"The New York Times"
January 28, 2001

On the Verge of Re-Creating Creation. Then What?

By JAMES GLANZ

Ask a philosopher, a theologian, an artist or a composer how close
humanity is to understanding the mystery of cosmic creation, and
you are liable to get an answer that is majestic, inspiring and
extremely imprecise. Ask a physicist the same question and the
answer will be much more cut-and-dried: about 10 millionths of a
second.

 If the theory that the universe began in a single tremendous
explosion more than 10 billion years ago is correct, as most
scientists believe, then a few millionths of a second after that
instant, the cosmos was filled with a fiery sea of particles that
scientists refer to   inelegantly   as a quark-gluon plasma.

 At a government laboratory near Exit 68 on the Long Island
Expressway, physicists appear close to recreating a drop of that
primordial sea by smashing together the central cores of gold
nuclei at nearly the speed of light. And next summer NASA plans to
launch a new satellite whose observations, along with experiments
like those on Long Island, could help scientists work out a
mechanistic, gears-and-levers theory of the genesis moment itself
the hows, if not the whys, of creation ex nihilo.

 That final revelation, if so florid a word is apt in this context,
may still be decades off, if indeed some hidden flaw does not bring
the whole logical structure crashing to earth before then. But this
may be a good time to ask whether, as science treads over those
final 10 microseconds, there is a human epiphany   something to
match the scale of "The Divine Comedy" or Handel's "Messiah"
waiting at the other end.

 If so, will it leave any room for those glorious cultural
expressions of creation's mystery, or simply reduce them to the
status of historical knickknacks? When all terms in that equation
are filled in, what becomes of the scientific quest itself?

 Few scientists willingly take up those loaded questions. Not
surprisingly, some religious and philosophical thinkers who are
familiar with the latest scientific work are already considering
them. In fact, in a few decades scientists may be surprised to find
these thinkers there waiting for them.

 "What is important in creation is not envisioning God up on some
platform, pushing the mighty `On' switch," said Dr. Owen Gingerich,
a historian of science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics who is a member of the Anabaptist faith and who is
noted for his writings on religion and science. "Rather, it is the
design and intention that went into it, how it unfolds. In that
sense, driving it back farther and farther with a gluon soup
doesn't have any moral implication at all, because that doesn't
take away from the grandeur of the design."

 Dr. Gingerich said a cosmic explosion would merely add layers of
meaning to the Biblical God's "Let there be light." But others have
suspected, not without reason, that the cultural and emotional
landscape after science passes through often resembles the site of
a monster truck rally the day after the last race is run and the
last six-pack discarded.

 "The cold star-bane has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,"
Yeats famously sneered in a warning on the dangers of regarding the
heavens scientifically, "and dead is all their human truth."

 Indeed, evidence for scientists' deafness to the cultural and
aesthetic implications of their work can be found in the very words
they use to describe the creation event. They call it the Big Bang,
a term coined in the 1950's by a British cosmologist, Sir Fred
Hoyle, who was intentionally belittling the theory because he
didn't believe in it.

 Is the Big Bang a fitting replacement for the clash of fire and
ice within a dark abyss, the birth of the cosmos according to the
great Icelandic epic the Edda? "The majesty is in the
understanding," said Dr. Michael Turner, an astrophysicist at the
University of Chicago. "The human mind was able to figure out, from
the clues left behind, how it all began. That's the majesty."

 If humanity does figure it out, a certain debt of gratitude will
be due to scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton,
N.Y., who are smashing gold nuclei in hopes of making a dab of
primordial soup. Dr. Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, said that if the Brookhaven experiments
succeed, as appears close, the behavior of the stuff they make
would be "very similar to what we would expect in the early
universe," around 10 microseconds after the moment of creation.

 Particle accelerators are still not powerful enough to mimic the
cosmos earlier on, when it was even hotter and denser. But Dr. Guth
is the prime discoverer of a theory that goes by another (sigh)
whimsical moniker   inflation   and that scientists believe is
their best bet for explaining what set off the Big Bang, perhaps
filling in the last gap in the cosmic timetable.

 The so-called inflationary epoch   in which a kind of
self-replicating energy may have existed in the primordial
nothingness, igniting the great explosion   would have been over
almost before it began. But the $145 million NASA satellite, called
MAP, that will be launched this summer is intended to collect hints
of subtle processes that took place during that epoch.

 Scientists still have a way to go before they can calculate just
how that inflating speck popped into being; still, they are close
enough that various competing theories have set off a debate about
whether it is proper to speak of a beginning of cosmic time, or
whether the expression has no meaning.

 THE scientific exploration of cosmic birth "clarifies somewhat
those first mysterious moments," said Dr. Ernan McMullin, a
Catholic priest who is an emeritus professor at the University of
Notre Dame and a former director of its history and philosophy of
science program.

 But he said no solution of the scientific problem would ambush
philosophers and theologians, many of whom have already worked the
Big Bang into their worldviews   a judgment shared heartily by Dr.
Guth.

 "In a sense, it goes up to the doorstep of God without opening the
door," Dr. Guth said. "It would still leave completely open the
question."

 Oddly enough, the most painful repercussions of approaching the
moment of creation could be felt in the scientific enterprise
itself.

 John Horgan, author of the 1996 book "The End of Science: Facing
the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age,"
said he thought a full understanding of creation was "a complete
pipe dream," since trying to span those final microseconds would
eventually lead scientists to conditions too extreme to be explored
in an experiment or clarified in a theory.

 "We can fine-tune the Big Bang theory," Mr. Horgan said, but "the
general outlines of what we can know about the origins of the
universe are already in place."

 Few scientists, who tend toward sunny outlooks when it comes to
gauging the power of rational inquiry, would agree that their
greatest quest is nigh on bringing them to a dead end. But in their
more candid moments, some will admit to the slightest frisson of
dread   not dread of failing, but of succeeding so entirely that
the adventure would be over.

 "I hope it's not on my watch," Dr. Turner said. "It's just too fun
unraveling the history of the universe."

Oryginal: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/28/weekinreview/28GLAN.html

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