Portraits of reality
Posted: Sun May 05, 2013 5:12 am
This is part of a book I am working on. It's a history of cosmology, from the earliest recorded stories about how we have viewed the world we live in, up to current ideas about the Big Bang. I am hoping to put everything into context so that what seem like crazy ideas make a bit more sense. I hope also that some of the people here would be my target audience, so any comments would be very welcome.
Introduction
Years ago, before I knew any better, it seemed like a good idea to join a group of friends on a bicycle ride from London to the seaside. After a long day in the saddle we hit the foothills of the South Downs where we set up base camp in an old coach house. Between us and the sea were hills of chalk, made of the skeletons of countless animals which, 120 million years ago, lived beneath the same water we were now trying to reach. Eventually deciding we were sufficiently refreshed, we started our assault on the summit. The road was steep, but at least we could see the top. Or so we thought. When we reached the horizon, it turned out to be a ridge, beyond which the road climbed to meet the sky higher up. Exactly how many times this happened is lost to memory, but the abiding perception the experience left is of a series of increasingly cruel disappointments, followed by more uphill struggle.
It’s a metaphor, of course; that hill is the history of western thinking about life, the universe and everything. Characteristic of curious people is that they will explain the world to their own satisfaction, and assume their musings somehow reflect reality. Philosophers, scientists, poets, prophets and priests have all shared their visions, only for others, with new ideas, discoveries or inventions to come along and expose their forebears’ old ideas as incomplete or else complete nonsense.
Aristotle for instance was so learned that he is possibly the only person ever to have known everything there was to know at the time. His ideas remained central to the intellectual orthodoxy for almost 2000 years. Then in 1609 the observations Galileo made with the newly invented telescope confirmed the Copernican claim that the Earth travels around the Sun, not the other way round as Aristotle had argued. It was one of the ideas which during the Renaissance blew away the overbearing Medieval authority of Aristotle and Catholicism.
The new freedom from dogma segued into the Enlightenment and brought about further revolutions in our thinking, institutions and nations. The ancient belief that elements could change from one thing into another, the theoretical inspiration for alchemy, was finally laid to rest by Antoine Lavoisier, ending millennia of futile attempts to turn all manner of concoctions into gold. Lavoisier himself was dispatched by the guillotine, a victim of popular fury during the French Revolution, because of his role as a tax collector.
Another pre-historic belief lasted even longer: the contention that life sprang spontaneously from the ground; that maggots just happen to erupt from decaying flesh, still had its adherents until, in 1864, another Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, demonstrated that life won’t appear where life doesn’t put it.
By the end of the century the West had finished subjugating almost the entire planet, their scientists were so confident of the imminent completion of their work that the American Albert Michelson claimed ‘the grand underlying principles have been firmly established, further truths of physics are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.’ In Britain, Lord Kelvin was even more blunt; ‘There is nothing new to be discovered now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’
They were wrong. With the twentieth century came world war, cold war, global warming, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. The last two each portrays its own portion of the universe to an astonishing degree of accuracy; Richard Feynman, one of the great Twentieth century physicists and an enthusiastic bongo player described the precision of Quantum Electro-Dynamics, a branch of Quantum Mechanics he helped develop. ‘If you were to measure the distance from Los Angeles to New York to this accuracy, it would be exact to the thickness of a human hair.’
The case for Relativity is also compelling, messages sent to the Cassini probe and back when it was on the other side of the Sun showed that Relativity is accurate to at least one part in 50 000. But the two theories describe very different worlds. According to Quantum Mechanics, the universe is made of tiny smudges of excitable energy that can flit in and out of existence anywhere in the universe for no good reason. General Relativity, on the other hand, treats reality as though it were a huge sponge that can be twisted and squeezed, so that space and time are malleable.
The two pictures are as incompatible as they sound and huge efforts are being made to discover a single theory that will explain all the forces, all the features, the origin and destiny of the universe in one tidy package. People have always wanted to know, where did it come from? What is it made of? How does it work? This book is a tribute to some of the people bold enough to offer solutions.
Chapter 1
The most astonishing thing about the universe is that there is one. What is so wrong with emptiness that it blew itself into the smithereens that is reality? How, then, did the dust and ashes draw themselves into the sun, the moon and the Earth. And how on Earth did some of that same debris clump together into arrangements that began to reproduce themselves. How did the imperfections in the copies turn into the staggering diversity that is life, and how did one of the resulting species develop such a superfluous intellect that it could look at everything and wonder; what happened?
The questions as they are put above assume the worth of modern ideas, particularly the Big Bang and evolution. But we believe that since the dawn of self reflection, our ancestors have marvelled at and celebrated the fact that we are here. The first thoughts have been lost; we cannot yet fully understand the messages left by our early hunter-gatherer ancestors.
About five thousand year ago farmers were becoming so skilled at agriculture that their efforts could produce enough food to support growing, permanent settlements. Rich alluvial floodplains were especially favourable and from Egypt to China, the first urban civilizations developed. Many of the early farmers simply had to wait for the annual flood and sow their fields as they emerged from the receding water, but as the population grew, labour had to be organised to manipulate the course of rivers to irrigate more of the land.
The success of the farmers meant that with much of the population not needed for food production, other crafts and skills flourished, creating an early consumer boom. But floodplains by their nature often lack the materials needed to support a range of sophisticated industries; those that exist are often washed away or buried by mud. So the opportunity for enterprising people to settle near the source of valuable materials they could trade with the cities was exploited, creating a broader community of interdependent populations.
The increasing complexity of the developing societies demanded sophisticated record keeping; and symbols, pictograms and tokens that are no longer fully understood evolved into written documents that we can translate with some confidence.
Mesopotamia.
The very first examples come from Mesopotamia, essentially modern day Iraq. Called cuneiform, the script was created by pushing a sliced reed into wet clay tablets, which were then left in the sun to bake. The ruins of temples and palaces have been rich sources of such tablets and thousands have been found across the entire region. A lot of them are exactly the sort of humdrum administrative records that provoked the invention in the first place, but the potential for creativity and story telling was quickly realised and, for the first time, we don’t have to patch together clues with guesswork to recreate what our ancestors believed; we can read the book.
One of the best sources was discovered in the mid nineteenth century, in the ruined palace of Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia. He reigned for roughly forty years in the mid seventh century B.C. and was unusual in that he could read and was loved by his people; a combination of characteristics that his enemies ridiculed as weakness. Generally kings and queens have stood or fallen on their ability to marshal a brutal aristocracy and ruthless clergy, a skill that requires little literacy and even less popularity.
Ashurbanipal though was not the eldest son and therefore not expected to succeed his father; he was supposed to make his way in life as something less fabulous than ‘king of the universe’ which he eventually became. Despite his effete education, Ashurbanipal was a successful military leader and expanded the Assyrian empire considerably. What’s more, he boasted about the pleasure he took in humiliating and even torturing his conquered rivals, on one occasion putting a chain through the jaw of a defeated king and leading him round like a dog. But, when he wasn’t mistreating the vanquished, Ashurbanipal assembled the most comprehensive and systematic library the world had seen.
Among the thousands of artefacts discovered were seven cuneiform tablets which became known as the Enuma Elish. So called after the opening words, it is in its detail the story of how Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, came to be the most powerful of all the Mesopotamian gods and as such it explained to the people of Babylon why they were better than everybody else. Other cities of Mesopotamia had equally self-congratulatory versions, but embedded in the opening verses of the Enuma Elish is a story about the creation of the world, the fundamentals of which were common to the whole civilization.
When there was no Heaven and Earth, it says, there was Apsu, god of fresh water and Tiamat, goddess of salt water. Their waters joined and from this union came Lahmu and Lahamu, gods of soil. Lahmu and Lahamu in their turn bore Anshar and Kishar, the sky that carries the seed and the fertile Earth that bears the fruit.
The idea that the universe began as body of water might not be what we consider a scientific hypothesis, but it is an idea born of observation. Four thousand years ago, the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia was a major maritime port, perhaps the largest city in the world at the time; today the site is over two hundred kilometres inland because the Euphrates and Tigris deposit enough silt annually to advance the coast by up to fifty metres. But the process we describe as sedimentation, fuelled by erosion upstream, was interpreted by the Mesopotamians as the seed bearing male river flowing into the body of the female sea. Thus impregnated, foetal islands developed in her body until the build up is so great that new land is born.
The virgin soil is quickly sown with seeds delivered by the wind; it begins to mature into productive, nurturing mother Earth. Where the sea is pushed back, the land that takes its place is at first wet and marshy. When the new life dies and decays beneath the shallow water it produces marsh gas, methane, which bubbles up and bursts into the atmosphere, as though the marriage of the Earth and water was giving birth to air.
With Mesopotamia growing at a rate of 50 metres each year, the whole process was part of everyday experience and even though it is wrong, the story so far is a sincere attempt to explain events that everybody could witness. The evidence for how the finer details of creation work is harder to discern and it is at this point that the Enuma Elish and it’s rival accounts diverge. With little evidence to contradict them the writers could unharness their imagination to create a politically valuable fairy tale.
In the case of the Enuma Elish, more gods were born, but Tiamat was shocked by the wickedness and noise of her descendants and she complained bitterly to her husband. For the sake of peace and quiet, Apsu decided to murder all of his riotous offspring, but his plan was discovered by Ea, god of wisdom and magic, who put Apsu in a trance and killed him as he slept. Ea made his home on the body of Apsu and there his wife Damkina bore a son, Marduk.
Meanwhile, Tiamat was furious that her husband had been taken from her, so she created eleven monsters to help her exact revenge. Ea, for all his wisdom, lacked the heart to take on Tiamat and her terrifying army, so did all the other gods until the job was offered to Marduk, who accepted, on condition that he was made top god. The others were summoned to a banquet, at which Marduk proved his credentials by making clothes disappear. Suitably impressed, the other gods agreed to his demands, so Marduk left to confront Tiamat.
At the height of the battle, Marduk forced a hurricane into Tiamat’s gaping mouth as she tried to swallow him. The hurricane blew Tiamat up like a balloon and, seizing his chance, Marduk shot her through the heart with an arrow. He split the distended body of Tiamat in two, like one opens an oyster. From one half he fashioned the heavens as a home for the gods, the other half he shaped into the Earth, making mountains from Tiamat’s breasts, and the Tigris and Euphrates flow from her eyes. Provided they paid suitable homage and made the appropriate sacrifices, the people of Babylon could rely on the support of such a powerful patron. At least that’s what the priests said.
As far as we can tell, the story of the Enuma Elish is typical of the beliefs of the time. Peoples’ wish to understand the mechanics of the universe was satisfied with an appeal to the force they felt intimately; the world works in much the same way as the people describing it, things change and develop because they are alive.
Egypt.
The Rivers Tigris and Euphrates define Mesopotamia, the name means the land between the rivers. It forms the eastern arm of the Fertile Crescent. This as the name suggests is an agriculturally rich strip of land that sweeps north-west along the Tigris and Euphrates before turning, following the river Jordan south, through the Levant and ending in Egypt. There the rise of the civilisation happened away from the coast where the land was regularly inundated by the floodwaters of the river Nile. Their retreat left a film of fresh soil that sustained cultivation, and the different circumstances are reflected in the myths. Hundreds of miles from the sea, there is no mixing of water and while, as in Mesopotamia, the details differ from place to place, most Egyptians agreed that originally there was only one sort of water, which they called Nun.
Among the different accounts is one from Heliopolis in which Atum, the first true god created himself, first as a mound of earth in the primordial water and then into a human form. From his semen Atum created Shu, the air and Tefnut, the water that falls from the sky, as dew or rain. These two, a male and a female respectively, then begat children of their own in the conventional way. Their first born were Geb and Nut, the Earth and the sky, who were so keen on begetting that their constant coupling caused a jealous rage in Atum, who ordered Shu to tear them apart and keep them separated. The wrench provoked such anguish in Geb that his body was petrified into the contorted shape that to us looks like hills and valleys.
As in Mesopotamian, the Egyptians struggled to find evidence for how the subtler details of the world worked, and just as in Mesopotamia, the regional differences in the stories served the purposes of the ruling political elite. The priests at Heliopolis had competition from Thebes, Memphis and Hermopolis; each keen to establish itself as the main religious centre in Egypt. Part of the strategy was to insist that they knew something the others didn’t and in Hermopolis the tactic included developing a more elaborate genesis. Nun, they said, was accompanied by his partner, Naunet, and as a pair they could have populated the universe by the simple expedient of prodigious quantities of sexual reproduction, which was the favoured method of most gods of the time. But in addition to the water gods there were three other couples representing darkness, infinity and mysterious powers; together these gods formed the Ogdoad, literally the group of eight.
We can well imagine that a universe containing only water might be dark and infinite, but the addition of gods of mysterious powers is an acknowledgement that we don’t know how we come to be here. Today we talk about forces such as electromagnetism and gravity, but they are still, frankly, mysterious powers acting on matter and shaping our world in ways we don’t fully understand.
The Poet’s universe.
Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332BC. Less than ten years later, he was dead and his huge Empire was divided up by his colleagues and family in an act known as the Partition of Babylon. Egypt was given to one of Alexander’s most trusted generals, Ptolemy who, after years of struggle and intrigue declared himself Pharaoh. The Ptolemaic dynasty ruled until Cleopatra’s Egypt was conquered by Rome almost 300 years later. But even before Alexander, it was common for rich Greeks to send their sons to Egypt, and indeed Babylon, to enhance their education.
The Greeks, of course, had their own gods. In fact by 700BC, roughly the time that Ashurbanipal was building his library, the many different city states that made up Greece had gods for every conceivable natural feature, phenomenon and emotional state. About that time, so his own story goes, a poor shepherd called Hesiod was visited by the Muses as he was tending his flock on the slopes of the sacred mount Helicon. There they taught Hesiod a glorious song and gave him a divine voice to sing it. He then wrote the book of the song and called it the Theogeny, literally the birth of the gods; it became the standard Greek creation myth.
Given the number of sources that contributed to the Theogeny, it is not surprising that the original state of the universe was Chaos. But this was less the shambles we associate with the word and more a dark and mysterious, infinite void; effectively a dry version of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis. That water is less fundamental is not surprising either, as the Theogony was written on a mountain, where water is more likely to be seen springing from the hillside than dumping the silt it picked up on it’s journey. Hence matter emerged out of Chaos in the form of Gaia, mother Earth. At the same time Eros was created who, as the god of sexual attraction, was the mysterious power that brings people together. But he was also an abstract force that worked on nature in general, bringing together various elements to mix and mate, creating novelty.
The story continues with the virginal Gaia giving birth to Uranus the starry sky. It was only after this that Earth gives birth to water in the form of Pontus, who in contrast with other stories is described as the fruitless deep. She also bore the seas and the mountains in the same condition, so Greek mythology didn’t depend on a Marduk or painful mid-coital wrench to explain the features of the world. But Hesiod agreed with the Mesopotamians and Egyptians that when Gaia lay with Uranus, as Anshar and Kishar and Geb and Nut had done, the begetting got serious; the story less so.
To cut a long story short, Gaia gave birth to twelve Titans, followed by three Cyclopes and finally three monsters with fifty heads and a hundred arms. Uranus was horrified by his progeny, and hid them away. In a rage Gaia hatched a vengeful plan; she created flint and made a jagged sickle from it and told her less monstrous children what a terrible god their father was. The Titans were all frozen with fear except the youngest, Cronus who agreed to help. So Gaia hid Cronus and when Uranus came and spread himself on Gaia for some more begetting, Cronus snuck out and lopped off Uranus’ genitals with the jagged flint sickle and so, like Geb and Nut, the Earth and Sky were separated. The blood that spilled into Gaia wasn’t wasted and in due course she gave birth to the avenging Furies as well as Giants and Nymphs. The genitals themselves were thrown into the sea, they drifted until they reached Cyprus where they foamed up and out stepped Aphrodite.
With Cronus now in charge the begetting continued unabated with hundreds of gods born until nothing much could happen without some god or other being held accountable. Eventually Cronus was overthrown by his own son, Zeus, who remained the most powerful of all the Greek gods. His name has its roots in PIE, the ancestral proto indo-european language that most linguists believe was spoken, but can’t agree where or when. The original word is thought to have been dyeu, meaning to shine; day is from the same root. Zeus is only one almighty god associated with daylight and sunshine; others include Dyaus in Sanskrit, Tiwas in Germanic languages and Deus in Latin. Modern Latinate languages use essentially the same word for the Christian god, for example, Dieu in French, Dios in Spanish.
Meanwhile, back in Hesiod’s Greece, more and more gods came to be. In amongst them, with no more ceremony than the birth of say, Quarrels or Forgetfulness, Helios and Selene, the sun and the moon were born. We are also told that a bronze anvil, dropped from the sky would fall for nine days to reach Earth on the tenth, what happened on impact isn’t recorded, but we are told it would then fall a further nine days before it reached Tartarus.
This is not to say that Hesiod actually believed that such an anvil would fall for nine days, much less that anybody had in fact dropped one; the number nine often crops up when an indefinite, but definitely large amount needs to be expressed. This too is thought to be a relic of PIE, the word for new is closely linked to the number nine, its the same word in Spanish. In the Theogeny we are told that a god that drinks from the River Styx is laid low for nine years; Homer, the other major interpreter of Greek myths used the same allusion. In the Iliad, the siege of Troy lasted nine years; afterwards in the sequel, The Odyssey, Odysseus wanders for nine years before making it home.
There is no suggestion as to how fast a brazen anvil would fall, so how far it would fall in nine days is anyone’s guess. But until Galileo proved otherwise it was believed that the heavier the object, the faster it will fall. Were that so, an anvil would clearly fall very fast indeed and Hesiod is making the point that Heaven and Hell are very, very big. Sandwiched between them, like a slice from a not especially large salami, is the world we inhabit; a flat disc that extended to somewhere beyond the range of Greek travellers’ tales: about from Bangladesh to the Azores and from Poland to the middle of Chad. This world, like the one in the old stories from Egypt and Mesopotamia was surrounded by water, in this case the mighty river, and god, Oceanus.
That Oceanus was always just out of view was typical of gods. In the 19th century a Scottish preacher called Henry Drummond complained about Christians claiming that the gaps in scientific explanations were where God did his work. Few people take the god of the gaps seriously today, but in Hesiod’s time it was pretty much all gaps and the great advantage of believing in promiscuous gods was that for any phenomenon that sprang to mind, all it took was a suitable couple copulating to account for it. As there was never any sign of the gods responsible, some people were led to question whether they really existed. One such person was called Thales.
Schools of thought
The stories of the Greek poets, like the ones from Mesopotamia and Egypt wove together the threads of science, religion and politics into a single yarn that was a reference for all of life’s mysteries: they were as much about cultural identity as they were a search for the truth. Although Thales surely wasn’t the first to appreciate this, he is credited with being the first to attempt to disentangle the different strands and explain the how universe might work without plugging the gaps with gods. As far as possible he stuck to what he could see and examined the relationships between objects as agents of cause and effect; by so doing he introduced the reasoning that saw science emerge as a separate discipline.
This new way of thinking stimulated 200 years of intense debate that we now call Pre-Socratic philosophy: it shook up the holistic thinking of previous authors and in addition to science, introduced mathematics and logic as abstract tools for thinking about anything and everything. Rarely was any mode of thought used completely to the exclusion of all others, though each had their advocates and centres of activity. Thales’ method, with its emphasis on observation, most closely resembles science; based initially in Thales home town of Miletus it spread to the surrounding area and is sometimes called the Ionian school. Mathematics was championed by Pythagoras, according to some a student of Anaximander, himself a student of Thales. Pythagoras moved to Croton in southern Italy, where he started a secret society run on mathematical principles. Xenophanes was a travelling rhapsode, a poet who got about a bit. He was originally from Colophon in Ionia and some say he too was a student of Anaximander. He declared that the universe is one and unchanging, a view that inspired the Eleatic school, again of southern Italy. These three schools of Greek thought, one from Turkey and two from Italy, were brought together in Athens, by Plato and Aristotle, creating philosophy as we now know it. It is largely Aristotle’s version of reality that best represents the Greek world view
Science
The historical details of Thales are vague, contradictory even; there are conflicting stories about whether Thales ever married, one being that he did and had a son, the other that he didn’t, at first telling his mother that he was too young to marry and later, that he was too old. He also set the standard for philosophical distraction, falling into a well because he was so busy studying the stars. Plato says he was laughed at by a pretty maid, while Diogenes Laertius, a third century biographer, says Thales was scorned by an old woman. Indecisiveness and clumsiness might seem like natural prerequisites for a successful philosopher, but Thales was also a very practical man.
He was very widely travelled, his parents were nobles and, as was the fashion, Thales was sent on a grand educational tour. There is a story of him gauging the height of the pyramids by measuring the length of their shadows when his own shadow was equal to his height. He could also turn his hand to politics and business; on one occasion buying all the olive presses in Miletus after predicting a bumper crop, apparently he was making the point that he could use his intellect to increase his wealth if he wished, but he preferred to use it as it’s own end, which is a luxury the son of nobles could easily afford. And while his professed contempt for riches was influential, it was probably his rejection of the poetry of Homer and Hesiod that had the biggest impact on history.
Thales, like others before and since, stepped backward to move forward. In particular, he was unconvinced by the poets’ notion of Chaos as the original condition of the universe. The early religions taught that even gods were products of the primordial matter and Thales saw part of his task as discovering what the original matter was. At the time Miletus, as Ur had been, was a busy maritime port with several harbours. Lying on the banks of the river Meander, from which we get the verb, the site of Miletus is now ten kilometres inland thanks to the soil deposited by the slow winding river. Having travelled and studied in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, it is little wonder he concluded that the elemental substance was water. But without the usual infusion of gods to generate the forces of nature, Thales was left with a lot of water that had mysteriously turned into a universe by itself. His solution was partly in agreement with the myths he was familiar with: things that move and change are alive, the universe moves and changes; therefore the universe is alive. But in contrast to his predecessors, Thales chose to liberate the power to move and act from the gods and attribute it directly to the water and so to the world it bore.
To support this unlikely seeming hypothesis Thales gave two examples of apparently lifeless things that do have the power to cause movement. Magnets, which get their name from the lodestones found in the Greek region of Magnesia; and amber, which when rubbed with fur, as children rub balloons on their jumpers, will be charged with enough electricity to make your hair stand on end; the Greek name for amber was electron. The fact that magnetism and electricity could be found in otherwise unexceptional pebbles was enough for Thales to extend the principle to the entire contents of the universe.
Given the power of life, the primordial water metamorphosed into the universe we are familiar with as water changed to earth, to air, to fire and living creatures sprang spontaneously from the resulting mix, much as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians had envisaged. But without the conscious intervention of sentient gods, Thales tried to show how things that happened could be explained in broadly mechanical terms; one of the best known examples that he gave was earthquakes. In Greek mythology, earthquakes were caused by Poseidon, a god and therefore an actual physical giant, who would wreak bloody havoc by stamping the ground petulantly. Thales in contrast believed that the Earth floated on the primordial ocean and he reasoned that earthquakes could be caused by waves shaking the world, as a ship might be tossed in a storm. He was confident that similar thinking would discover physical reasons for everything else that happens. Never mind that the best of his ideas were speculative and most were wrong, they could be argued and tested in a way the whim of divine beings could not.
Introduction
Years ago, before I knew any better, it seemed like a good idea to join a group of friends on a bicycle ride from London to the seaside. After a long day in the saddle we hit the foothills of the South Downs where we set up base camp in an old coach house. Between us and the sea were hills of chalk, made of the skeletons of countless animals which, 120 million years ago, lived beneath the same water we were now trying to reach. Eventually deciding we were sufficiently refreshed, we started our assault on the summit. The road was steep, but at least we could see the top. Or so we thought. When we reached the horizon, it turned out to be a ridge, beyond which the road climbed to meet the sky higher up. Exactly how many times this happened is lost to memory, but the abiding perception the experience left is of a series of increasingly cruel disappointments, followed by more uphill struggle.
It’s a metaphor, of course; that hill is the history of western thinking about life, the universe and everything. Characteristic of curious people is that they will explain the world to their own satisfaction, and assume their musings somehow reflect reality. Philosophers, scientists, poets, prophets and priests have all shared their visions, only for others, with new ideas, discoveries or inventions to come along and expose their forebears’ old ideas as incomplete or else complete nonsense.
Aristotle for instance was so learned that he is possibly the only person ever to have known everything there was to know at the time. His ideas remained central to the intellectual orthodoxy for almost 2000 years. Then in 1609 the observations Galileo made with the newly invented telescope confirmed the Copernican claim that the Earth travels around the Sun, not the other way round as Aristotle had argued. It was one of the ideas which during the Renaissance blew away the overbearing Medieval authority of Aristotle and Catholicism.
The new freedom from dogma segued into the Enlightenment and brought about further revolutions in our thinking, institutions and nations. The ancient belief that elements could change from one thing into another, the theoretical inspiration for alchemy, was finally laid to rest by Antoine Lavoisier, ending millennia of futile attempts to turn all manner of concoctions into gold. Lavoisier himself was dispatched by the guillotine, a victim of popular fury during the French Revolution, because of his role as a tax collector.
Another pre-historic belief lasted even longer: the contention that life sprang spontaneously from the ground; that maggots just happen to erupt from decaying flesh, still had its adherents until, in 1864, another Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, demonstrated that life won’t appear where life doesn’t put it.
By the end of the century the West had finished subjugating almost the entire planet, their scientists were so confident of the imminent completion of their work that the American Albert Michelson claimed ‘the grand underlying principles have been firmly established, further truths of physics are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.’ In Britain, Lord Kelvin was even more blunt; ‘There is nothing new to be discovered now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’
They were wrong. With the twentieth century came world war, cold war, global warming, Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. The last two each portrays its own portion of the universe to an astonishing degree of accuracy; Richard Feynman, one of the great Twentieth century physicists and an enthusiastic bongo player described the precision of Quantum Electro-Dynamics, a branch of Quantum Mechanics he helped develop. ‘If you were to measure the distance from Los Angeles to New York to this accuracy, it would be exact to the thickness of a human hair.’
The case for Relativity is also compelling, messages sent to the Cassini probe and back when it was on the other side of the Sun showed that Relativity is accurate to at least one part in 50 000. But the two theories describe very different worlds. According to Quantum Mechanics, the universe is made of tiny smudges of excitable energy that can flit in and out of existence anywhere in the universe for no good reason. General Relativity, on the other hand, treats reality as though it were a huge sponge that can be twisted and squeezed, so that space and time are malleable.
The two pictures are as incompatible as they sound and huge efforts are being made to discover a single theory that will explain all the forces, all the features, the origin and destiny of the universe in one tidy package. People have always wanted to know, where did it come from? What is it made of? How does it work? This book is a tribute to some of the people bold enough to offer solutions.
Chapter 1
The most astonishing thing about the universe is that there is one. What is so wrong with emptiness that it blew itself into the smithereens that is reality? How, then, did the dust and ashes draw themselves into the sun, the moon and the Earth. And how on Earth did some of that same debris clump together into arrangements that began to reproduce themselves. How did the imperfections in the copies turn into the staggering diversity that is life, and how did one of the resulting species develop such a superfluous intellect that it could look at everything and wonder; what happened?
The questions as they are put above assume the worth of modern ideas, particularly the Big Bang and evolution. But we believe that since the dawn of self reflection, our ancestors have marvelled at and celebrated the fact that we are here. The first thoughts have been lost; we cannot yet fully understand the messages left by our early hunter-gatherer ancestors.
About five thousand year ago farmers were becoming so skilled at agriculture that their efforts could produce enough food to support growing, permanent settlements. Rich alluvial floodplains were especially favourable and from Egypt to China, the first urban civilizations developed. Many of the early farmers simply had to wait for the annual flood and sow their fields as they emerged from the receding water, but as the population grew, labour had to be organised to manipulate the course of rivers to irrigate more of the land.
The success of the farmers meant that with much of the population not needed for food production, other crafts and skills flourished, creating an early consumer boom. But floodplains by their nature often lack the materials needed to support a range of sophisticated industries; those that exist are often washed away or buried by mud. So the opportunity for enterprising people to settle near the source of valuable materials they could trade with the cities was exploited, creating a broader community of interdependent populations.
The increasing complexity of the developing societies demanded sophisticated record keeping; and symbols, pictograms and tokens that are no longer fully understood evolved into written documents that we can translate with some confidence.
Mesopotamia.
The very first examples come from Mesopotamia, essentially modern day Iraq. Called cuneiform, the script was created by pushing a sliced reed into wet clay tablets, which were then left in the sun to bake. The ruins of temples and palaces have been rich sources of such tablets and thousands have been found across the entire region. A lot of them are exactly the sort of humdrum administrative records that provoked the invention in the first place, but the potential for creativity and story telling was quickly realised and, for the first time, we don’t have to patch together clues with guesswork to recreate what our ancestors believed; we can read the book.
One of the best sources was discovered in the mid nineteenth century, in the ruined palace of Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Assyrians of northern Mesopotamia. He reigned for roughly forty years in the mid seventh century B.C. and was unusual in that he could read and was loved by his people; a combination of characteristics that his enemies ridiculed as weakness. Generally kings and queens have stood or fallen on their ability to marshal a brutal aristocracy and ruthless clergy, a skill that requires little literacy and even less popularity.
Ashurbanipal though was not the eldest son and therefore not expected to succeed his father; he was supposed to make his way in life as something less fabulous than ‘king of the universe’ which he eventually became. Despite his effete education, Ashurbanipal was a successful military leader and expanded the Assyrian empire considerably. What’s more, he boasted about the pleasure he took in humiliating and even torturing his conquered rivals, on one occasion putting a chain through the jaw of a defeated king and leading him round like a dog. But, when he wasn’t mistreating the vanquished, Ashurbanipal assembled the most comprehensive and systematic library the world had seen.
Among the thousands of artefacts discovered were seven cuneiform tablets which became known as the Enuma Elish. So called after the opening words, it is in its detail the story of how Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, came to be the most powerful of all the Mesopotamian gods and as such it explained to the people of Babylon why they were better than everybody else. Other cities of Mesopotamia had equally self-congratulatory versions, but embedded in the opening verses of the Enuma Elish is a story about the creation of the world, the fundamentals of which were common to the whole civilization.
When there was no Heaven and Earth, it says, there was Apsu, god of fresh water and Tiamat, goddess of salt water. Their waters joined and from this union came Lahmu and Lahamu, gods of soil. Lahmu and Lahamu in their turn bore Anshar and Kishar, the sky that carries the seed and the fertile Earth that bears the fruit.
The idea that the universe began as body of water might not be what we consider a scientific hypothesis, but it is an idea born of observation. Four thousand years ago, the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia was a major maritime port, perhaps the largest city in the world at the time; today the site is over two hundred kilometres inland because the Euphrates and Tigris deposit enough silt annually to advance the coast by up to fifty metres. But the process we describe as sedimentation, fuelled by erosion upstream, was interpreted by the Mesopotamians as the seed bearing male river flowing into the body of the female sea. Thus impregnated, foetal islands developed in her body until the build up is so great that new land is born.
The virgin soil is quickly sown with seeds delivered by the wind; it begins to mature into productive, nurturing mother Earth. Where the sea is pushed back, the land that takes its place is at first wet and marshy. When the new life dies and decays beneath the shallow water it produces marsh gas, methane, which bubbles up and bursts into the atmosphere, as though the marriage of the Earth and water was giving birth to air.
With Mesopotamia growing at a rate of 50 metres each year, the whole process was part of everyday experience and even though it is wrong, the story so far is a sincere attempt to explain events that everybody could witness. The evidence for how the finer details of creation work is harder to discern and it is at this point that the Enuma Elish and it’s rival accounts diverge. With little evidence to contradict them the writers could unharness their imagination to create a politically valuable fairy tale.
In the case of the Enuma Elish, more gods were born, but Tiamat was shocked by the wickedness and noise of her descendants and she complained bitterly to her husband. For the sake of peace and quiet, Apsu decided to murder all of his riotous offspring, but his plan was discovered by Ea, god of wisdom and magic, who put Apsu in a trance and killed him as he slept. Ea made his home on the body of Apsu and there his wife Damkina bore a son, Marduk.
Meanwhile, Tiamat was furious that her husband had been taken from her, so she created eleven monsters to help her exact revenge. Ea, for all his wisdom, lacked the heart to take on Tiamat and her terrifying army, so did all the other gods until the job was offered to Marduk, who accepted, on condition that he was made top god. The others were summoned to a banquet, at which Marduk proved his credentials by making clothes disappear. Suitably impressed, the other gods agreed to his demands, so Marduk left to confront Tiamat.
At the height of the battle, Marduk forced a hurricane into Tiamat’s gaping mouth as she tried to swallow him. The hurricane blew Tiamat up like a balloon and, seizing his chance, Marduk shot her through the heart with an arrow. He split the distended body of Tiamat in two, like one opens an oyster. From one half he fashioned the heavens as a home for the gods, the other half he shaped into the Earth, making mountains from Tiamat’s breasts, and the Tigris and Euphrates flow from her eyes. Provided they paid suitable homage and made the appropriate sacrifices, the people of Babylon could rely on the support of such a powerful patron. At least that’s what the priests said.
As far as we can tell, the story of the Enuma Elish is typical of the beliefs of the time. Peoples’ wish to understand the mechanics of the universe was satisfied with an appeal to the force they felt intimately; the world works in much the same way as the people describing it, things change and develop because they are alive.
Egypt.
The Rivers Tigris and Euphrates define Mesopotamia, the name means the land between the rivers. It forms the eastern arm of the Fertile Crescent. This as the name suggests is an agriculturally rich strip of land that sweeps north-west along the Tigris and Euphrates before turning, following the river Jordan south, through the Levant and ending in Egypt. There the rise of the civilisation happened away from the coast where the land was regularly inundated by the floodwaters of the river Nile. Their retreat left a film of fresh soil that sustained cultivation, and the different circumstances are reflected in the myths. Hundreds of miles from the sea, there is no mixing of water and while, as in Mesopotamia, the details differ from place to place, most Egyptians agreed that originally there was only one sort of water, which they called Nun.
Among the different accounts is one from Heliopolis in which Atum, the first true god created himself, first as a mound of earth in the primordial water and then into a human form. From his semen Atum created Shu, the air and Tefnut, the water that falls from the sky, as dew or rain. These two, a male and a female respectively, then begat children of their own in the conventional way. Their first born were Geb and Nut, the Earth and the sky, who were so keen on begetting that their constant coupling caused a jealous rage in Atum, who ordered Shu to tear them apart and keep them separated. The wrench provoked such anguish in Geb that his body was petrified into the contorted shape that to us looks like hills and valleys.
As in Mesopotamian, the Egyptians struggled to find evidence for how the subtler details of the world worked, and just as in Mesopotamia, the regional differences in the stories served the purposes of the ruling political elite. The priests at Heliopolis had competition from Thebes, Memphis and Hermopolis; each keen to establish itself as the main religious centre in Egypt. Part of the strategy was to insist that they knew something the others didn’t and in Hermopolis the tactic included developing a more elaborate genesis. Nun, they said, was accompanied by his partner, Naunet, and as a pair they could have populated the universe by the simple expedient of prodigious quantities of sexual reproduction, which was the favoured method of most gods of the time. But in addition to the water gods there were three other couples representing darkness, infinity and mysterious powers; together these gods formed the Ogdoad, literally the group of eight.
We can well imagine that a universe containing only water might be dark and infinite, but the addition of gods of mysterious powers is an acknowledgement that we don’t know how we come to be here. Today we talk about forces such as electromagnetism and gravity, but they are still, frankly, mysterious powers acting on matter and shaping our world in ways we don’t fully understand.
The Poet’s universe.
Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332BC. Less than ten years later, he was dead and his huge Empire was divided up by his colleagues and family in an act known as the Partition of Babylon. Egypt was given to one of Alexander’s most trusted generals, Ptolemy who, after years of struggle and intrigue declared himself Pharaoh. The Ptolemaic dynasty ruled until Cleopatra’s Egypt was conquered by Rome almost 300 years later. But even before Alexander, it was common for rich Greeks to send their sons to Egypt, and indeed Babylon, to enhance their education.
The Greeks, of course, had their own gods. In fact by 700BC, roughly the time that Ashurbanipal was building his library, the many different city states that made up Greece had gods for every conceivable natural feature, phenomenon and emotional state. About that time, so his own story goes, a poor shepherd called Hesiod was visited by the Muses as he was tending his flock on the slopes of the sacred mount Helicon. There they taught Hesiod a glorious song and gave him a divine voice to sing it. He then wrote the book of the song and called it the Theogeny, literally the birth of the gods; it became the standard Greek creation myth.
Given the number of sources that contributed to the Theogeny, it is not surprising that the original state of the universe was Chaos. But this was less the shambles we associate with the word and more a dark and mysterious, infinite void; effectively a dry version of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis. That water is less fundamental is not surprising either, as the Theogony was written on a mountain, where water is more likely to be seen springing from the hillside than dumping the silt it picked up on it’s journey. Hence matter emerged out of Chaos in the form of Gaia, mother Earth. At the same time Eros was created who, as the god of sexual attraction, was the mysterious power that brings people together. But he was also an abstract force that worked on nature in general, bringing together various elements to mix and mate, creating novelty.
The story continues with the virginal Gaia giving birth to Uranus the starry sky. It was only after this that Earth gives birth to water in the form of Pontus, who in contrast with other stories is described as the fruitless deep. She also bore the seas and the mountains in the same condition, so Greek mythology didn’t depend on a Marduk or painful mid-coital wrench to explain the features of the world. But Hesiod agreed with the Mesopotamians and Egyptians that when Gaia lay with Uranus, as Anshar and Kishar and Geb and Nut had done, the begetting got serious; the story less so.
To cut a long story short, Gaia gave birth to twelve Titans, followed by three Cyclopes and finally three monsters with fifty heads and a hundred arms. Uranus was horrified by his progeny, and hid them away. In a rage Gaia hatched a vengeful plan; she created flint and made a jagged sickle from it and told her less monstrous children what a terrible god their father was. The Titans were all frozen with fear except the youngest, Cronus who agreed to help. So Gaia hid Cronus and when Uranus came and spread himself on Gaia for some more begetting, Cronus snuck out and lopped off Uranus’ genitals with the jagged flint sickle and so, like Geb and Nut, the Earth and Sky were separated. The blood that spilled into Gaia wasn’t wasted and in due course she gave birth to the avenging Furies as well as Giants and Nymphs. The genitals themselves were thrown into the sea, they drifted until they reached Cyprus where they foamed up and out stepped Aphrodite.
With Cronus now in charge the begetting continued unabated with hundreds of gods born until nothing much could happen without some god or other being held accountable. Eventually Cronus was overthrown by his own son, Zeus, who remained the most powerful of all the Greek gods. His name has its roots in PIE, the ancestral proto indo-european language that most linguists believe was spoken, but can’t agree where or when. The original word is thought to have been dyeu, meaning to shine; day is from the same root. Zeus is only one almighty god associated with daylight and sunshine; others include Dyaus in Sanskrit, Tiwas in Germanic languages and Deus in Latin. Modern Latinate languages use essentially the same word for the Christian god, for example, Dieu in French, Dios in Spanish.
Meanwhile, back in Hesiod’s Greece, more and more gods came to be. In amongst them, with no more ceremony than the birth of say, Quarrels or Forgetfulness, Helios and Selene, the sun and the moon were born. We are also told that a bronze anvil, dropped from the sky would fall for nine days to reach Earth on the tenth, what happened on impact isn’t recorded, but we are told it would then fall a further nine days before it reached Tartarus.
This is not to say that Hesiod actually believed that such an anvil would fall for nine days, much less that anybody had in fact dropped one; the number nine often crops up when an indefinite, but definitely large amount needs to be expressed. This too is thought to be a relic of PIE, the word for new is closely linked to the number nine, its the same word in Spanish. In the Theogeny we are told that a god that drinks from the River Styx is laid low for nine years; Homer, the other major interpreter of Greek myths used the same allusion. In the Iliad, the siege of Troy lasted nine years; afterwards in the sequel, The Odyssey, Odysseus wanders for nine years before making it home.
There is no suggestion as to how fast a brazen anvil would fall, so how far it would fall in nine days is anyone’s guess. But until Galileo proved otherwise it was believed that the heavier the object, the faster it will fall. Were that so, an anvil would clearly fall very fast indeed and Hesiod is making the point that Heaven and Hell are very, very big. Sandwiched between them, like a slice from a not especially large salami, is the world we inhabit; a flat disc that extended to somewhere beyond the range of Greek travellers’ tales: about from Bangladesh to the Azores and from Poland to the middle of Chad. This world, like the one in the old stories from Egypt and Mesopotamia was surrounded by water, in this case the mighty river, and god, Oceanus.
That Oceanus was always just out of view was typical of gods. In the 19th century a Scottish preacher called Henry Drummond complained about Christians claiming that the gaps in scientific explanations were where God did his work. Few people take the god of the gaps seriously today, but in Hesiod’s time it was pretty much all gaps and the great advantage of believing in promiscuous gods was that for any phenomenon that sprang to mind, all it took was a suitable couple copulating to account for it. As there was never any sign of the gods responsible, some people were led to question whether they really existed. One such person was called Thales.
Schools of thought
The stories of the Greek poets, like the ones from Mesopotamia and Egypt wove together the threads of science, religion and politics into a single yarn that was a reference for all of life’s mysteries: they were as much about cultural identity as they were a search for the truth. Although Thales surely wasn’t the first to appreciate this, he is credited with being the first to attempt to disentangle the different strands and explain the how universe might work without plugging the gaps with gods. As far as possible he stuck to what he could see and examined the relationships between objects as agents of cause and effect; by so doing he introduced the reasoning that saw science emerge as a separate discipline.
This new way of thinking stimulated 200 years of intense debate that we now call Pre-Socratic philosophy: it shook up the holistic thinking of previous authors and in addition to science, introduced mathematics and logic as abstract tools for thinking about anything and everything. Rarely was any mode of thought used completely to the exclusion of all others, though each had their advocates and centres of activity. Thales’ method, with its emphasis on observation, most closely resembles science; based initially in Thales home town of Miletus it spread to the surrounding area and is sometimes called the Ionian school. Mathematics was championed by Pythagoras, according to some a student of Anaximander, himself a student of Thales. Pythagoras moved to Croton in southern Italy, where he started a secret society run on mathematical principles. Xenophanes was a travelling rhapsode, a poet who got about a bit. He was originally from Colophon in Ionia and some say he too was a student of Anaximander. He declared that the universe is one and unchanging, a view that inspired the Eleatic school, again of southern Italy. These three schools of Greek thought, one from Turkey and two from Italy, were brought together in Athens, by Plato and Aristotle, creating philosophy as we now know it. It is largely Aristotle’s version of reality that best represents the Greek world view
Science
The historical details of Thales are vague, contradictory even; there are conflicting stories about whether Thales ever married, one being that he did and had a son, the other that he didn’t, at first telling his mother that he was too young to marry and later, that he was too old. He also set the standard for philosophical distraction, falling into a well because he was so busy studying the stars. Plato says he was laughed at by a pretty maid, while Diogenes Laertius, a third century biographer, says Thales was scorned by an old woman. Indecisiveness and clumsiness might seem like natural prerequisites for a successful philosopher, but Thales was also a very practical man.
He was very widely travelled, his parents were nobles and, as was the fashion, Thales was sent on a grand educational tour. There is a story of him gauging the height of the pyramids by measuring the length of their shadows when his own shadow was equal to his height. He could also turn his hand to politics and business; on one occasion buying all the olive presses in Miletus after predicting a bumper crop, apparently he was making the point that he could use his intellect to increase his wealth if he wished, but he preferred to use it as it’s own end, which is a luxury the son of nobles could easily afford. And while his professed contempt for riches was influential, it was probably his rejection of the poetry of Homer and Hesiod that had the biggest impact on history.
Thales, like others before and since, stepped backward to move forward. In particular, he was unconvinced by the poets’ notion of Chaos as the original condition of the universe. The early religions taught that even gods were products of the primordial matter and Thales saw part of his task as discovering what the original matter was. At the time Miletus, as Ur had been, was a busy maritime port with several harbours. Lying on the banks of the river Meander, from which we get the verb, the site of Miletus is now ten kilometres inland thanks to the soil deposited by the slow winding river. Having travelled and studied in both Mesopotamia and Egypt, it is little wonder he concluded that the elemental substance was water. But without the usual infusion of gods to generate the forces of nature, Thales was left with a lot of water that had mysteriously turned into a universe by itself. His solution was partly in agreement with the myths he was familiar with: things that move and change are alive, the universe moves and changes; therefore the universe is alive. But in contrast to his predecessors, Thales chose to liberate the power to move and act from the gods and attribute it directly to the water and so to the world it bore.
To support this unlikely seeming hypothesis Thales gave two examples of apparently lifeless things that do have the power to cause movement. Magnets, which get their name from the lodestones found in the Greek region of Magnesia; and amber, which when rubbed with fur, as children rub balloons on their jumpers, will be charged with enough electricity to make your hair stand on end; the Greek name for amber was electron. The fact that magnetism and electricity could be found in otherwise unexceptional pebbles was enough for Thales to extend the principle to the entire contents of the universe.
Given the power of life, the primordial water metamorphosed into the universe we are familiar with as water changed to earth, to air, to fire and living creatures sprang spontaneously from the resulting mix, much as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians had envisaged. But without the conscious intervention of sentient gods, Thales tried to show how things that happened could be explained in broadly mechanical terms; one of the best known examples that he gave was earthquakes. In Greek mythology, earthquakes were caused by Poseidon, a god and therefore an actual physical giant, who would wreak bloody havoc by stamping the ground petulantly. Thales in contrast believed that the Earth floated on the primordial ocean and he reasoned that earthquakes could be caused by waves shaking the world, as a ship might be tossed in a storm. He was confident that similar thinking would discover physical reasons for everything else that happens. Never mind that the best of his ideas were speculative and most were wrong, they could be argued and tested in a way the whim of divine beings could not.
