Problems In Astrophysics

I’ve been reading up on astrophysics this summer. Don’t ask why. 

Okay, well, since you asked, it’s because I’ve had reason to confront my own mortality more than I’d like to what with a friend and two family members passing away in the last several months. Since I’m neither religious nor spiritual this makes a guy queasy about what, you know, comes next, since all the empirical evidence is that nothing comes next. 

By the way, I’ve also devoted some time to trying to understand baseball player and union contracts. For example, “designated for assignment”, “optioned”, “rule five draft”, etc. Astrophysics is easier. 

I was looking for some way of making sense of it all (life, not baseball) that was as rational as possible and didn’t require any leaps of faith, or faith at all for that matter.

While astrophysics doesn’t provide answers it does help put things in context. The main point you learn is that we are small. There are around 100 billion galaxies and each one contains hundreds of billions of stars. Even with our earth’s goldilocks conditions for life, there are so many suns out there that there are probably 40 million earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone.. and then multiply that by 100 billion galaxies. The chances that we are the only intelligent life (yeah, I use the term loosely) in the universe is just about zero. 

So, we’re small and not all that special. We also exist for little more than a picosecond. (That’s one-trillionth of a second. See? You learned something new today.) The universe has been around for 15 billion years or so. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that it lasts another 15 billion years and let’s say you live to the ripe old age of 100. That’d mean that your entire lifespan amounted to .000000003% of the life of the universe. Gnats live longer, comparatively speaking. 

Then there’s the point about the continuation of life. Air molecules and water have been around ever since homosapiens started messing around with the planet. So the water we drink and the air we breathe also passed through the bodies of Caesar, Jesus, Abe Lincoln, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Frank Sinatra. And, just so we don’t get a big head, it also passed through Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler and, well, Frank Sinatra. 

And it will go on. So the air and water that pass through my body will pass through great and awful and average people for millennia to come. It’s not exactly reincarnation, but it’s something like that. 

Also, the elements that make up our bodies were hatched in explosions of stars. We are literally stardust. The Catholics, of which I was once one, actually got this one right. On Ash Wednesday when the priest would mark a cross on my forehead he would say, “Man, you are dust. And to dust you shall return.” Kind of hard for a first grader to hear, but it puts things nicely in perspective.

But here’s the damn thing. Just when it seems like I’ve got some way of looking at things from the very long view, there comes news that maybe we shouldn’t be so sure about all this stuff.  

This problem comes to us from the James Webb telescope. The idea behind bigger, better and now space-based telescopes is that they, among other things, allow us to look deeper into the universe. And, because it takes even light a long time to travel great distances, what we see from here is actually looking back in time. So the Webb telescope allows us to see and measure stuff that formed in the universe’s infancy, maybe only 300 million years or so after the Big Bang. 

What we’d expect to find when we look out there are galaxies that are relatively hot and small because the universe started out that way (we’re all hotter when we’re young). But the Webb found a half dozen galaxies out there on the edge that are cool and big. This is a head scratcher for astrophysicists and it’s no small problem. If everything is cooling down and expanding over time how could something this young be so cool and big way back so close to the beginning? One science writer described it as discovering that your child was born before his grandfather. It doesn’t add up. 

But here’s the great thing about reading about science. In politics, when facts don’t support ideology, even most thoughtful people just ignore them. (Something we strive mightily NOT to do here at YSDA.) And, these days, Donald Trump has been very successful at making allegations wholly unsupported by any facts at all and by calling facts that are well-supported lies. 

But when scientists get data that don’t support even long accepted paradigms they get excited. It’s a new problem to figure out. In the case of the troublesome galaxies it means one of three things. There might be some error in the data, our Big Bang theory may need an amendment or the whole shooting match might need to be reconsidered. 

What I like about the scientific approach is that – unlike religion and politics – it’s not dogmatic. Nothing’s set in stone. There are things that can be proven and things that can’t. Experiments whose results other scientists can replicate and those that don’t hold up. And when new information becomes available scientists are ready to reconsider everything that is called into question. Here at YSDA we try to apply that method (poorly, I realize) to politics and current events.

The trouble with the big three religions (well, there are many troubles with the Abrahamic religions) is that they imagine a personal relationship with a human-like God. A God who is always watching them, every move they make, every breath they take. In other words, a pretty creepy God who also gets angry every time they violate one of his rules. And if you violate too many or just one of the big ones? Eternal damnation! How can anybody live under a belief system like that and not be a little on edge all the time? This is a prescription for mass neurosis.

Not only does none of that stand up to reason, but it doesn’t even seem like an attractive way to live a life. But what those handful of troubling galaxies don’t call into question is the reality that we are tiny specks of dust in a picosecond of time. I don’t know about you, but I find my insignificance comforting. I mean, how bad can I screw up?