- A University physicist has proposed that temperature
fluctuations in microwave radiation may contain messages from the universe's
creator.
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- "It's one of the most speculative possible hypotheses,"
said associate professor Stephen Hsu, a member of the University's Institute
of Theoretical Science.
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- However, it may be 20 or 30 years before experimental
physicists develop instruments refined enough to collect the data necessary
to test this hypothesis, Hsu said.
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- Hsu said he thought of the idea many years ago, when
theoretical physicists at Stanford and MIT addressed whether a universe
could be created in a laboratory. They hypothesized that this could be
done by creating a bubble of super-dense matter that would expand into
extra dimensions.
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- "If you did create such a universe, how would you
tell the occupants of that universe that their universe was made in a lab
at MIT?" Hsu said. "One place to put the message would be in
a microwave background."
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- According to the Big Bang theory, matter was distributed
almost uniformly at the beginning of the known universe, shortly after
the Big Bang, Hsu said. Through small matter density fluctuations, this
evolved into galaxies, stars and planets.
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- Cosmologists know this by looking far out into the universe.
Because the speed of light is finite, light from distant objects is therefore
light that originated long ago, so this is actually the same thing as looking
backward in time, Hsu said.
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- Cosmologists have also found that there is microwave
radiation left over from the Big Bang in the background of the universe.
Similar to the fluctuations of density in matter that created planets,
the microwave radiation has very small temperature fluctuations, and Hsu
hypothesized that a message could be hidden in those fluctuations.
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- Who would the message be from?
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- "Who knows?" Hsu said. "It could be some
person at MIT Prime in some other universe."
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- Hsu said that while the existence of such a message is
not known, and probably highly unlikely, microwave radiation would be an
ideal medium for communicating with advanced civilizations.
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- Hsu decided to publish the idea after discussing it with
Anthony Zee, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa
Barbara.
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- Zee said the paper, which is currently under review at
an unnamed scholarly journal, is written in two parts: one describing the
medium for the message, and one describing the content of the message.
He said he's confident that microwave radiation would be the medium, but
less confident about the message.
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- Hsu and Zee calculated that the maximum amount of information
that could be contained in such a message is about 10,000 characters of
text.
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- "The longer the message is, the more likely you're
going to be convinced that that's what the message really says," Hsu
said.
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- Hsu said the minimum length for a message to be believable
would be 1,000 characters.
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- "If you could get a 1,000-character message and
encode it in some reliable way, I think people would agree, 'Yeah, that's
a message,'" Hsu said.
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- Hsu said the equations describing the fundamental laws
of physics are compact enough to fit into a chunk of text that size, and
would be a likely subject for such an encoded message, given the universal
utility of math and physics.
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- "That may just be bias on our part, but if it's
going to be read by all civilizations, it's not going to be about the price
of oil," Hsu said.
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- Zee elaborated that the gauge laws, as they are called,
explain how the world is put together through four fundamental force fields:
gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong.
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- Hsu said finding a message from the creator of the universe
would not necessarily resolve disputes over intelligent design and evolution,
because the existence of a message would not imply that the message's writer
designed humans.
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- "Humans are probably still a random evolutionary
occurrence on this planet," Hsu said.
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- Hsu and Zee are not the only scientists looking for messages
in outer space. At the SETI@home Web site (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu),
people can download screensavers that allow scientists working in the Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence to use their computers' processing power
to analyze radio wave signals SETI has collected for patterns.
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- According to the SETI@home Web site, 78 computer users
who identified themselves as affiliated with the University have contributed
549,768 credits to this effort.
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- Hsu said SETI's work differs from his because the radio
waves SETI is looking for would be produced by a particular source, such
as an alien civilization, and that encoding a message in the microwave
background at the time of the Big Bang would probably be beyond the capabilities
of any civilization within the known universe.
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- Contact the business, science and technology reporter
at esylwester@dailyemerald.com
- http://dailyemerald.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/01/18/43ce0fdf42101
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