People travel to the strangest places for the oddest reasons, sometimes just out of curiosity. There are, of course, many places where humans cannot go, and reversing the arrow of time to travel backwards into history is also impossible.
That doesn’t stop enquiring minds from wondering about the conditions in inaccessible places, or what happened in the past. A few take that sense of wonder to its logical conclusion. They seek out the distant reaches of space, and speculate about the beginning of time itself.
The quests are linked. Looking back in time is possible when viewing distant galaxies. Owing to the limitations imposed by the speed of light, the images from a distant galaxy are old. We see stars as they were millions of years ago.
Astronomers are driven to seek high, dry, uninhabited places by their need to observe distant celestial objects. Population centres have multiple sources of visual and radio interference. Mobile networks and high-tension electricity grids jam even under-populated areas. Clouds and storms blind instruments.
Therefore, many observatories are embedded in desolation. There are stations high up on mountain ranges, deep in the Atacama Desert, on the slopes of active volcanoes, in Ladakh, in Lake Baikal, and on Antarctica.
The author went to some of those exotic locales in his quest for bleeding-edge cosmology. He describes the life and rhythm of observatories ranging from the venerable Mount Wilson in California to McMurdo Sound on Antarctica, the Atacama Desert of Chile, Mauna Loa in Hawaii, GMRT in Maharashtra and Hanle in Ladakh. Each of these houses optical or radio telescopes. All have unique characteristics in terms of living conditions.
He’s also been to Lake Baikal, into the bowels of a converted Minnesota mine and, of course, made the obligatory pilgrimage to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. These are not astronomical centres. They are labs where experiments can be carried out deep underground or underwater to detect unusual particles, whose “signatures” are normally drowned. LHC is the most ambitious scientific experiment ever, with its 27 km of tunnels where particles are accelerated to near-light-speed and smashed together in conditions approaching absolute vacuum and absolute zero.
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But the most unusual “lab” is Antarctica. The southern continent has unique conditions. Sitting on top of a 60 km thick sheet of ice that is more than 50,000 years old, in an absolutely dry atmosphere with no trace of biological impurities or human electro-magnetic interference, and living with fierce winds that are circular in path, scientists perform experiments such as sending balloons up 40,000 metres and putting neutrino detectors into 3-km deep holes.
On every trip, Anil Ananthaswamy describes both the place and the people he found there, and a much-simplified scientific explanation of what is going on and the theories being tested. This is like a potted history of 20th and 21st century physics coupled to current hypotheses. Call it extreme science welded to extreme travel.
One of the paradoxes of physics is that the study of very large objects, such as stars and galaxies, is inextricably linked to the study of infinitesimally small objects, as in fundamental particles. Another paradox is that understanding how the universe evolved over billions of years involves understanding what happened in the first fraction of the very first second of creation. Cosmology deals as often in femtoseconds as in billions of years, and equally often in massive supernovae and single particles.
Physics has thrown up many crackpot theories. Some, such as the counter-intuitive idea that the earth revolved around the sun, were subsequently proved correct. In science, theories must be falsifiable, and that means devising experiments and making observations that could provide either supporting or negating evidence.
Falsifying cosmological theory is extremely difficult. It took about 250 years before Einstein theorised that Newton’s clockwork model of the universe was incomplete. It took another 15 years before observational evidence in support of relativity was obtained.
In the last 40-odd years, huge efforts have been made (so far unsuccessfully) to locate the Higgs Boson, and to find direct evidence of dark matter and dark energy. These are key underpinnings of our current understanding of cosmology. Further out in speculative territory, there is super-string theory with predictions of innumerable universes, super-symmetry and “eternal expansion”.
There has been steady accretion of knowledge as theories are proved or tweaked to match data. Often the data gives rise to new theories, as it is hoped will happen with the LHC. But observation and experiment have become exponentially more difficult as “the easy stuff has been found” as one scientist explains.
It takes imagination, creativity and ingenuity to design experiments to test certain hypotheses. It also stretches technological competence and beyond. To give an example, the laser interferometer space antenna (Lisa) experiment involves sending three spacecraft out in an equilateral triangle formation, with each at a distance of exactly five million km from the other two. Lisa will test the curvature of space-time by gravity by measuring changes of a nanometre (one-billionth of a metre) in the distances between those three vessels. Another hypothesis suggests matter exceeded anti-matter by one extra molecule in every 10^35 molecules (10 followed by 34 zeros) at the Big Bang.
This is a fascinating book about strange places and fascinating people. Written in chatty style, it provides interesting insights into the things people do and the places they’ll go to satisfy their insatiable curiosity.
THE EDGE OF REASON
Anil Ananthaswamy
Penguin Paperback
322 pages; Rs 399