How the Universe Got It's Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space

I just finished reading Janna Levin's How the Universe Got It's Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space. As the book's title alludes, Levin is a believer in a finite universe, with all the implications, even as she declares herself agnostic on the plausibility of free will. Levin supports her assertions of a finite universe, with the machinations of mathematics -- specifically, the branch describing topology. Levin is a theoretical astrophysicist.

The actual content dealing with topology and supporting the argument for a finite universe would actually fit into just one chapter of the book's 200-pages -- and it presented nothing revolutionary, nothing new -- at least to my popsci understanding of the topic. Levin wrote for popsci audience.

[Speaking of the CMB] This archaeological remnant of the big bang had journeyed from the farthest reaches of the cosmos that we can access and carries information about these earliest times, and so encodes all kinds of information about the large-scale landscape of the universe. In particular, we should be able to see an imprint of the geometry of space in the pattern of hot and cold spots in the sky.

We can see how the universe got its spots.

She grazed the surface of topology, and only lost me for a few moments when she plumbed the depths -- otherwise, she did excellent work to bring general understanding to a very hard to understand subject. I was especially grateful for the hand-holding to visualize multidimensional compact topologies.

Suppose there were a two-dimensional flatland where the indigenous population was totally unable to access the third dimension. Here I borrow from a truly peculiar book called Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. It was written in the nineteenth century and chronicles a society of two-dimensional creatures. It would be impossible to discuss space, dimensionality and geometry without paying homage to this fantastical book.

Levin wrote How the Universe Got It's Spots via a series of letters between late 1998 and early 2001.

Writing this as the events unfold is different from writing about the events with the clarity of hindsight. The inane and the mundane are given equal importance in the present before select events acquire special importance in the context of a memory that stretches far into the past and far enough into the future.

While this style was distracting with its wandering, it worked well to set the tone of the book. There was a melancholy undercurrent pervading the book -- a result of the juxtaposition of Levin's tenuous grasp on her future, as her career tossed her from one academic assignment to another, and her study of the largest-scale structure of the universe -- looking for meaning.

For me, while the astrophysics was intriguing -- leaving me in wonder as I pondered the big everything, where it all came from and where it is all going -- it was the human stories that had the most emotional appeal. Levin's personal thoughts -- her fears and uncertainty -- and her reflection on the personal lives of the great figures in mathematics and physics that have influenced her work -- were engrossing.

[Writing on Gödel] I don't know all the details but have heard that the murder of an influential logician [Moritz Schlick] by a young National Socialist precipitated his decline. But then I've also heard he was lovesick. Despair followed the murder (or the heartache) and a breakdown pounced on the heels of despair. His life story wouldn't end well.

[On Turing] History tells us that Turing was tried and convicted of homosexual activity. He came forward to the police to pre-empt any accusations against him. The state subjected him to injections of oestrogen as an alternative to a prison sentence -- quite outrageous.

Levin opened How the Universe Got It's Spots by admitting her morbid "curiosity about the madness of some mathematicians." Wondering "if alienation and brushes with insanity are occupational hazards." Boltzmann and Ehrenfest are both remembered in this light.

Over a century ago the Viennese-born mathematician Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) invented statistical mechanics, a powerful description of atomic behaviour based on probabilities. Opposition to his ideas was harsh and his moods were volatile. Despondent, fearing disintegration of his theories, he hanged himself in 1906. It wasn't his first suicide attempt, but it was his most successful. Paul Ehrenfest (1880-1933) killed himself nearly thirty years later. I looked at their photos today and searched their eyes for depression and desperation. I didn't see them written there.

Levin also mentions that Pythagoras also killed himself -- so sure was he of the "sanctity of numbers" that his own discoveries, such as Pi, would shake his faith.

When I tell the stories of their suicide and mental illness, people always wonder if their fragility came from the nature of the knowledge -- the knowledge of nature. I think rather that they went mad from rejection. Their mathematical obsessions were all-encompassing and yet ethereal. They needed their colleagues beyond needing their approval. To be spurned by their peers meant death of their ideas. They needed to encrypt the meaning in others' thoughts and be assured their ideas would be perpetuated.

I also wonder about knowledge -- sometimes ignorance is bliss -- but once you know, it's hard to go back to ignorance. How can you not want to act on that knowledge? Knowing what I know of the universe, I take solace in being able to act -- to influence and change what I can around me. I tell myself there is meaning in my actions -- free will -- since knowledge of the universe loses much meaning -- is incomprehensible to our finite and insignificant lives.

It's hard for me to place the significance of culture and humanity in a universe that barrels along without concern for our welfare. Our city monuments are poignant, but maybe I don't know how to assess our significance. Why are we all struggling so desperately to survive? I don't know how to place us in the greater scheme of things. As Oscar Wilde said, 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.'

I can understand how Levin feels -- knowing, but also knowing that there is a chasm of not knowing also in our knowledge. How do you move forward knowing that all the answers will never be revealed to you -- that our species may not survive long enough to discover what it's all about -- that maybe by just the virtue of being in the universe, we'll never be able to behold and comprehend it.

The inflationary paradigm offers a plausible explanation for how a lumpy, chaotic universe could end up vast and smooth. It gives us a chance of survival, since the universe must be vast and smooth to be inhabitable. Fifteen billion years later, we're here. Still, I do wonder if we haven't squandered that chance of survival. The dinosaurs managed to road for 250 millions years. All we have under our belt are a few tens of thousands of years, an opposable thumb, some fire and we've already nearly demolished the planet. Maybe we're not such a success as a species if you measure success by the likelihood of survival. Even if we do survive, we have to at least admit that it's possible we will not and that our demise could come tomorrow. We could poison ourselves, toxify the earth, drop a weapon of mass destruction. Are we a suicidal species? Will we be responsible for our own genocide? There I go, obsessing about our predilection for insanity.

Yet we can ask these questions: why? how? We can even answer them. The dinosaurs couldn't do that.

Another undercurrent in How the Universe Got It's Spots was the issue of gender. Levin is a female scientist in a field dominated by men -- where despite the intellectual endeavour, crass sexism still flourishes. I remember when I was in school, my program -- astrophysics as well -- only had a few females. I believe only one survived. It was a combination of sheer tenacity and stubbornness that made her a success despite the barriers. Levin comments on the silent acknowledgement that her female peers share. They don't talk about the gender bias. I was happy to find that Levin skipped on the use of the traditional male pronoun in her writing, and instead, uses the female pronoun in her writing. Only once did she give in to temptation and poked festering gender issue.

Physicists are obsessed with acronyms: WIMPs, MACHOs, POTENT, COMBAT. All allegedly stolen from the first letters of a meaningful phrase like: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) or Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs). The acronyms fit comfortably into a lexicon replete with terms like 'sterile', 'impotent', 'the bulge' and 'barrier penetration'. I saw Rocky give a talk once where he swore the objects he studied were Not Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects (NACHOs). At least his acronym had to do with junk food and not male insecurity.

To reconcile the large-scale with the very small, Levin looked to quantum mechanics to describe gravity -- a feat not yet accomplished, but may have hope with string theory.

Quantum mechanics says that nature is fundamentally grainy when we focus closely enough. The fundamental grains are made from a handful of different kinds of particles: quarks, leptons, photos, gravitons and the like. A fairly thrilling theory threatens to overthrow this atomistic assumption. If we looked at the fundamental grains, we would not find point particles, but instead a collective of identical strings. The notes of the string correspond to the different particles that appear to make up the world. So ultimately there is not a handful of distinct particles but only one kind of something, a string. The apparently distinct fundamental quarks and leptons, gluons and gravitons are the varied resonances of these identical strings. Spacetime and matter unify as the intrinsic notes of a complex melody whose score is string theory, the ultimate Theory of Everything.

Married to the geometry of gravity:

So spacetime isn't a thing but rather a collection of events and their relations. Even more disarming, we may not even be things, just events.

And viewed from the perspective of topology and a finite universe:

Even time can be made compact. If time is compact, every event will repeat precisely as set by the age of that very peculiar world.

A universe that eventually stops expanding and begins to collapse can in a sense grow young again. If space itself were to collapse, we would be crushed back into the dust of the earth from which we came: the atoms that the sun, the earth and we ourselves stole from a dying star would be returned to space and broken into their subatomic constituents, to the stuff of pure energy where gravity and matter and light merge indistinct. As nature rushes to its demise, the entire universe would become smaller than a discarded speck of dust, and smaller still, and perhaps then it cold start all over again. The energy of the implosion would be so great that our cosmos explodes in a big bang, a cosmic rebirth in which space swells and our entire history repeats itself. The same galaxies form and the same stars and planets; and on at least one of those planets there is life. You are born. I am born. Even a proponent of free will can see that, at the very least, we would be limited in the choices we could make. We would live out the same lives, make the same choices, make the same mistakes.

But of course, in quantum mechanics, there's uncertainty -- and that could very well mean that things wouldn't be just the same.