Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves (3 page)

But space is not nothing. There’s no such thing as nothing. Turns out space has properties. Virtual particles—subatomic particles that live for evanescently tiny time periods and then vanish—pop in and out of existence. Nothingness has inherent energy, and lots of it. According to current theory, an empty mayonnaise jar containing only vacant space has enough energy to boil away the Pacific Ocean in less than a second.

This so-called vacuum energy, or zero-point energy, pervades the cosmos. Thus seeming nothingness seethes with power. And whatever it is, it grows bigger and bigger.

Square one in our natural-motion board game, therefore, involves not just the very fastest velocities but also the frenzied animation of emptiness.

The most frequent question cosmologists get is: What is the universe expanding into?

For many, it’s the most perplexing motion-related inquiry, and scientists hear it routinely. However, to ask such a question means you’ve pictured the universe as an inflating balloon that you’re viewing from the outside. In actuality, no such perspective exists. There is no “outside” to the universe, by definition. The conundrum arises because the questioner has set up a nonexistent vantage point.

Instead, one should visualize living within a galaxy cluster and observing all the others. We see them all flying directly away from us. Distances between clusters are growing everywhere. This is the basic truth, and we can all picture it. And whether we deem the galaxies to be moving or the space between there and here to be inflating, the result is the same. The gap between us and distant galaxies is steadily growing.6

Moreover, the rate of the universe’s size increase is itself growing. We’re living within an ever more powerful self-perpetuating explosion. Most astronomers think it’s caused by that mysterious antigravity force pervading every cosmic nook and cranny, dark energy, which keeps rearing its invisible head. That’s probably what started everything blowing outward from the get-go. In a very real sense, the big bang is still banging. This runaway mushrooming of the entire universe is the picture frame that surrounds all other movement.7

Our exploding universe, which also contains small regions of contracting, collapsing entities, results from a tug-of-war between phantoms in black robes, in which dark matter does most of the pulling and dark energy does the repelling. The latter is winning the contest. Dark energy first gained the upper hand six billion years ago, even if we only just learned the news around the time we were switching from dial-up to broadband.

If we could someday gain light-speed capability, which physicists assure us is impossible, we still couldn’t reach the farthest visible galaxies, not even if we traveled forever. Thanks to the acceleration of the expanding universe, by the time we arrived at the galaxies’ present location, which would require more than thirty billion tedious years in our spaceship, the distance between us would have increased so enormously that they’d be farther away than ever. Here is futility beyond even the petty frustrations of Sisyphus.

Indeed, the light of those galaxies we were trying so hard to reach would no longer be visible. The trip would be worse than pointless. Our quarry would simply have vanished without a trace.

Lest we let ourselves feel too crushed by this news, within these dizzying extreme-motion cosmic parameters lie astounding secrets we have uncovered. Kelson himself promised to reveal some when his data was complete. But, as I was to learn, the true story of nature’s motions and speeds did not unfold without laughable errors, egotistical ambitions, and unspeakable tragedy.

The mistakes and the head-scratching began long ago. The oldest Hindu religious text, the Rigveda, written in Sanskrit around 1500 BCE, pondered how it is that “the waters glide downward to the ocean.” By the time Old Testament books were penned, a key point was not motion but its opposite. Psalm 93:1 says, “The world also is established, that it cannot be moved.” The universal assumption was of a stationary earth. The sun circling around us while our planet remains motionless seemed beyond dispute, because even an idiot could watch it happen. You could see stuff in the sky moving, and you could feel that we were not moving.

The standard wisdom was that, as in everyday life, the fastest-seeming objects must be those closest to us. (A car going down your street changes its angular position faster than a plane in the sky.) To the ancients this meant that the moon must be closer to us than the stars. It daily traverses twenty-six of its own widths as it speeds through the constellations. At the other extreme were the six thousand glowing dots whose patterns never changed; they must lie farthest away. This assigning of distance—the moon nearest and the stars farthest—ultimately proved true. So the ancients managed not to be wrong about everything.

By the time of the Greeks, the stars that circled us nightly were assumed to be inlaid into a kind of crystalline sphere—check another box in the “incorrect” column. But with the tools at hand 2,300 years ago—i.e., none—how could anyone begin to figure out the truth?

Yet that is exactly what one Greek accomplished. I introduce him proudly, because he is my first hero.

Aristarchus of Samos, born in 310 BCE, pondered these moving entities in the sky and arrived at correct conclusions eighteen centuries ahead of everyone else. A mathematician and astronomer, Aristarchus was the very first person to say that the sun is the center of the solar system. And that Earth orbits around it while also spinning like a top. To his contemporaries it must have seemed nothing short of crazy. And indeed, with fellow Greeks Plato and Aristotle contradicting and even ridiculing him, Aristarchus’s insights—based on lunar shadowing and the relative positions of the sun and moon—didn’t “take off” until another seventy-two human generations had come and gone. Even Aristarchus’s contemporary and fellow Samos native Epicurus—yes, that Epicurus, who was fond of life’s pleasures—claimed the sun hovered nearby and was just two feet in diameter. Two feet! Early evidence, perhaps, that hedonistic ouzo binges are not compatible with math.8

Meanwhile, odd celestial events, such as eclipses, along with earthquakes and other scourges, were usually seen as a manifestation of anger from God or the gods. It became our human task to figure out why the deities were so enormously ticked off and to appease them. Moreover, for more than thirty centuries, natural events that either threatened life or were considered capable of doing so—and these included comets, planet conjunctions, eclipses, storms, and epidemics—were regarded as omens. They didn’t just happen, they had meaning. Omen interpretation was a popular activity and, for those with the gift of gab, a lucrative business. There was no word in either Greek or Latin for “volcano”—which illustrates how little importance was paid to the physical event as opposed to the presumed underlying cause, divine fury.

Meanwhile, to rational Greeks, the issue of what moves and what doesn’t remained secondary to the basic question of why anything should move in the first place. It may have seemed an insoluble problem, but Leucippus, and especially his student Democritus, who was born around 460 BCE, originated and popularized the idea that everything is composed of infinitesimally small moving particles called atoms. Each is colorless and indivisible, they said, and when atoms glom together to form the various objects around us, those objects mobilize as a result of their atoms’ motions.

This atomic theory became a popular explanation of nature’s animation. The reason the belief lasted only as long as the modern “Elvis is alive” concept—a couple of generations—is that it ultimately collided with the genius of Aristotle.

Aristotle was born on the Greek mainland in 384 BCE. His prolific writings were a mixed bag, although many of his goofs were inherited from his teacher Plato. These mistakes included relatively minor errors, such as his belief that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, and major blunders, such as his insistence that Earth is the stationary center of all motion.

He spent countless pages exploring the causes and nature of motion in his groundbreaking book The Physics. In one of its subsections (Book II) Aristotle claims that actions begin because nature “wishes to achieve a goal.”

But here’s the point. In both Greek atom theory and Aristotelian philosophy, natural motion originates from within each object. This is the reverse of our modern thinking. Science now insists that nothing budges unless acted upon by an outside force.

Many of Aristotle’s ideas provide grist for deep thought to this day. Book IV discusses time as being a quality of motion, which, he said, has no independent existence of its own. He also implied that an observer is necessary for time to exist. Both these concepts are very much in line with modern quantum thinking. Few physicists today think that time has any independent reality beyond being a tool of animal perception.

Later in The Physics, Aristotle tackles the old “prime mover” enigma by arguing that the universe and its motions are eternal. You don’t need an initial instigator to start the ball rolling. Everything moves; it’s always moved; it’s its nature to move.

In other words, as we gaze at nature’s endless animation, we see a pageant that has no need for the cause-and-effect business: every moving entity exhibits the dynamic aliveness of the eternal One. It sounds very much like Hindu Advaita or Buddhist teachings.

Moreover, Aristotle said, matter’s energy never diminishes. In this, too, Aristotle is confirmed by modern science. We have accepted since the nineteenth century that the universe’s total energy never decreases.

With this mixed assortment of profound and nutty notions, Aristotle is nonetheless best remembered for yet another aspect of his epic treatise on why things move: the elements. He actually borrowed the idea from Empedocles, who was born around 490 BCE in Sicily. Embraced for the next two thousand years, this theory basically states that everything is made of earth, air, water, or fire (or mixtures of them), to which Aristotle added a divine fifth element, ether, found only in the heavens.

Aristotle said that each element liked to exist in a particular place and would always go there if it could. This, he said, was the central reason for motion.

A clay pot, for example, is made of earth. This element fundamentally belongs to a realm at the center of the universe (i.e., beneath the ground) and hence desires to return there. So at the slightest provocation a pot falls because its natural motion is downward. That would bring it closer to “home.”

The element water also wants to go down. Its domain is the sea, which, for the ancients, was the region surrounding the lowest realm—made of earth, clay, and rocks. This is why people, composed of lots of water, easily fall and bruise. Our bodies want to fall. But when bathing in the ocean we don’t fall or even necessarily sink because our body’s watery element is now “home” and at rest in its natural environment.

Fire, on the other hand, is of a mysterious realm high above us, and thus its natural motion is upward. This explains why fire and anything associated with it, such as smoke, readily rise. The element air is another lives-up-high substance, which explains why bubbles in water always head upward.

Hence was born the notion of “place”—everything has its preferred position and tries to go there. Aristotle said that natural place has a dunamis, or power to create motion.

It all made sense. It still makes sense, even though it’s wrong. Aristotle’s notions about why things move held sway for eighty generations, until well into the Renaissance. It was still the paradigm for a no less brilliant observer than Leonardo da Vinci, who made frequent allusion to the four elements.

Leonardo’s writings make contemporary motion beliefs crystal clear. In particular, he articulately pondered the nature of force:

“It is born in violence and dies in liberty.”

“It drives away in fury whatever opposes its destruction.”

“Force lives always in hostility to whoever controls it.”

“It willingly consumes itself.”

“Always it desires to grow weak and to spend itself.”

Judging by these quotations from a 1517 Leonardo manuscript, it’s obvious that he saw force, another initiator of motion, as an almost sentient presence. It had deliberate objectives. Like Mona Lisa, it schemed and dreamed.

It took another 170 years—until 1687, when Isaac Newton spelled out his three laws of motion in the Principia—for modern concepts of how and why things move to finally appear.

Of course to us, as observers and participants in nature’s nonstop action, the real enjoyment lies in simply watching the pageant. And here, I was to learn, even sluggishness brings jaw-dropping surprises.

How We Learned to Love Lethargy

I’m ready to go anywhere…

—BOB DYLAN, “MR. TAMBOURINE MAN” (1964)

The human brain has a bias. We are wired to notice abrupt motion.

If we stare blankly out a window, thinking about our taxes, we’ll be snapped to attention if the still life is punctured by sudden movement. A rabbit darting from a bush, say. The scene may already be pregnant with countless slow movers—caterpillars, subtle swayings of branches, clouds mutating—but we will be oblivious to all of it. A shame. While we may pay attention to the sudden fast things, Earth’s oozing, creeping entities influence our lives far more than the darting bunnies.

Our bias toward speed is at least as old as written language. Though the pace of life in olden times was far more leisurely than it is today, classical and ancient literature showed little interest in “slow.” True, everyone knew the sun set 180 degrees away from where it first appeared at dawn. And agricultural societies cared about wheat growing taller. But only the final result mattered. They didn’t know or care that corn grows an inch a day, an imperceptible motion twenty times slower than a clock’s hour hand.

We are all prisoners of our experience, and human motion was the standard for what we’d call slow or fast. The speediest person who ever lived is alive today: Jamaica’s Usain Bolt. He ran the hundred-meter dash in 9.58 seconds in 2009 for a speed of twenty-three miles an hour. This is the very fastest a human has traveled using no more than his own legs. As if to prove it was no mere ephemeral fluke, he virtually equaled that speed when he left all competitors behind during the 2012 Olympics in London.