Wolfgang Korsus
Dipl.Ing. NT , Astrophysiker
Klingenberg 40
25451 Quickborn
TEL.: +49 4106 69295
Handy: +49 162 5680456
Website : wolfgang.korsus.net
Chapter 2
It is called: Being also has a beginning so I call this chapter simple and hopefully understandable for all readers:
„THE BEGINNING OF ALL BEING“
So, when I talk about the above topic, I am forced to ask myself ……. where do I start, how do I begin? …… how did it all begin?
In order for us to understand how it all came about, I really must start at the beginning, because that is the beginning. Dear reader, I hope you don’t have a problem with this, but some people are now inclined to ask: And what was before that? I say very clearly and I have to pass, because there is no answer to that and there never will be, not from anyone.
Because the person wasn’t there yet. I always like to say :
„Atoms, molecules and cells were still fast asleep“ their spaces of movement and formation were only just emerging.
I am now talking, to say it again and to express it metaphysically, about the beginning of all being, even more precisely: it should be noted, the beginning of all „physical“ being. There can be states of being that are not physically accessible – I cannot and do not want to rule that out. But here I am talking about what is physically accessible, both theoretically and experimentally – not a bit hypothetical. So I’m talking about the order of nature, about the cosmos. It should be noted that the use of the word cosmos in the sense of universe has crept into our typical everyday language. The order in the universe is the basis for man’s actions and their effects on the nature of his planet.
The orderly universe, how did „that“ begin? The fact that it has a beginning has not been known for very long.
As recently as 300 years ago, astronomical science believed – I prefer to simply say „believed“ – that the cosmos must have always been there, i.e. an eternal cosmos. Nobody asked what came before. The actual historical consciousness, an existing awareness of the past, simply did not exist in the past. To put it briefly, tradition and rituals used to consist of plain and simple repetition. Here and there, someone questioned one thing or another, but we humans have only had an interest in why things happened this way and not otherwise for around 200 years. A damn short time. Because it is only modern man, let’s call him modern man, who is the first to ask about the „before“. That was less than six or seven generations ago. It is also very surprising that some of today’s scientists heralded the Anthropocene at the same time as the beginning of the self-destructive triumphal march of technology and science.
At the same time, however, the science of history also emerged; and look, the geosciences, the sciences of the earth and its subsystems, grew out of history and the natural sciences. Let me list: the atmosphere, the continents, oceans and ice deserts, their creatures and the history of all of these. And they are still trying to shed light on all the darkness of time.
Back to the beginning, to the beginning of all existence. 13.82 billion years ago-these are the latest figures-something must have happened, no, something did happen. Because it was ……………………( Edwin Powell Hubble (* November 20, 1889 in Marshfield Missouri † September 28, 1953 in San Marino California ) an American astronomer. He classified spiral galaxies, studied the „expansion of the universe“ and discovered the Hubble constant of galactic cosmology – the redshift of starlight with increasing distance („Hubble effect“). He also gave his name to the „Hubble Space Telescope“.
……er himself looked deep into the universe and had the impression that everything was moving away from us. Everything! In all directions! He proved it and calculated it.
Hubble was a discoverer and he provided the proof…..and only at the beginning of the twentieth century. I will touch on this topic again in a moment.
So it seems as if the universe is expanding – and at a rapid rate.
At least that was the impression that a man called Georges Lemaître also gained in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As a Belgian priest and astrophysicist, he was busy interpreting the observation data of the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. More intensively, Hubble had discovered that the redshift of spectral lines in very distant galaxies obviously increased the further away the galaxies were. Somehow similar to a build-up. He assumed that the electromagnetic radiation he received from other galaxies worked in the same way as that which could be examined in countless experiments in laboratories on Earth. Astrophysicists had been working with this hypothesis for a long time. Hubble’s observations were a great success and ensured that those who had always thought otherwise were disproved. His observations once again confirmed a generally valid finding that the transition of electrons within an atom from one energy state to another is always associated with a clearly defined amount of energy, regardless of whether it is an oxygen atom here on Earth or one in some galaxy a few hundred million light years away from us.!!!!! And I point out really loosely that the speed of light is also constant everywhere, it’s just a natural constant. Hubble was doing nothing more than pointing it out in principle, which is what all empirical researchers must do:
draw CONCLUSIONS FROM CERTAIN PREDICTIONS – CONCLUSIONS THAT ARE THEN EXPERIMENTALLY TESTED !
Staying close to his research, he himself wanted to find out why the spectral lines were red-shifted. Please let us try together to understand Hubble’s train of thought. He certainly wondered how and why such a spectral line could shift. The simplest explanation for him was certainly that atoms that radiate, i.e. emit energy, move away from us, all of them, and if all atoms move away from us, then the radiation is influenced by an effect known to many as the „Doppler effect“ in sound waves. If a sound source approaches us, the sound becomes higher, its frequency has increased in this respect. If it rushes past us and moves away, the sound and thus the frequency become lower……known ‚classic‘ case: the siren of a patrol car in action.
I also judge briefly ….The same applies to electromagnetic radiation.
If a radiation source approaches us, the light becomes higher-frequency, the wavelength becomes shorter and the light shifts into the bluer range of the visible spectrum. If the source moves away from us, the light becomes lower-frequency, the wavelength increases, so it appears in the red section of the visible spectrum. So much for the simple explanation.
But be careful! In an expanding universe, there is no fixed reference system. In the example of the Doppler effect just described, someone is standing on the street and a source of radiation or sound whizzes past them. But what about in an expanding universe? Of course, the Doppler effect cannot work there. If everything is moving away from us in all directions, then, Lemaître realized, there must be another explanation for the red shift: It is space moving by expanding. The galaxies practically swim away with this space. Imagine raisins in a swelling yeast dough: It seems as if they are moving themselves, but in fact they are being carried along. So that you really understand the difference between moving and being moved – it is literally earth-shattering – I will give you another example: Take a balloon and stick several cotton balls on it. These are your galaxies. Now blow up the balloon. What do you see? The cotton balls retain their shape and stay in place thanks to the glue, but they still move away from each other. The distance between the cotton balls gets bigger and bigger, and the further apart they were at the beginning, the faster. This was exactly Lemaître’s idea: the universe is expanding – as a whole. Unbelievable! Someone had to come up with that first. Let’s be honest, that sounds completely insane. We’re talking about the whole, about everything that can physically exist. And someone makes a statement about everything. Just like that. If a scientist says that we have a part of the universe here and that this part functions in a similar way to what we know of the Earth, then that is already very significant. But to claim that what we know from Earth, the laws of physics, radiation, the structure of matter, the speed of light, charges and much more, that it all works in exactly the same way everywhere in the universe – nobody can know anything like that, nobody can verify it. Yet there are living beings in this universe who have a cognitive apparatus weighing 1.5 kilograms, are around two meters tall and, at best, live to be 100 years old. And they dare to make statements about everything. We have come a long way with this self-confidence. We know how it works, we know how it is. We even know how it came about. But that’s not surprising – after all, we are physicists.
No, no! That’s not how it works. With this arrogance, based on chronic conceit, I certainly can’t give you any explanations that you can understand. In reality, I have to admit, even I am still amazed, even years later I can still be amazed that we can actually think and recognize such things with our brains. You also have to treat the physics of the entire universe in the same way as in an experiment on Earth. Which brings us back to Lemaître. After allowing the universe to expand, he obviously came up with an idea that you can also come up with now. All you have to do is ask yourself: if the universe is expanding, how big was it yesterday? Exactly! Of course it was smaller, that’s logical. If it is expanding, if it is flying apart all the time, it was smaller yesterday. And the day before yesterday? It was even smaller then. And so on and so on … But at some point it gets serious. How small could the universe have been – in the beginning? When Lemaître first presented his idea to the scientific community, physics had just begun to deal with quantum mechanics. That was in the twenties of the 20th century. That was when the first particles were discovered. Electrons were already known at the end of the 19th century. But only now had protons, the positively charged particles, been found. Neutrons were added in 1932. Physicists in the 1920s and 1930s already knew that atoms had to be very small. They could imagine, practically in a thought experiment, that the universe was as small as an atom. And Lemaître did just that. He called it the primordial atom. In 1948, a paper was published by three nuclear physicists, Ralph Alpher, George Gamow and Hans Bethes. They had considered the following: If the universe had been as small as an atomic nucleus in the beginning-we can calculate the physics of this, and we have already built an atomic bomb-then it would have been like a universal nuclear reactor. And in this nuclear reactor, fusion reactions would have taken place. Around a quarter of the protons would have fused to form helium nuclei, the rest would have been hydrogen. The model thus made a prediction: the gas between the galaxies consists only of hydrogen and helium. All heavier elements are only bred much later and only in stars. According to this model, the universe was initially very hot because it was so small. Everything was squeezed into a very small space – it could get stuffy. And from this hot beginning, the three nuclear physicists said, radiation must have remained, the so-called cosmic background radiation; it depends only on the temperature, and because the universe is already so old and so large, the temperature today must be very low, a few Kelvin, close to absolute zero, which is minus 273 degrees Celsius or zero Kelvin. The physicists also assumed that the universe was homogeneous and isotropic, which means that matter is evenly distributed in all directions. How can this be understood? The complete explanation is provided by the general theory of relativity, but it is also possible without it. Let’s assume we have a cannon on earth, let’s say on a tower about two kilometers high. Maybe in Dubai or Qatar, they like to build things that high – only without a cannon. Now we shoot a cannonball. If it comes out of the barrel too slowly, it will naturally fall down quickly, pulled towards the earth by gravity. If it is really fast, as fast as the speed at which it escapes the Earth’s gravitational pull, i.e. 11.4 kilometers per second, then the ball will leave the Earth’s gravitational field. If we now leave out the atmosphere for a tiny moment – we can do this in a thought experiment – then the sphere could reach exactly the speed it would need to orbit the Earth once. It would arrive back at the cannon from behind and … well, the thought experiment could no longer be repeated. If we apply the general theory of relativity, there are three possible solutions for the life of a universe, depending on its mass. The first solution envisages a universe with a lot of mass and therefore a lot of gravity, which perhaps expands a little at the beginning but eventually collapses again. This is called a closed universe. In the second solution, a universe has too little mass, which causes it to fly apart. This corresponds to the example of the fast cannonball with escape velocity. And finally, there is the variant that a universe has a very finely balanced equilibrium, a dynamic equilibrium between kinetic energy, i.e. the kinetic energy, and potential energy, i.e. the mass. In this way, the universe would get bigger and bigger, but its rate of expansion would gradually decrease. What we are still missing is the actual cause, the origin, the reason why the universe threw itself into existence. Was there a conductor who gave the universe the cue for the galactic symphony? Including a drumbeat? António Damásio has also pondered a similar dilemma in his book „Self is Man“, although he is concerned with consciousness. Damásio compares it to an orchestra in which the conductor only comes into being at the moment the orchestra begins to play. The conductor of our consciousness appears with the first thought. From then on, he conducts the orchestra, the orchestra reacts to him and he in turn reacts to what the orchestra does. Perhaps the universe can also be compared to such an orchestra: Causa sui, the cause of itself. But this brings us to a logical problem at the beginning of everything. The first person to ponder this was also the inventor of logic: Aristotle. He also already had the dull feeling that it was best to stay away from the beginning, because it cannot be logical. If everything is kept in motion by a mover, then the stars, which are obviously in motion, must also have a mover. But then there would also have to be a mover for the mover. And another mover for the mover that moves the mover. And so on and so forth. And Aristotle was already in the middle of an infinite regress, an endless chain of questions to which there is no satisfactory answer. Of course, that’s stupid when you invent logic and have a problem right from the beginning of the universe and can’t find a logical solution. So Aristotle, mercilessly and boldly at the same time, placed an unmoved first mover at the beginning of the universe. Problem recognized, problem solved. This unmoved first mover was supposed to have practically created the world-and out of love. Oh yes, love can produce beautiful results, enriching the relationship between humans and even between humans and gods. The Olympians in particular had many experiences with this. But to place love at the beginning of the universe is somehow … unsatisfactory for the sober-minded physicist. We still don’t know what the beginning of everything is. How did the universe begin? Is there any way to avoid the question of what came before? You can, of course, turn to the masters of parallel universes. They supposedly know that there was a lot before, all sorts of great things. Naturally, this can’t be verified, but it sounds great. If that helps you, go ahead. For my part, I prefer to stick to the facts. The Big Bang is, crystal clear, the smallest, the very smallest, beyond which, or rather below which, nothing more can be measured. As a reasonable scientist, you have to say: the beginning of the universe is the beginning of a structure that has the smallest causally meaningful length, corresponds to the smallest causally meaningful unit of time and everything that can be derived from it. This is the initial situation of the Big Bang as physicists see it. The mathematician, on the other hand, sees it somewhat differently, and promptly runs into problems. He lets the radius of the universe go to zero, because mathematicians like to let something go to zero. This gives him a fraction that goes to zero, which means that the whole fraction becomes infinite. This is called a singularity. The mathematical beginning is a singularity, the physical beginning is not. Physically, the beginning can be set so far away from this zero that there is even an infinity in between. The beginning of the universe can be formulated epistemologically by defining the smallest units of information that can still be understood in the universe. This requires two different theories: quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. Quantum mechanics, defined by the Heisenberg indeterminacy relation, has a lower information limit. This means that falling below the minimum effect no longer reveals anything. Smaller than the product of spatial and momentum uncertainty, smaller than Planck’s quantum of action is not possible, you can do whatever you want. The general theory of relativity says: If a body of a mass m shrinks to a certain radius, the gravitational force is obviously so strong that nothing can come out of this compact body. This is the so-called Schwarzschild radius. For our sun with its 333,000 earth masses, the Schwarzschild radius is three kilometers. So if the sun were to shrink to a sphere with a radius of less than three kilometers, it would become a black hole. Nothing would come out of it. No sound, no light. Nothing. There are great non-fiction books about what happens in a black hole. None of it can be verified, but the authors don’t seem to care. So we have quantum mechanics with Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation and the general theory of relativity with the Schwarzschild radius. Add to this a little mathematics and the result is the Planck length: 1.6 times 10-35 meters. The Planck time is nothing other than the Planck length divided by the speed of light. Do you remember? The speed of light is constant, about 300,000 kilometers per second. That means we end up with a value of 5.3 times 10-44 seconds for the Planck time. Then we can calculate the Planck mass and from this the Planck energy and end up with the initial temperature of the universe: 1032 degrees Kelvin. Just read that again: 1032! That is the highest temperature in the universe. That’s where it all began. And we are also back at the beginning of the chapter: with the background radiation and the three physicists from 1948. If the universe starts out so small and hot and dense and compact, it must fly apart. That was the idea of the Big Bang. The more we discover about the structure of matter-particles that are made up of particles that are made up of particles again-the more precisely we can physically describe the beginning of the universe. Whether it was the nuclear physicists from 1948, the elementary particle physicists from the sixties and seventies or the physicists from the eighties and nineties who worked on quantum field theory, everyone was able to say step by step more and more precisely what must have happened in the universe at the beginning. This was always based on the laws of nature that we know from Earth and that apply everywhere in the universe. We are now building accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to simulate the state of the universe when it was just one trillionth of a second old, or rather young. Isn’t that incredible? How do we know what happened after the trillionth of a second, you ask? The temperature at the beginning is known, 1032 Kelvin. This gives us a temperature-time correlation. As the universe expands, it becomes colder, which means that every point in time corresponds to a certain temperature. This provides us with a cosmic time arrow that shows us the spatial change of the universe: it is getting bigger and bigger, its clock is ticking. Incidentally, this is also the reason why there is no time travel. If you wanted to travel back in time, you would have to return the entire universe to the state it was in at that time.
However, as the universe only provides a finite amount of energy and every machine has heat losses, you would have to use more energy than the universe provides. Not to mention the many other logical problems. Ergo: Time travel is not possible! We march, come what may, along our cosmic arrow of time, always in one direction. Hydrogen and helium are created in the first three minutes. Do you remember that? That was the prediction of the three gentlemen from nuclear physics at the end of the 1940s, which has since been confirmed. Their second prediction was confirmed in 1964 when two radio engineers, who had no idea what was on their screen, discovered background radiation. The two lucky guys, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, hadn’t even been looking for it. The universe that you and I found when we were born is very different from what it was then. When we look at the sky tonight, we can no longer recognize anything of its hot beginning. Unfortunately, our eyes are not sensitive to infrared, and most of us no longer have an old tube television that showed this wonderful gray noise, the background radiation, after the end of the broadcast (yes, there was a break in broadcasting back then!). But what we can recognize in the starry firmament are the twinkling stars.