The astounding part is that this creation myth might be right. Last week researchers led by astrophysicist George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory announced that they had discovered primordial wrinkles, floating at the very beginning of time. No more than wispy tendrils, they are up to 59 billion trillion miles across, the most gigantic and the most ancient structures ever seen. But that’s not why scientists are calling the find “one of the major discoveries of the century” and “the Holy Grail of cosmology.” E-mail is and hastily called symposia are ripples, says physicist Joel Primack of the University of California, Santa Cruz, are no less than “the handwriting of God.”
If so, then the Creator has been writing in almost-invisible ink. On Nov. 18, 1989, NASA launched a $160 million satellite to seek the memoirs of genesis. COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) measures the nearly uniform sea of microwaves that bathes all of space like a whisper of creation. The discovery of the microwave whisper, by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1964, just about proved that the universe began in a big bang. Trouble was, the microwave sea seemed incredibly smooth-as smooth as the Atlantic with waves no higher than a golf ball. If energy and matter are spread across the heavens so evenly, how could particles ever have clumped together into galaxies? To say that theorists were eager to discover such primeval clumps is an understatement. They were desperate. When COBE didn’t spy any wrinkles at first, “we were close to catastrophe,” says Harvard University astrophysicist William Press.
COBE kept looking. Last summer, as Smoot’s team (and its computers) pored over some 420 million measurements radioed back from the satellite, 560 miles up, they glimpsed the discovery of a lifetime. They saw variations of .00003 degree from one swatch of sky to another. The temperature fluctuations were so tiny as to be almost undetectable. And yet, they “are the imprints of tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime put there by the primeval explosion,” says Smoot. The wrinkles, dating from just 300,000 years after the big bang, are “as close as we are ever going to get to creation itself,” says UC’s Primack.
The ripples are too huge to have grown into the individual galaxies seen today. Smoot calls them “the big brothers of the galactic seeds.” The seeds of the Milky Way, Andromeda and the rest of the twinkling firmament are too small for COBE to see. (Instruments at the South Pole can pick out fluctuations that begat today’s galaxies, and are on the verge of doing so.) But the ripples are just the size to support one of the boldest new offerings from cosmology. It’s a theory called inflation. Devised independently by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and by Russian physicist Andrei Linde, it holds that the universe began in the expanding fireball of the big bang and then inflated madly, doubling in size every tenth of a quadrillionth of a quintillionth (10-to the 34th power) of a second. Quantum fluctuations-hot, spots-arose. Unlike the original big-bang theory, inflation predicts the scale of these ripples of energy. The COBE measurements “are exactly what inflationary models predict,” Guth says. “It’s wonderful.”
COBE also supports theories holding that as much as 90 percent of the universe consists of bizarre invisible stuff called dark matter. It might be little black holes, never-seen particles dubbed axions and WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), or something not even a theorist has dreamed of. The wrinkles, says Smoot, must be “composed of… something we’ve never seen.” But there is something even curiouser, says Smoot: “that human beings have the audacity to conceive a theory of creation.” Even more astounding is that, if the COBE results hold up, puny Homo sapiens may just have gotten this myth right. In the Beginning…
