The Universe Within (18 page)

In the Middle Ages, the idea of a cyclic universe became less popular as Christianity took hold and the biblical explanation of a “beginning” became the norm. Nevertheless, cyclic ideas regularly appeared — Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay titled “Eureka” that proposed a universe resembling the ancient ekpyrotic picture. And the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also advocated a repeating universe. He argued that since there can be no end to time and there are only a finite number of events that can occur, then everything now existing must recur, again and again for eternity. Nietzsche's model of “eternal recurrence” was popular in the late nineteenth century.

In fact, Georges Lemaître, even as he worked on the idea of a “quantum beginning,” commented favourably on Friedmann's oscillating cosmological solutions. In 1933, he wrote that these cyclic models possessed “an indisputable poetic charm and make one think of the phoenix of the legend.”
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For now, we stand on the verge of major progress in cosmology. Both theory and observation are tackling the big bang in our past, and they will determine whether it was really the beginning of everything or merely the latest in a series of bangs, each one of which produced a universe like ours. They are also tackling the deep puzzle of the vacuum energy that now dominates the universe, and which will be overwhelmingly dominant in the future. What is it composed of, and can we access it? Will it last forever? Will the exponential expansion it drives dilute away all of the stars and galaxies that surround us and lead to a vacuous, cold eternity? Or will the vacuum energy itself seed the next bang? These questions have entered the realm of science and of scientific observation. I, for one, cannot wait for the answers.

FOUR

THE WORLD IN AN EQUATION

“If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand.
Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had
to wait until I have felt the mathematics lead me by the hand. It has led me along an unexpected path,
a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one ca
set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.”
— Paul Dirac, 1975
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USING THE MOST POWERFUL
radio telescope on earth, astronomers have just detected an encrypted signal emanating from Vega, one of the brightest stars in the sky and about twenty-five light years away. The message contains instructions for building a machine to teleport five human beings across space to meet with the extraterrestrials. After an intense international search, world leaders select the five delegates. Among them is the brilliant young Nigerian physicist Dr. Abonnema Eda, who has just won the Nobel Prize for discovering the theory of superunification, combining all known physics into a single, unified picture.

The storyline comes from Carl Sagan's 1985 novel
Contact
, later made into a movie starring Jodie Foster. Sagan was a renowned U.S. astronomer and, with his TV series
Cosmos,
one of science's greatest popularizers. In casting Eda as a hero in his novel, Sagan was making two points: first, that discovering the basic laws of the universe is a global, cross-cultural field of research. People from every country are fascinated by the same questions about how the world works. Second, genius knows no national boundaries. Although Africa has so far been woefully under-represented in the history of physics, like other disadvantaged regions, in the future it may be a source of incredible talent. Science benefits greatly from a diversity of cultures, each bringing a new stimulus of energy and ideas.

OVER THE PAST DECADE
I have led a dual existence. On the one hand, I have been trying to understand how to describe the beginning and the far future of the universe. On the other, I have been fascinated by the problem of how to enable young people to enter science, especially in the developing world.

My interest is rooted in my African origins. As I described earlier, I was born in South Africa, where my parents were imprisoned for resisting the apartheid regime. Upon their release, we left as refugees, first to East Africa and then the U.K. When I was seventeen, I returned to Africa to teach for a year in a village mission school in Lesotho, a tiny, landlocked country surrounded by South Africa. Lesotho is one of the poorest nations on Earth: 80 percent of the jobs available are migrant labour, mostly in the mines over the border. In the village of Makhakhe, where I worked, I met many wonderful people and great kids with loads of potential but zero opportunity. No matter how bright or talented they were, they would never have the chances I'd had. A clerical position in the mines was the height of their aspiration.

The kids in the mission school were eager, responsive, and bright. But by and large, the education they'd received consisted of rote learning: memorizing times tables, copying notes from the blackboard and reproducing them in exams. They had no real experience of figuring things out or learning to think for themselves. School was a dry exercise you had to submit to: its sole purpose was to get a certificate. The teachers had been taught that way themselves, and they perpetuated a cycle of harsh discipline and low expectations.

I tried to take the kids outside as often as possible, to try to connect what we did in class with the real world. One day I asked them to estimate the height of the school building. I expected them to put a ruler next to the wall, stand back and size it up with finger and thumb, and make an estimate of the wall's height. But there was one boy, very small for his age and the son of one of the poorest families in the village, who was scribbling with chalk on the pavement. A bit annoyed, I said, “What are you doing? I want you to estimate the height of the building.” He said, “I measured the height of a brick. Then I counted the number of bricks and now I'm multiplying.” Well, needless to say, I hadn't thought of that!

People often surprised me with their enthusiasms and interests. Watching a soccer match at the school one day, I sat next to a miner, at home on his annual leave. He told me, “There's only one thing that I really loved at school: Shakespeare.” And he recited some lines to me. Many similar experiences convinced me of the vast potential for intellectual development which is sorely needed for the continent's progress.

Evolution was not on the school curriculum, because the church objected, but we nevertheless had excellent classroom discussions about it. Most African children are unaware of modern scientific discoveries showing how
Homo sapiens
originated in Africa around two hundred thousand years ago and began to migrate out of Africa between seventy thousand and fifty thousand years ago. I believe they could draw motivation from learning how humankind, and mathematics, and music and art, arose in Africa. Instead, young Africans are all too often made to feel like helpless bystanders, with every advance happening elsewhere in the world.

With the end of apartheid in 1994, my parents were allowed to return to South Africa. Both won election as members of the new parliament for the African National Congress, alongside Nelson and Winnie Mandela. They kept saying to me, “Can't you come back and help in some way?” At the time, I was too busy with my own scientific career. Eventually, in 2001, I took a leave from my position at Cambridge to visit the University of Cape Town, near where my parents lived. Most of the time, I was pursuing new cosmological theories, like the cyclic universe scenario. But I took time out from my research to meet with colleagues and discuss what we might do to help speed Africa's scientific development.

In these conversations, it quickly emerged that Africa's deficiency in maths is a serious problem. There is an acute scarcity of engineers, computer scientists, and statisticians, making it impossible for industry to innovate or, more generally, for governments to make well-informed decisions regarding health, education, industry, transport, or natural resources. African countries are highly dependent on the outside world; they export raw and unprocessed commodities, and import manufactured goods and packaged food. Cellphones have transformed the lives of many Africans, but none are yet made in Africa. If Africa is to become self-­sufficient, it urgently needs to develop its own community of skilled people and scientists to adapt and invent the technologies that will allow it to catch up to the rest of the world.

And so we came up with the idea of setting up a centre called the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, or
AIMS
, which would serve the continent
(click to see photo)
. The idea was very simple: to recruit the brightest students from across Africa and the best lecturers from around the world for a program designed to turn Africa's top graduates into confident thinkers and problem solvers, skilled in a range of techniques like mathematical modelling, data analysis, and computing. We would provide exposure to many scientific fields of great current relevance to Africa, like epidemiology, resource and climate modelling, and communications, but we would also mix in foundational topics like basic physics and pure mathematics.

Above all, we wanted to create a centre with a culture of excellence and a commitment to Africa's development. The goal of the institute would be to open doors; encourage students to explore and develop their interests; discover which fields excited them the most; and assist them in finding opportunities.
AIMS
would help them forge their path to becoming scientists, technologists, educators, advisors, and innovators contributing to their continent's growth.

With my parents' encouragement, my brothers and I used a small family inheritance to purchase a disused, derelict hotel. It's an elegant eighty-room, 1920s art deco building in a seaside suburb of Cape Town. Then, with the support of my colleagues in Cambridge, we formed a partnership involving Cambridge and Oxford universities in the U.K., Orsay in France, and the three main universities in Cape Town. We recruited a South African nuclear physicist, Professor Fritz Hahne, as the institute's first director. I persuaded many of my academic colleagues to teach for three weeks each, and we advertised the program across Africa by emailing academic contacts and by sending posters to universities. In 2003, we opened
AIMS
, receiving twenty-eight students from ten different countries.

AIMS
was launched as an experiment. We started it out of belief and commitment but had no real idea how or whether it would work. Most of us working to develop the project were academics, with little experience of creating an institution from scratch. For everyone involved, it was a wonderful learning experience. What we discovered was that when you take students from across a continent as diverse as Africa and put them together with some of the best teachers in the world, sparks fly.

South Africa has a strong, largely white, scientific community. Many of the local academics said to us, “Are you sure you really want to do this? You're going to be spending all your time on remedial teaching. These students won't know a thing.” How quickly
AIMS
proved them wrong! What the students lack in preparation, they make up for with motivation. Many students have had to overcome incredible difficulties, whether poverty, war, or loss of family members. These experiences make them value life, and the opportunity
AIMS
provides them, even more. They work harder than any students I have ever seen, and they feel and behave as if the world is opening up in front of them
(click to see photo)
.

Teaching at
AIMS
is an unforgettable experience. One feels a tremendous obligation to teach clearly and well, because the students really want to learn and need to learn fast. There is a profound shared sense at
AIMS
that we are participating in the scientific transformation of a continent. And we are filled with the belief that when young Africans are given the chance to contribute, they will astonish everyone.

Take Yves, from the heart of Cameroon, from a peasant family with nine children. His parents could afford to send only one of them to university. Yves was the lucky one, and he is determined to live up to the opportunity and to prove what he can do. After graduating from
AIMS
, he took a Ph.D. in pure mathematics. Soon after, he won the prize for the best Ph.D. student presentation at the annual South African Mathematical Society conference. What an achievement, and what a powerful symbol that someone who comes from a poor family in an African village can become a leading young scientist.

In just nine years of existence,
AIMS
has graduated nearly 450 students from thirty-one different African countries. Thirty percent of them are women. Most come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and almost all have gone on to successful careers in research, academia, enterprise, industry, and government. Their success sends a powerful message of hope which undermines prejudice and inspires countless others. What more cost-effective investment could one possibly make in the future of a continent?

Ever since we started
AIMS
in Cape Town, our dream was to create a network of centres, providing outstanding scientific education across the continent. Specifically, our plan was to open fifteen
AIMS
centres. Each should serve as a beacon, a jewel in the local scientific and educational firmament, helping to spark a transformation in young people's aspirations and opportunities.

In 2008, I was invited by the
TED
organization to make “a wish to change the world” at their annual conference in California, attended by some of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. My wish was “that you help us unlock and nurture scientific talent across Africa, so that within our lifetimes we are celebrating an African Einstein.” Using Einstein's name in this way is not something a theoretical physicist does lightly, and I must admit that I was nervous. Before I did, I sounded out some of my most critical physicist colleagues to see how they would respond. To my delight, they were unreservedly enthusiastic. Science needs more Einsteins, and it needs Africa's participation.

The idea of using Einstein's name in our slogan came from from another remarkable
AIMS
student. Esra comes from Darfur in western Sudan. Her family suffered from the genocide there, in which tens of thousands were murdered and millions displaced. Esra was doing physics at Khartoum University before she made her way to
AIMS
. In spite of her family and community's desperate problems back home, she somehow manages to remain cheerful.

One evening at
AIMS
, I lectured on cosmology. As usual, there was a lot of very animated discussion. At one point, I showed the Einstein equation for the universe and, as an aside, said, “Of course, we hope that among you there will be another Einstein.” The next day, a potential donor was coming to visit, and we asked a number of the students, including Esra, to speak. She ended her short, moving speech with the words: “We want the next Einstein to be African.” So when
TED
called me, a few weeks later, and asked if I had a wish, I knew immediately what it would be.

The slogan is deliberately intended to reframe the goals of international aid and development. Instead of seeing Africa as a problem continent, beset by war, corruption, poverty, and disease, and deserving of our charity, let us see it for what it can and should be: one of the most beautiful places on Earth, filled with talented people. Africa is an enormous asset and opportunity for the world. For too long, Africa has been exploited for its diamonds, gold, and oil. But the future will be all about Africa's people. We need to believe in them and what they are capable of.