Science, the universe, and beauty

Today my seven-year old was reading an article in New Scientist about diamonds, where it discussed alternatives for harder materials, and arrangements of chemical structures.

It was remarkable that he read for more than two pages on a subject - chemistry - for which he clearly had little to no understanding.  Especially since it's only been a few months since he attained sufficient fluidity in reading.

 I have already outlined some of the basics of chemistry to my seven- and eight-year-olds, but since they have no specific interest in it, it will be slow going for a while.

But it got me considering the periodic table.  I'd only done chemistry to sixth form (age 16), and I haven't refreshed systematically since.  So I glanced at the subject in Encyclopedia Britannica - one of their rare shows of colour was the periodic table, page 952 of volume 15.

It was in discussion of the chemical composition of the earth, and the origin of elements in stars, that I realised there was a whole new area of fundamental systematics for me to absorb with adult eyes.

And then I was reminded of a piece in today's Good Weekend: in Stephanie Dowrick's Inner Life column which tends, I guess, to discuss the secular spiritual.  (I'm not generally taken by her, preferring the following columnist, Mark Dapin, who is surprisingly readable for a magazine humour column.)

Dowrick was querying one's "eye for beauty".  Looked like she was focusing on the visually beauty, but she eventually redeemed herself with other examples: children, poetry, music.

Of course, I find beauty in the analytical, in making sense of things that provide an internal logic and coherency.  The more fundamental the better, such as physics, evolutionary biology... and chemistry.  To see natural patterns and logic that are inherent and immutable: they describe a natural rhythm, a joyous music of the universe that is unsullied by human hand.

It takes a particular temperament to find joy in that sort of beauty*.  I feel privileged.





*One who does is someone I've previously mentioned, Daniel Tammet, a savant with Asperger's, who finds beauty in numbers.  That's numbers for themselves, as opposed to beauty in more complex mathematics, for which I have given a wonderful example here.

The big bang was a bounce?

A recent article in New Scientist posited the idea that the big bang was really a bounce.

It details a computer simulation, based on Loop Quantum Theory, that runs time backwards to the big bang, which demonstrates a bounce back to a previous(ly collapsing) universe. This is apparently one up on general relativity, which breaks down at the big bang.

Having only completed undergraduate physics and maths, the article will take some time for me to absorb properly. But there is a certain neatness to the concept of a universe continuously expanding and collapsing. I would imagine that in that case, there would be no state memory retained from the previous incarnation, so all prior information/knowledge (both about and within the prior universe) would be lost. There is sufficient unevenness to the expansion after a big bang that successive universes would not develop identically.

I have previously drawn a depiction of how time could work going backwards to the big bang. It's a conceptualisation, rather than based on hard physics. The above theoretical paradigm would be closer to hard physics, but still just theory at this point.

In the process of conceiving a universe running backwards to the big bang, most people might imaging a large box, with the matter filling a decreasing amount of space in the middle of the box. Fewer would imagine space as being a contracting 'box', with nothing 'outside' it, because it's hard to think of a space without automatically extending one's thoughts beyond the limits. Likewise with time. Is 'what happened before the start of time' a valid construct?

There is no certainty yet, but I think the ultimate solution would have a satisfying neatness and symmetry.