Philosophy and the Sciences

Transcript for Lecture 2.3 Part 2

A Very Brief History of Cosmology

John Peacock
So armed with general relativity, theorists were able to explore cosmology.
The first to do so was De Sitter in 1917. He produced a universe that
contained only vacuum energy. But it was realized after a few years, that this
predicted Hubble's law, and in fact, this prediction was very influential. A
number of astronomers before Hubble, leading up to Hubble's paper,
which was the most comprehensive of these analyses, in 1929, discovered,
or tested, this prediction. So, although Hubble's Law is often presented as
an unexpected surprise, in fact the theoretical context led people to look
for a result of this form. Its interesting to speculate how long its discovery
might have taken otherwise. But of course, the most general universe
contains more than just vacuum. And this was solved by the Soviet physicist,
Friedmann, in 1922 to 1924. Friedmann reached a number of remarkable
conclusions, the most important of which, was what we today call the Big
Bang. What this means is that you can make a plot. This is time at the size of
the universe. I don't need to say exactly what I mean by that. Just pick some
piece of the universe, plot how big it is versus time. Here it is. It's getting
bigger now, we know that. Solving the equations given him by Einstein,
Friedmann showed that in the past this wouldve emerged from a
singularity. And the time between the singularity and today is about one
over Hubble's constant, which today is 14 billion years. So, Einstein's
dynamics have given us this strange conclusion that the universe was only a
finite time. The other remarkable conclusion of Friedmann's work was that
the matter content of the universe affected its curvature. Think about the
Earth. This is what would be called a closed surface. By which I mean that
it's finite. You can walk around it forever. You never come to a boundary.
But you come back to your starting point. So the universe can be closed
and have what's called positive curvature. Three dimensional space can be
curved in exactly the same sense. But what Friedmann also showed was that
you could have negative curvature. Now, I can't draw you a picture of what
that means. But, curvature means that straightforward geometry doesn't
apply. For example, we know that the sum of these three angles adds up to
180 degrees. Thats not true in curved space. But the negative curved
universe, is what's called an open universe. And it would be infinite. So

unlike a closed universe which is finite, the universe with negative curvature
would go on forever, and it's the density of the universe that turns one of
these into another. Theres a critical density which is minute, its about one
atom per cubic metre. It's a better vacuum than we can make anywhere on
Earth. But that's enough material to turn an open universe into one that
closes back in on itself. And, every now and then, you might see the symbol
omega, which is the density divided by this critical value. And so we would
say that omega equals 1, tells us to join the universe at the boundary
between open and closed, which is flat. And strangely enough for modern
observations, this is where we seem to be.
One of the ways that we learn about the early stages of the expanding
universe is the fact that it was hot. So anybody who owns a bike appreciates
this. As you pump up your tires, you compress the air, it becomes hot. So
the temperature of material in the expanding universe is actually
proportional just to one over the size of the universe. The smaller it is, the
higher the temperature. This means at early times, the temperatures can be
really extreme. So, when the universe is about one minute old, the
temperature is about a billion degrees. This means that nuclear reactions
can happen. So atomic, so nuclei can be assembled. So, the higher
temperatures, they couldn't survive, so you have individual protons and
neutrons. But as the universe cools below this threshold, these can come
together to make a deuterium nucleus, and two deuterium nuclei can come
together to make helium. Now what we see in the universe today is that all
the stars contain roughly 25%, by mass, of helium. When this was first
discovered early in the 20th century, it was unexplained, but it was then
realized that this was an inevitable prediction of nuclear reactions in the
early universe. Furthermore, by looking at the relic abundance of
deuterium, you can measure the density of all ordinary material that
participates in nuclear reactions today. And the answer is, it's something
like5% of the critical density. Remember omega equals one was a universe
that was flat. So ordinary atomic material, we can be sure was being
synthesized at the time when the universe was about one minute old. And
we know today it's far short of closing the universe. Now, a more direct way
of probing the early hot universe is the fact that we can see it. If we look far
enough away, we can see directly back to a time when the universe had that
temperature. So, there's radiation left over in the universe that comes from
great distances. Thats from a shell known as the last scattering shell, and
thats because at great distances, corresponding to early times, as we look
at it, material is ionized so that light can't propagate freely. Temperatures
thousands of kelvin. Its just like the surface of the sun. But eventually, the
universe cools to the point where atoms form. That is, say for example with
hydrogen, you have a proton and an electron come together to make a
single atom of hydrogen. That doesn't scatter light so effectively and then
the radiation can propagate to see us. So over here, it's say, 3,000 kelvin,

but its at great distances and the expansion of the universe redshifts it by
the time it reaches us, its a mere 2.7 kelvin. So radiation of such a low
temperatures characterized by radio waves, as a wavelength of something
like one millimetre. This is the so-called CMB, stands for cosmic microwave
background, and this was found in 1960, well 1964,published in 1965 by
Penzias and Wilson who received a Nobel Prize for this work, even though it
was a complete accident. And it's a strange irony that, elsewhere in the
world, groups who understood this cosmological transition had predicted
the existence of radiation and were preparing to search for it. In any case, it
is there and we can see back, therefore, to this era, where the time is
something like 400,000 years after the big bang. So, we can get this close
to the initial singularity with direct observations, and that's extremely
powerful.

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