A Little "Cosmological Mystery"

If you're an avid Scientific American reader like me, you may have stumbled across the recent article (reprinted from Nature) about an experiment that actually had scientists bringing a bit of gas below absolute zero.  At first glance, one might think this absolute rubbish--or as the article itself says--"It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery."  The "cosmological mystery" this technique may or may not help solve is the question of "dark energy" and the exciting new idea (though nowhere near ready to be a real hypothesis yet) of the scientists in question is something like this, "Matter acts quite a bit differently than you would ever expect in negative-Kelvin temperatures, if matter somehow is under the same conditions, maybe it just acts differently than we expected and dark energy really just is normal energy under some incredibly unexpected conditions . . . ."
    I liked that idea, and not just because it satisfies the part of me that wants to slash the imagination of science down to size with Occam's Razor, though it does do that.  And not also because it puts a "face" on dark energy for me--makes it look like something more than a place-holding name for a phenomenon for which scientists have observed, but in reality haven't come remotely close to cracking.  Granted the connection between negative-Kelvin gas and dark energy is probably just a clever connection in spe but not in re, but I like clever connections, so why don't we run with this clever connection for a moment or two?
      When I read about Supersymmtery "failing" a few months ago, I was strangely pleased about it.  It was a nice vindication of the fact that at its best science seeks the truth, and sometimes that means finding out that the thing you've been searching for probably doesn't exist.  It's still possible that it's too soon to tell about Supersymmetry.  But the evidence is mounting that's she's a goner or Supersymmetry is going to look quite different than most expected.
    I have some affection for the unexpected, and perhaps the connection between both of these articles is the reality of science stumbling while breaking ground on new frontiers.  I don't mean that at all pejoratively--if you don't stumble while breaking new ground . . . well, I don't have a metaphor for it--you're either God or you're stumbling.  It's the most human enterprise, and stumbling (or "meandering" as one SciAm writer put it) toward truth is also the best human enterprise.
     In this case, the "stumbling" is made all the more interesting because the stumbling seems to end in resting against the firm foundation of some firmly established ideas.  In the case of the apparent failure of Supersymmetry, it comes on the heels of a most profound victory for the Standard Model.  Supersymmetry may have failed, but the Standard Model has, simply, worked.  It is not a grand unifying theory, but we're clearly getting quite a bit right here.  No dark matter yet, no singular theory of the fundamental forces, but we can account for the minute in a very detailed fashion.
       On the other hand, this new article on negative-Kelvin gas sparks some ideas--maybe (and it's such a maybe) dark energy really can be accounted for by the matter/energy in the universe that exists already.  Maybe there's no such thing as dark energy--or that it is the far side of the moon, the Janus-face of matter we're just not used to seeing--and there isn't anything else out there to be looking for.  Which doesn't mean there isn't anything left to discover, on the contrary, it means that we don't know what we do know quite so well as we thought.  If--and it's a huge hypothetical if--dark energy is just normal energy in an extreme state . . . it would mean that the answer to the question has been here the whole time, we just have yet to be able to even imagine the right questions.  It would be akin to another Einsteinian revolution: Newton (and co.) had a really great explanation for what we commonly observe in nature, but Einstein's crazy-complicated ideas that completely revolutionized our entire thinking about time, space, and light, was the right one.  What Newton did was remarkable, but what Einstein did was absolutely revolutionary on the cultural and psychological level--he rewrote the book on everything we thought we knew and could experience with the most common of senses.  For the scientific community, what we knew about the universe had already been problematized, and he found the solution in the place only genius thought to look.  But for everyone, he revolutionized the way we think about space and time and even "relativity".  For our purposes now, the reference is analogical: if dark energy is just energy, and not another "kind" of energy filled with exotic particles in far-flung corners of time and space, then we have no idea of what energy is capable.  We already know the energy contained in just an atom is remarkable--perhaps we have only glimpsed the beginning of the potential of matter/energy to do incredible things and simply to be incredible.
   In any case, I imagine we'll find out someday, and I imagine we'll do better than the current Wikipedia page on dark energy which makes me scowl a little because it sounds like science doing a "god-of-the-gaps" hypothesis as bad as the luminferous ether ever was.  Perhaps I'm supposed to be hearing, "We have no idea how to account for the disparity needed for the expanding universe model (when the universe is flat), and we're calling the potential solution for this problem "dark energy"?"  Being a Thomist and generally supportive of coherent metaphysical systems, I really don't like god-of-the-gaps hypotheses . . . but more on that in another article.

Quasars and Super-symmetry: Proof that Science Works

When I was a kid, none of the science textbooks could tell you what a quasar was.  I don't even think they had good guesses.  I heard something about "quasi-stellar radio sources" and from thenceforth always got quasars and pulsars confused.  The best explanation at the time was that quasars were "proto-galaxies" that were so far away they were still in some mysterious stage of development.  (Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate so quickly they give off bursts of energy, some in the form of radio waves--it was the radio connection that got me confused).  I don't know what made me decide to check out quasars in my latest Wikipedia science binge, but I did.

I found out something new!  We now have a pretty good guess that quasars are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that have such amazing amounts of energy pouring into them that it causes incredible friction around the accretion disk.  The "accretion disk" is the whirlpool of energy being collected and draining into the black hole.  For whatever reason (still unknown) all that energy in the accretion disk explodes outward along the north and south poles of these huge black holes--so, ironically, these black holes are some of the brightest (absolute magnitude) objects in the universe!  I read somewhere else--if I recall correctly, that if the Milky Way had a quasar as the supermassive black hole at its center, then that quasar would shine in the heavens as brightly as the Sun now does, even though its 26,000 light years, not 96 million miles away (light year=6 trillion miles, and it takes 8 minutes, not 26,000 years for light to get from the Sun to the Earth).  I love learning something new about the glorious cosmos--science for the win and for the glory of God!  (On the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, check out the article on Sagittarius A on Wikipedia.)

I also learned last week that super-symmetry has all but failed the test of scientific rigor.  I don't know about you, but I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe back in the day--I read all the exciting things about how some form of super-symmetry (linked to string theory somewhere) was bound to emerge as the poetic completion of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics.  But, thanks to the new Hadron Collider, the scientific community is starting to throw in the towel.  (Read about it more here at Scientific American.)  It will be another couple of years before they have really finished the tests in order to be more certain, but hopes are dim that super-symmetry will be able to make a come-back, and whether they'll find the "super-partner-particles" of the already known particles that would have validated their theories.  (And so much for a quick solution to dark matter, I imagine, though that may be conflating things.)  Now everyone is back to the drawing board, and scratching their heads as to whether they can reasonable expect to find anything beyond the Standard Model.  Personally, right now I'm excited about relativistic chemistry--which no one told me about in school--and want to know when we're going to solve that quantum theory of gravity!

When I read about the tests for super-symmetry failing, I (oddly) felt an immense degree of satisfaction--about the same feeling of satisfaction when they found (we think) the Higgs-boson particle.  In both cases, I was immensely pleased because the hard work and years of labor had paid off--in the first case, it finally paid off with a discovery--scientists found more or less exactly what they wanted to find: how wonderful.  In the second case, scientists are about to prove that they are never going to find what they wanted to find: equally wonderful.  That is the point of science, after all--to devise methods and conditions of discovery and then to put those methods and conditions to the test with ever-increasing rigor until some little bit of the universe has been exegeted properly.   Lovely.  I love science.  It reminds me that life (in general) is really worth all the effort and uncertainty, disappointment and ambiguity for long road of the progress of knowledge and the contemplation of beautiful and wonderful things.

When it comes to the history of civilizations, I am not a big believer in "progressivism":  I don't really think the nations of the world are necessarily better or worse now than they were 500 years ago.  I think we are better in some ways and worse in other ways to which we are mostly blind.  But I do think every human being has the option before them of being better today than they were yesterday.  I think we have the option, with God's help, of contributing to goodness each and every day, though that work is sometimes painstaking and difficult and tedious and it seems that not much comes of it except profound moral failure.  But even accepting that failure and learning to live with it and with God and to move forward in the strength and grace of God and leave failure behind . . . that's what life is about in nearly every dimension.  Science reminds me that some types of failure are just as important as success and sometimes just as helpful and meaningful and instructive.  And living life well means being a good student of it as one learns to be a good student of the physical universe in science.

Some day, after years of striving, you discover the Higgs boson particle.  On another, after years of striving, you discover that super-symmetry has failed.  Both days can be worth the having.  I want to pray more for the grace to move forward in a spirit of discovery and wonder.

**(You can take a quiz about your knowledge of black holes here at http://www.space.com/15906-black-hole-quiz-facts.html.  I got 7/9 correct, and I gave you one of the answers that I originally got wrong in this post.  I think they said Einstein and Eddington would be proud, or something like that.)