Jennika C.

Chua
2LM1
A Pithy Scrutiny on the Chronicle of the Universe
Our cosmic history has been a huge mystery to everyone for indefinite years. We
have been made to believe certain facts regarding our universe condescending yet
an indecisive way of feeding mans never ending curiosity. Many great men and thinkers
alike have had the thirst and the need to unravel the puzzling mystery of this universe
that we claim to know so much about where for years, decades, centuries and even a
millennia may have passed or may even pass by that we may or may not have fully
have a grasp on how this world, our universe came to be. Astronomers have had placed
certain ideals in the chronicle of our universe which seemed to have wrapped up our
cosmic history, but could the hunger for that supreme explanationa complete unified
theory that would give us an unerringly absolute understanding of the universebe
more than just an intellectual ambition or an indubitably dubious belief?
About 12 to 20 billion years ago, the universe came into its very existence, and
with its existence came space and time. Then a fraction of a microsecond later, inflation
set in and for a brief period, the cosmos expanded at an utterly explosive rate. Within a
billion years, galaxies began to form with the aid of what we refer to as dark matter,
which still holds them together. And now, a mysterious force known as dark energy
seems to be taking over, accelerating the universes ongoing expansion. Scientists aim
to dig beyond the depths of human wonderto understand why such explicably certain
events happened the way they did. What was the Big Bang, and how could time just
begin? What caused cosmic inflation
1
? And what exactly are dark matter
2
and dark
energy
3
? Many scientists believe that dignified observations and thorough curious
analysis are somehow the answers to these questions which are tied with some of the
most unsolved problems in physics.
According to Edward Witten
4
, who was thought to be the worlds greatest living
theoretical physicist, early in the 20th century when Albert Einstein drastically changed
our notions about space and time, everyday experience which seemed completely
different were unified into a strange new concept that came to be called space-time. His
ideas have had brought a great surge of knowledge in our minds. Although almost
everything else in our fundamental description of physics had changed since Einsteins
day, we still describe space-time using the concepts he introduced. But many scientists
still suspect that these Einsteinian concepts are destined to change and that the world
would need to give birth to new developments in order to fully understand space-time
before we can face the puzzling yet mysterious world head on.
Einstein altered our concepts of space and time with two astonishing revelations:
the first upheaval came in 1905 with the theory of special relativity
5
, which explored the
strange behaviour of matter moving near the speed of light. Ten years later, the second
revolution arrived. In 1915, Einstein completed his greatest and most surprising

1
Guth A. (1997). The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. New York, NY: Perseus
Books.
2
Trimble, V. (1987). Existence and nature of dark matter in the universe. Annual Review of Astronomy and
Astrophysics, 25, 425-472.
3
Peebles, P. J. E. and Ratra, Bharat (2003). The cosmological constant and dark energy. Reviews of Modern Physics,
75 (2), 559606.
4
Lemonick, M. (2004, April 26). Edward Witten: The World in a Supersting. Retrieved from
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,994019,00.html
5
Einstein, A. (1905, June 30). On the ELectrodynamics of Moving Bodies Retrieved from
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
achievement: the theory of gravity known as general relativity
6
which illustrated that
space-time is curved, and that the curvature is created by matter. Surprising predictions
from special relativity ranged from an ultimate speed limit nothing can travel faster
than the speed of light to the famous formula, E=mc
27
, that describes the
equivalence of mass and energy. General relativity, on the other hand, predicted
gravitational waves, black holes, the bending of light by the Sun, and the expansion of
the universe. After Einstein, further discoveries changed almost everything else in our
understanding of physics. Scientists discovered new building blocks of matter and the
surprising laws that govern their behaviour. But all the new phenomena occurred, and
all the new particles were found, in the space-time arena that Einstein had set forth.
In the 1920s, we have been told that subatomic particles
8
obey not Newtons
laws of motion but the weird yet wonderful laws of quantum mechanics
9
, in which
particles behave as waves and Heisenbergs uncertainty principle
10
gives everything a
fuzziness nearly impossible to describe in words. By the 1970s, a surreal yet clear
division of labor existed in our understanding of physics. General relativity described
large objects such as the solar system, galaxies, and the universeon the other hand,
quantum mechanics described small objects such as atoms, molecules, and subatomic
particles. Physicists, however, are not satisfied having two different theories that work in
two different realms. One reason is simply that big objects ultimately are made out of

6
Einstein, A. (1916). Relativity: The Special and General Theory. United Kingdom: Methuen & Co Ltd.
7
Bodais, D. (2000). E=mc
2
: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. New York, NY: Walker.
8
Sutton, C. (2014, February 7). Subatomic Particle. Retrieved from
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/570533/subatomic-particle
9
Greenstein, G. and Zanjonc A. (2006). The Quantum Challenge: Modern Research on the Foundation of Quantum
Mechanics. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
10
Hawking, S. (1996). A Brief History of Time, 55-64. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
little objects where the same force operates on both atoms and stars that even though
gravity is more obvious for stars, electricity and magnetism dominate in atoms, so it
must be possible to combine the standard model and general relativity into a bigger,
more complete theory that describes the behaviour of both atoms and stars.
The quest for the complete unified theory of the universe has paid enormous
dividends in the past, the present and perhaps the imminent, forthcoming future. Both
the standard model and general relativity were discovered, in large part, through efforts
to unify earlier theories. Unfortunately, direct attempts to have the ultimate theory of the
universe have led to a web of contradictionsthat even great physicists, astronomers,
scientists and thinkers like Albert Einstein have failed to have a full grasp on the
unification of the panacea for all universal mysteries. Perhaps there are more things
beyond this complicated universe that we have, maybe we are on the brink of finding a
resolution or conceivably, we have been considerably observing on the wrong
directionbut the certain fact that man is an intensely curious being makes this
complete unified theory never an impossibility.