Candles in the Sky

The physicist David Bohm used to say that physicist were not physical enough. They relied too much on mathematical equations and had no, as it were, viscerally physical sense of what they were talking about. A variant of this came to mind yesterday as I first heard and then read about the 2011 Nobel Prize for physics awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt. The variant is that we interpret physical observations based on theoretical structures. But the work these gentlemen engaged in was right physical, actually. They used arrays of massively modern telescopes to observe one type of supernova activity, that associated with Ia supernovae.

The terminology here is unfortunate. We have two kinds of supernovae, 1 and 2, but these are rendered in Roman form as i and ii. In the first category, i, interests us here. Type ii are produced by large stars late in their lives. In the first category, we have three subdivisions: 1a, 1b, and 1c; the first is produced by dwarfs, the last two by massive stars. On YouTube videos we hear people talking about “one A,” but in press accounts we see Ia. But never mind. the 1a’s are all white dwarf stars to begin with, and these are always associated with another sun; each dwarf is thus one member of a binary system. Furthermore, each is the collapsed form of the bigger of the two, with immense density. Most white dwarfs are about the size of the earth but have mass equivalent to 0.6 of the sun. The 1a supernova comes into being when the white dwarf sucks the mass of its binary companion to itself. Slowly its mass increases. When it comes very close to having 1.38 solar mass, it produces an enormous nuclear explosion, the supernova of type 1a. That number, 1.38, is called the Chandrasekhar limit, named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar who wrote a 1931 paper titled “The Maximum Mass of Ideal White Dwarfs.” The process described above is illustrated by the fabulous graphic authored jointly by NASA, the European Space Agency, and A. Field; I bring it courtesy of Wikipedia Commons (here).

The important point here is that white dwarfs never go into nova unless they reach that mass. And knowing that mass, we can calculate their brightness at peak with great precision. It is always just about the same. For this reason whenever such a supernova appears, we know how bright it must be where it is. Measuring its observed brightness with our by now stupendous instruments, we can therefore calculate how far away it is. 1a supernovae, therefore, act as a pretty reliable standard candles, thus objects of known absolute magnitude (luminosity). Knowing their observed magnitude, we can calculate their distance from us using a simple formula.

Our Nobelists looked for and found many, many supernovae of type 1a and measured their distances from us. In the absence of any kind of theory of the cosmos, this would give us a nice, clean idea how far away the most distant galaxies—those housing the 1a’s—are from us. Instead these men were greatly surprised by their findings. The most distant galaxies turned out to be much dimmer, thus much farther away, than they had expected them to be. I emphasize that word because “the model” now comes into the picture. That model, simply, is that the universe began with a Big Bang and has been expanding for 14 billion years. The expectation was that over time, the expansion would have slowed, decelerated, owing to the gravitational pull of everything on everything. Adam Riess uses the image of throwing your car keys into the air (read Big Bang). You expect the keys eventually to lose their upward energy—and to fall back down again. Instead, these keys just seemingly kept on going up. The following little graphic shows what they expected and what they actually saw.

Not to forget. The Big Bang is behind this expectation, thus a certain energetic, one-time dynamism. The Big Bang itself is based on Edwin Hubble’s observation that the farther galaxies are from us, the more red-shifted their light actually is, thus that the peaks of the light waves are farther apart. This used to be explained by saying that space was expanding and, as it expanded, it stretched the light. Today the explanation is that some kind of energy must be causing the expansion, dark energy, dark because we cannot detect it directly. And the observed red shifts—and now the unexpected dimming out of supernovae at great distances—has been interpreted to mean that the universe is mostly just that, dark energy (as I’ve had occasion to report here).

Alternative models are not even on the back burner these days. One of these might be that light gets tired as it moves, and therefore a red shift simply means tired light; hence there is no expansion. Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974), a physicist associated with supernovae, proposed the tired light hypothesis. Astronomer Halton Arp (1927-) holds “heretical” views on the red shift as well. If the red shift doesn’t always mean what Hubble thought it did, there might never have been a Big Bang. But we like the Big Bang. In the beginning, etc. Let there be Light. And having light, we now complete the picture with energetic Darkness.

Season of the Saints

In the early days of October each year, the award of the Nobel Prize reminds me that secular ages have their saints too, not least those formally recognized at the culmination of a process akin to canonization. As in religious times so also in secular, when the official powers disdain to recognize a popular figure, the folk proceed to loft certain people into undying visibility for long veneration. Today’s announcement that Liu Xiaobo, the incarcerated Chinese activist, has won the Peace Prize coincides with Google’s celebration of John Lennon’s birthday on its search page. The British government is also prone to grant titles of nobility to leading practitioners of popular arts; no doubt that happens elsewhere too.

The Nobel Prize, established in 1901, is granted for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. In 1968 the Prize in Economic Sciences was added. Notice here the absence of the word “Nobel” in front of the word “Prize”—at least on Nobelprize.org. The foundation administers that prize too, but it was established by a bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, in celebration of its 300th anniversary and in memory of Alfred Nobel.

Unlike religious sainthood, which postdates a person’s passing sometimes by many years, the top secular prize is awarded only to the living. The Nobel’s reach, to be sure, is beyond mere physical science, but in my lifetime certainly the literary prize has tended to go to writers who’ve resonated with modernity rather than with tradition. An aura of conflict surrounds this year’s peace prize—as in other years as well—sure to anger the Chinese. I’m reminded of Matthew 10:34: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” The Nobel Committee didn’t quite get it right. I’ve always approved of titles like “revolutionary” and “assassin”—but “activist” doesn’t quite measure up. In China the Mandate of Heaven is bestowed on people who storm the citadels with sword in hand…or, in modern times, tossing dynamite.

Visibility

Brooding over prize holders and fame this morning as I brewed my early cup, it occurred to me that the actual experience even of very minor fame is rarely pleasing. In tracing this reflection back, I discovered that it began because Paul Krugman is the columnist for the New York Times today; he is the winner of a Nobel Prize in economics. When that prize came to be announced just shy of a year ago, it occasioned the kind of reflection that the Nobel committee often triggers: at the time the thought I had was, Would Krugman have received the prize for economics if he hadn’t been a columnist? Or if he’d been the columnist for, say, the Kansas City Star?

A sour thought, I grant you, but then the Nobel Prize reflects much more on the erratic character of Nobel’s clusters of committees than on the individuals who are their beneficiaries. The recipients are best judged ignoring the honor, a dubious blessing in these latter days: the money is no doubt welcome; the honor may actually be an embarrassment. It may be given for secondary or even accidental aspects of a person’s work.

But my thought this morning, as it meandered on, forgetting its triggering impulse, was that visibility produces unwelcome attentions. The person who has it becomes a reflector in which many others see themselves writ large. They project their own ideals and their own projects on a person who may share neither their views nor aims at all. The only commonality may be a mere label that roughly covers both. I had this kind of visibility for a while as an EPA official administering the Resource Recovery Act, and in the shining eyes of eco-activists I became the focus of an attention I found entirely inappropriate, indeed misplaced. And for those opposed to any kind of governmental intervention into the sacred market, I became the target of negative attention, the personification of a danger. Experiencing such celebrity, however minor, teaches you that “we the people” has quite another meaning in experience than in the lofty national rhetoric. Direct democracy? Please keep it on a leash. And please collect its waste in a plastic sack before you leave my yard.

When a finger points at the moon, please look at the moon and not the finger.