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2003-02-12 - 9:38 p.m. Starstuff Hi, Theo, how are you? Gina, the universe is flat, isn�t that cool? I know, I�m excited and you probably don�t care, and I sound like a physics freak, but isn�t it cool? Well, sure. Though if you knew how to manage 15 year old teenagers make sense, that would be cool also. Sigh. I should�ve called Tristan, but I didn�t have the number handy. Yesterday, NASA released results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a little satellite built by my NASA center, measuring the temperature of the cosmic background radiation over the full sky with unprecedented accuracy. "Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff, we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective. -Delenn to Sheridan in Babylon 5: �A Distant Star� Change your perspective of the universe, thumb through her baby pictures, the oldest light ever seen by mankind. They�ve pegged the age of the universe 13.7 billion years old. 13.7 billion. And they now know the first stars ignited only 200 million years after the Big Bang, much earlier than we first thought. And that the universe will collapse someday blue shift thing? A myth. Forget it � turns out the Inflation theory is correct and the universe will expand forever and ever � red shifting to infinity. General relativity predicts, light leaving a region where the gravitational force is large will be shifted towards the red (wavelength increased) where light falling into a region where gravity is is larger will have it�s wavelengths shortened, shifted towards the blue Contents of the universe? How�s this for a cocktail Heisenberg would�ve savored: 4% atoms, like the same ordinary stuff that makes up potatoes, cats and water. 23% of the still unknown dark matter 73% of the mysterious dark energy, which sort of acts like anti-gravity. Talk about shaking up the science of cosmology. [I feel a fleet of bad sci-fi movies coming on once Hollywood digests this.] And, best of all, Euclid was right, the Greeks had it correct from the time before Christ�s birth: the Universe is flat. Two parallel lines stretched to infinity will (how reassuring is this) remain parallel. Unlike Magellan, we can�t get back to the start by circumnavigating the Universe. (If you can�t visualize why flatness matters, check out the slug with this laser guns) (Betcha didn�t think you�d learn something from a slug today.) The scientist that do this work, I pass their offices a couple times a week, and they look just like ordinary guys who occasionally have the bad taste to wear gleaming white tennis shoes with too short khakis. I love my job. The Columbia crew could have no better memorial than for mankind to keep pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. � � Scribble to Theo previous - next �