around - a process vaguely analogous, on an immensely large scale, to ‘dawning of the morning’ on planet Earth.
Due to the Universe being opaque for the first 300 thousand years, the birth of the Universe can never be ‘seen’ by means at the disposal of earthlings. If earthlings received light from such early sources, they could look back the 13½ billion years or so of the Universe’s age up to within the first 300 thousand years, but no further. The birth of the Universe will forever remain invisible to earthlings, shrouded in mystery to them – mathematically calculable after the first fleeting instant, but utterly incomprehensible.
These early founding stages of our Universe were extremely dazzling: Events succeeded each other in such rapid succession that it was almost impossible to keep track of happenings. By comparison, today’s Universe is stagnant; things happen at such a slow rate that they are barely discernible. Since the beginning, every time we reached a new stage in evolution, we felt this was it, we had now attained the desired level or configuration; this would now be a stable state of affairs – especially after those first wild fleeting instants had passed. Every time we were proved wrong.
Atomic and Gaseous Clouds
After some hundreds of millions of years in this serene, balanced state – atoms roving through the Universe – we occasionally noticed the pull of a – to us – new attracting force. Wherever a number of us atoms congregated or accumulated, we felt the effect of a new force – gravity – pulling us towards each other, gently at first but with increasing insistence. This was no longer the rarely and even then barely perceptible ‘tug at the elbow’ from our free roaming quark times which we had then shrugged off as insignificant on the rare occasions that we noticed it at all. This was stronger, increasingly more insistent and annoying.
Gravity had been in subdued existence from very shortly after BigBang, but only now began to exert real influence due to the ever-increasing masses. Local imperfections in matter distribution conglomerated into initially slow swirling low-density matter agglomerations which attracted further matter, thus increasing gravitational attraction and rotational speed, causing the wisps of clouds in formation to become denser and denser, rotating faster and still faster, in an ever-accelerating process. These groupings or seeds of matter clouds generally derived their rotational impact from being deviated by the still feeble effect of gravity from their initial linear expansive motion into a curved trajectory. The curvature of these trajectories increased with the accumulation of more matter, curved more, then became spirals. If this matter was attracted and captured by some heavier ‘heavenly’ body, its orbit eventually turned into a circle or ellipse.
Earthlings have an expression, ‘snowball effect’: In their atmosphere, under certain conditions, water exists in a flocculent form called ‘snow’; if something starts a particle rolling on an inclined snowy surface (like a mountain slope), the nucleus gathers more snow as it rolls down the slope, increasing its diameter, thereby increasing its speed, accumulating still more snow and other debris that may be lying on its path, thereby increasing further in size and gathering more speed, and so on and on and on. This snowball effect is an apt visualization of what happened in the early primordial state of the Universe, culminating in the formation of large conglomerates of gaseous clouds, the arch origins of galaxies. Both snowball effects, the formation of gaseous clouds and eventually solids and the literal snow on the slope, are caused by gravity, although by different mechanisms.
My cluster of hydrogen atoms was lazily floating about the already vast expanses of the Universe; we were mildly attracted to several slowly rotating clouds, but managed to resist using our mutual gravitational pull that was still stronger than the external forces tugging at us from the swirling clouds. What a grandiose process! This already immense but still expanding Universe, which had been a seemingly endless gigantic froth of seething particles, now began to form isolated matter concentrations or ‘mists’ at locations where particles happened to be huddled together more closely than on the average – the previously mentioned local imperfections. Soon the Universe consisted mostly of these colossal immense rotating cloud formations, gaining rotational speed, continually shrinking and rapidly increasing in density and their force of attraction increasing. They formed immensely colossal pre-galactic clusters. We tried to remain free. As the galactic cloud formations concentrated and the attractive forces in their vicinity increased, the space between them became more rarefied. We endeavored to stay in this rarefied space where the luring attractive forces were lower, but sooner or later it had to happen again. We were gently attracted towards one cloud, then in the direction of another, majestically turning by in a gigantic slow-motion swirl, only to be attracted by yet another one in another direction, but eventually we drifted in only one direction, no other cloud mass came close enough to ‘rescue’ us this time. Again, gradually at first, but ever firmer we were hauled into the region of this immense imposing swirling gaseous cloud that in due course was to become a hyper star.
Hyper Stars
Some 200 million years after BigBang (8 million generations), our ‘monster cloud’ had accumulated the enormous mass equivalent to about 1000 Suns. As the rotating cloud contracted, our atoms collided more and more frequently, raising our temperature, the gravitational attraction augmented further and so on, until it was so hot and the pressure had risen high enough to start nuclear fusion! Thus, huge hyper stars were formed, consisting of a dense liquid core surrounded by swirling gases, dust and debris decreasing in density and temperature in an outward direction. It had to happen to me! The portion of the cloud my atom happened to be in was drawn into the hyper star’s super strong gravitational field and drawn towards its centre by an irresistible force. As we heated up, we became hectic and excited in a vague semblance of the agitated early infant stages of the Universe.
We had been sucked into a nuclear furnace. The nuclear fusion reaction converted hydrogen into helium and liberated enormous amounts of energy; the heat raised the pressure, which stopped the cloud from contracting further. The intense temperature made our atomic ‘skeleton’ tweak and creak. Eventually it cracked. We, the proton, the neutron and the electron, were swirled around as if we were in a raging hurricane, together with other protons, neutrons and electrons. At a certain instant, the right number of ingredients happened to be together – and we clicked into a new configuration. We had now been ‘burnt’ into a helium atom, the ones that once had seemed so complex from within my previous hydrogen atom. As an insider, it seemed fairly straightforward now, two of everything, two protons, two neutrons, two electrons. And I was in one of the protons. One quickly got to know all the constituents on all hierarchical levels. And again we felt the serenity of a stable, comfortable state …
The average nuclear furnace remained in a steady reactionary state for long times by earthling standards, radiating energy in the form of heat and light for a few hundred million years. Ours, however, happened to be an extremely massive hyper star. It became successively hotter due to its ever-increasing density, accelerating the nuclear reaction such that all our hydrogen content was burnt up within a few million years. Due to its continuously increasing mass, it contracted further, heating up even more. This started other nuclear fusion reactions, converting helium to still heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. While I was still part of a swirling hydrogen cloud, we had occasionally passed by these nuclear fusion furnaces, where protons were ‘burnt’ into helium nuclei, or helium nuclei were ‘burnt’ to carbon and oxygen nuclei. Now we were right in the middle of it! While darting around at temperatures of around 100 million Kelvin, agitated by the intense heat, constantly banging into other atoms who were also overexcited, our – oh so serene and complacent – structure was continually being twisted and torn at, until it tweaked, creaked and cracked again. In the terrible chaotic infinitesimal instant that followed, some constituents of our atom were blown away and others were forced in. In the ensuing confusion, all constituent particles milling around, we were suddenly forced into positions again, but there were many more of us. We now formed a carbon atom with six of each! Six protons, six neutrons, six electrons. My proton had survived intact, and there we were, embedded in the comparatively hefty structure of a carbon atom. I was firmly entrenched in one of the six protons of this carbon atom! This now seemed a really complex structure to me: three hierarchical levels, six incumbents – and our six protons and neutrons still made up of three quarks each! It took a much longer time to get to know all the staff and their positions in the hierarchy.
Other furnaces fired up for oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and finally iron burning. We were ‘fortunate’ enough to escape these, once again maintaining a stable condition for some time …
The Universe now consisted of 70% hydrogen, 25% helium and a total of 2% of elements heavier than helium. I was now part of the latter 2%, in earthling terms a small but influential minority.
After the furnace had been burning for a further few million years, the nuclear burning to carbon and oxygen did not yield much more energy. Fuel was running out. The large hyper star eventually cooled down and its central regions collapsed into a tremendously dense matter concentration, so dense it would swallow everything, but really everything, that came within range – even light! That is why earthlings have called these extreme mass concentrations black holes. In earthling terminology, black is not a color, black is the absence of all colors. Or, in other words, a black body is one that does not reflect any of the electromagnetic frequencies visible to earthlings, i.e. what they call light. It sucks them in and even bends them, but that’s another story.
When our hyper star collapsed, its outer shell got blown off by a tremendously intense and dazzlingly bright explosion – later called a supernova. The explosion was so bright and so energetic that it dimmed the combined light of all the other stars in the galaxy for several weeks! Then, the remaining enormous mass collapsed under its own weight within a few tenths of a second - an earthling eyewink - to form the darker than dark maelstrom of a black hole.
A small fraction of the heavier elements produced by the nuclear furnace were expelled into the galaxy by the impact of the supernova explosion. Out of these debris agglomerating with each other and attracting other gas or particle clouds, ‘second generation stars’ were formed. In this way stars are still formed in successive generations from the formation of the first galaxies to the present age. And thus our patch of carbon atoms was flung far out into space unceremoniously but with tremendous force resulting in a terrific speed! We started a new peregrination through the Universe, this time not in form of a wisp of hydrogen, but in a clump of atoms.
Black Holes: irresistible suckers
So what remained of our hyper star had collapsed into a ‘fiercely attractive’ black hole. These remnants of collapsed hyper stars are truly invisible. Not only to ‘visible’ light, but also to infrared and ultraviolet light, and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation: x-rays, alpha rays, beta rays, gamma rays, radio waves, microwaves, or whatever other subdivisions and categorizations earthlings may have made up for radiation. The gravitational attraction of black holes is so immensely strong that, apart from attracting and engulfing all forms of matter and energy, they distort space and time in their vicinity! Due to this literally extraordinary attractive force, black holes capture large quantities of primordial matter. Depending on the attracted matters’ density and trajectory, the ‘unfortunate’ parts or particles are engulfed and disappear without trace into the mega-sucking deep throat of the black hole. Without trace, that is, in this Universe. Rumors persist that the matter swallowed by a black hole is ‘compressed’ or ‘condensed’ into pure energy, which, when enough of it has accumulated, may give rise to another BigBang, causing the birth of another Universe! I would not know, since I’ve never been to any other Universe yet. I personally do not indulge in spreading rumors. I prefer to recount events and happenings that I witnessed myself.
The ‘fortunate’ matter – that which succeeded in avoiding being drawn into the black hole – was deviated into orbits around it. These orbital bodies occur in a range of shapes and sizes, forming an abundant variety of stellar bodies. Thus black holes, by accumulating more and more bodies around them, became the centers of galaxies rotating about them. Our black hole captured and gathered around it all the bodies, clouds and interstellar matter of the immense conglomerate that was eventually to be named the galaxy Milky Way by earthlings.
To illustrate the enormous density of black holes: If Earth could become as dense as a black hole, its entire matter would fit into a nutshell. The whole planet would shrink to the size of a nut! It would also fiercely attract and swallow anything, and I repeat, anything that came within reach of its event horizon: meteorites, moons, asteroids, comets, gas, dust, light, and with that – even its own shadow! It would even swallow quarks if there were any free ones floating around!
Galaxies
Several times, our infant black hole swallowed other black holes. Whenever a smaller black hole disappeared into a larger one, a gravitational shock wave ripped through the surrounding orbits, causing quite a shake-up and re-shuffling of the orbiting bodies. Some collisions resulted, either creating larger bodies by causing them to fuse or fracturing large colliding bodies into smaller pieces. Of the numerous bodies thrown out of orbit, many were sucked into the ever-fiercer black hole before they could ‘find’ a new stable orbit; a small number of bodies ‘succeeded’ in being flung onto trajectories out of the pre-galactic conglomerate. Some were ‘caught’ on the way by larger objects that collected a trail of smaller bits and pieces to form comets. About 1 billion years (40 million generations) after BigBang, Milky Way had shaken itself out in a broad sense and evolved into one of the first galaxies to emerge in this Universe – rotating about the black hole in its centre that had once been my hyper star. Smaller evolutionary galactic changes keep occurring, however, up to the present.
While we were involved in our pre-galactic evolution, countless other embryo galactic structures had similarly formed. As the snowball effects increased, gravitational pull increased towards the centre of the gaseous clouds eventually causing denser regions to collapse: As a collapsing region shrank, its rotational speed increased (like earthling ice skaters pulling in their arms to spin faster), causing it to contract more, which would increase its density further, causing it to spin faster, which would make it shrink faster, and so on. Eventually, the spin speed would be fast enough to cause a centrifugal force that balanced the gravitational attraction of the black hole at the centre of rotation. An uneasy equilibrium would be reached and another spiral-rotating galaxy was born. Inside the galaxy, localized rotation would carry on in different sub-regions, and countless similar conglomerations ensued, eventually forming stars, planets and other stellar bodies.
By way of ‘word of mouth’ from other quarks, I learned that there were other galactic regions that happened to fall ‘between’ gravitational pull areas and did not spin. They formed elliptical galaxies, which as a whole do not spin, but are held in equilibrium by their constituent bodies whirling around in reasonably stable configurations.