Cosmos (31 page)

The rising and falling of the surf is produced in part by tides. The Moon and the Sun are far away. But their gravitational influence is very real and noticeable back here on Earth. The beach reminds us of space. Fine sand grains, all more or less uniform in size, have been produced from larger rocks through ages of jostling and rubbing, abrasion and erosion, again driven through waves and weather by the distant Moon and Sun. The beach also reminds us of time. The world is much older than the human species.

A handful of sand contains about 10,000 grains, more than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can
see
is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that
are
. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

Despite the efforts of ancient astronomers and astrologers to put pictures in the skies, a constellation is nothing more than an arbitrary grouping of stars, composed of intrinsically dim stars that seem to us bright because they are nearby, and intrinsically brighter stars that are somewhat more distant. All places on Earth are, to high precision, the same distance from any star. This is why the star patterns in a given constellation do not change as we go from, say, Soviet Central Asia to the American Midwest. Astronomically, the U.S.S.R. and the United States are the same place. The stars in any constellation are all so far away that we cannot recognize them as a three-dimensional configuration as long as we are tied to Earth. The average distance between the stars is a few light-years, a light-year being, we remember, about ten
trillion kilometers. For the patterns of the constellations to change, we must travel over distances comparable to those that separate the stars; we must venture across the light-years. Then some nearby stars will seem to move out of the constellation, others will enter it, and its configuration will alter dramatically.

Our technology is, so far, utterly incapable of such grand interstellar voyages, at least in reasonable transit times. But our computers can be taught the three-dimensional positions of all the nearby stars, and we can ask to be taken on a little trip—a circumnavigation of the collection of bright stars that constitute the Big Dipper, say—and watch the constellations change. We connect the stars in typical constellations, in the usual celestial follow-the-dots drawings. As we change our perspective, we see their apparent shapes distort severely. The inhabitants of the planets of distant stars witness quite different constellations in their night skies than we do in ours—other Rorschach tests for other minds. Perhaps sometime in the next few centuries a spaceship from Earth will actually travel such distances at some remarkable speed and see new constellations that no human has ever viewed before—except with such a computer.

The Big Dipper, as seen from the Earth
(top left)
, from the back
(top right)
and from the side
(right)
. The last two views would be seen if we were able to travel to the proper vantage points, about 150 light-years away.

The appearance of the constellations changes not only in space but also in time; not only if we alter our position but also if we merely wait sufficiently long. Sometimes stars move together in a group or cluster; other times a single star may move very rapidly with respect to its fellows. Eventually such stars leave an old constellation and enter a new one. Occasionally, one member of a double-star system explodes, breaking the gravitational shackles that bound its companion, which then leaps into space at its former orbital velocity, a slingshot in the sky. In addition, stars are born, stars evolve, and stars die. If we wait long enough, new stars appear and old stars vanish. The patterns in the sky slowly melt and alter.

Even over the lifetime of the human species—a few million years—constellations have been changing. Consider the present configuration of the Big Dipper, or Great Bear. Our computer can carry us in time as well as in space. As we run the Big Dipper backwards into the past, allowing for the motion of its stars, we find quite a different appearance a million years ago. The Big Dipper then looked quite a bit like a spear. If a time machine dropped you precipitously in some unknown age in the distant past, you could in principle determine the epoch by the configuration of the stars: If the Big Dipper is a spear, this must be the Middle Pleistocene.

Computer-generated images of the Big Dipper as it would have been seen on Earth one million years ago and half a million years ago. Its present appearance is shown at bottom.

We can also ask the computer to run a constellation forward into time. Consider Leo the Lion. The zodiac is a band of twelve constellations seemingly wrapped around the sky in the apparent annual path of the Sun through the heavens. The root of the word is that for
zoo
, because the zodiacal constellations, like Leo, are mainly fancied to be animals. A million years from now, Leo will look still less like a lion than it does today. Perhaps our remote descendants will call it the constellation of the radio telescope—although I suspect a million years from now the radio telescope will have become more obsolete than the stone spear is now.

The (nonzodiacal) constellation of Orion, the hunter, is outlined by four bright stars and bisected by a diagonal line of three stars, which represent the belt of the hunter. Three dimmer stars hanging from the belt are, according to the conventional astronomical projective test, Orion’s sword. The middle star in the sword is not actually a star but a great cloud of gas called the Orion Nebula, in which stars are being born. Many of the stars in Orion are hot and young, evolving rapidly and ending their lives in colossal cosmic explosions called supernovae. They are born and die in periods of tens of millions of years. If, on our computer, we were to run Orion rapidly into the far future, we would see a startling effect, the births and spectacular deaths of many of its stars, flashing on and winking off like fireflies in the night.

The solar neighborhood, the immediate environs of the Sun in space, includes the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. It is really a triple system, two stars revolving around each other, and a third, Proxima Centauri, orbiting the pair at a discreet distance. At some positions in its orbit, Proxima is the closest known star to the Sun—hence its name. Most stars in the sky are members of double or multiple star systems. Our solitary Sun is something of an anomaly.

The second brightest star in the constellation Andromeda, called Beta Andromedae, is seventy-five light-years away. The light by which we see it now has spent seventy-five years traversing the dark of interstellar space on its long journey to Earth. In the unlikely event that Beta Andromedae blew itself up last Tuesday, we would not know it for another seventy-five years, as this interesting information, traveling at the speed of light, would require
seventy-five years to cross the enormous interstellar distances. When the light by which we now see this star set out on its long voyage, the young Albert Einstein, working as a Swiss patent clerk, had just published his epochal special theory of relativity here on Earth.

Space and time are interwoven. We cannot look out into space without looking back into time. Light travels very fast. But space is very empty, and the stars are far apart. Distances of seventy-five light-years or less are very small compared to other distances in astronomy. From the Sun to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is 30,000 light-years. From our galaxy to the nearest spiral galaxy, M31, also in the constellation Andromeda, is 2,000,000 light-years. When the light we see today from M31 left for Earth, there were no humans on our planet, although our ancestors were evolving rapidly to our present form. The distance from the Earth to the most remote quasars is eight or ten billion light-years. We see them today as they were before the Earth accumulated, before the Milky Way was formed.

This is not a situation restricted to astronomical objects, but only astronomical objects are so far away that the finite speed of light becomes important. If you are looking at a friend three meters (ten feet) away, at the other end of the room, you are not seeing her as she is “now”; but rather as she “was” a hundred millionth of a second ago. [(3 m) / (3 × 10
⁸
m/sec) = 1/(10
⁸
/ sec) = 10
^–8
sec, or a hundredth of a microsecond. In this calculation we have merely divided the distance by the speed to get the travel time.] But the difference between your friend “now” and now minus a hundred-millionth of a second is too small to notice. On the other hand, when we look at a quasar eight billion light-years away, the fact that we are seeing it as it was eight billion years ago may be very important. (For example, there are those who think that quasars are explosive events likely to happen only in the early history of galaxies. In that case, the more distant the galaxy, the earlier in its history we are observing it, and the more likely it is that we should see it as a quasar. Indeed, the number of quasars increases as we look to distances of more than about five billion light-years).

The two Voyager interstellar spacecraft, the fastest machines ever launched from Earth, are now traveling at one ten-thousandth the speed of light. They would need 40,000 years to go the distance to the nearest star. Do we have any hope of leaving Earth and traversing the immense distances even to Proxima Centauri in convenient periods of time? Can we do something to approach the
speed of light? What is magic about the speed of light? Might we someday be able to go faster than that?

If you had walked through the pleasant Tuscan countryside in the 1890’s, you might have come upon a somewhat long-haired teenage high school dropout on the road to Pavia. His teachers in Germany had told him that he would never amount to anything, that his questions destroyed classroom discipline, that he would be better off out of school. So he left and wandered, delighting in the freedom of Northern Italy, where he could ruminate on matters remote from the subjects he had been force-fed in his highly disciplined Prussian schoolroom. His name was Albert Einstein, and his ruminations changed the world.

Einstein had been fascinated by Bernstein’s
People’s Book of Natural Science
, a popularization of science that described on its very first page the astonishing speed of electricity through wires and light through space. He wondered what the world would look like if you could travel on a wave of light. To travel at the speed of light? What an engaging and magical thought for a boy on the road in a countryside dappled and rippling in sunlight. You could not tell you were on a light wave if you traveled with it. If you started on a wave crest, you would stay on the crest and lose all notion of it being a wave. Something strange happens at the speed of light. The more Einstein thought about such questions, the more troubling they became. Paradoxes seemed to emerge everywhere if you could travel at the speed of light. Certain ideas had been accepted as true without sufficiently careful thought. Einstein posed simple questions that could have been asked centuries earlier. For example, what do we mean when we say that two events are simultaneous?

Imagine that I am riding a bicycle toward you. As I approach an intersection I nearly collide, so it seems to me, with a horse-drawn cart. I swerve and barely avoid being run over. Now think of the event again, and imagine that the cart and the bicycle are both traveling close to the speed of light. If you are standing down the road, the cart is traveling at right angles to your line of sight. You see me, by reflected sunlight, traveling toward you. Would not my speed be added to the speed of light, so that my image would get to you considerably before the image of the cart? Should you not see me swerve before you see the cart arrive? Can the cart and I approach the intersection simultaneously from my point of view, but not from yours? Could I experience a near collision with the cart while you perhaps see me swerve around nothing and pedal cheerfully on toward the town of Vinci? These are
curious and subtle questions. They challenge the obvious. There is a reason that no one thought of them before Einstein. From such elementary questions, Einstein produced a fundamental rethinking of the world, a revolution in physics.