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Life, the Universe, and the Anthropic Principle
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11956 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
4,193 Words |
| Author
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John D. Barrow
John D. Barrow is Reader in astronomy at the University of
Sussex in the United Kingdom. His current book is The World
Within the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). |
As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.
- Freeman Dyson
Cosmology is the science of the universe - its size, age, shape, wrinkles, origin, and contents. Mankind's oldest speculation, it has been transported in the twentieth century from the realm of metaphysics into the domain of physics, where speculation is not unbridled and where ideas must confront observations.
The universe, it was once assumed, existed as some vast unchanging background stage of space, against which all the local motions of the heavenly bodies took place. We have discovered that there is no such static cosmic stage. Everything that is - the entire universe of galaxies and stars - is in a state of perpetual motion. The universe is expanding: Its galaxies are flying away from each other, participants in a vast explosion. That motion is revealed to us by the red shift: the systematic shifting in the colors of the light that we receive from distant galaxies.
If we retrace the course of this expansion backward in time, we can visualize a moment when everything was concentrated before the expansion of the universe. The apparent beginning lies about fifteen billion years ago: a little more than ten billion years before the origin of the solar system and the Earth. Current cosmological research focuses upon events that might have occurred during the first instants after this beginning. In those moments, the universe resembled a cosmic experiment in high-energy physics, from which telltale fallout remains for us to see. These fossil remnants enable us to construct a tentative picture of the early history of the universe.
The problem of fitting human life into the impersonal tapestry of cosmic space and time has been pondered by mystics, philosophers, theologians, and scientists in all ages. Their views straddle the entire range of options. At one extreme is painted the depressing materialistic picture of human life as a local accident, totally disconnected and irrelevant to the inexorable march of the universe into a future "Big Crunch" of devastating heat (as the universe collapses upon itself), or the eternal oblivion of "Heat Death" (a cold state of maximum disorder). At the other end of the spectrum is preached the ancient teleological view that the universe was made especially for living
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