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02/27/2003
A Farewell and a Look Back
I’ve just finished my early morning walk on the Marco Island
beach. Typically, these walks put me in a reflective mood and lift
my spirits, which certainly need a lift this week. This column’s
nominal filing date marks the first anniversary of the death of my
wife’s sister Agnes. Regular readers may remember that, within
a few months, another sister, Annie, also passed away. Annie
died in the arms of her daughter, our niece Anna Marie. Now we
are devastated by the fact that cancer claimed the life of Anna
Marie this past Monday. She, like her mother, was a remarkable
individual who spread love and joy throughout her life. She
deliberately postponed her chemotherapy so she could take care
of her mother and also enjoy her son’s wedding, the Cambodian
wedding I described in a column last summer. Anna Marie got
her Ph.D. in nursing when in her 40s, became a professor in the
school of nursing at the University of Pittsburgh and, with her
colleagues, wrote what became a widely used textbook on the
nursing care of the aged. Sadly, she did not reach the age where
she might benefit from the wisdom she dispensed in the book.
In a sense, the report on Anna Marie is a very sad follow-up on
parts of some earlier columns. I’d like to follow up on another
column with something of a happier nature. In my column of
October 10, 2000 we talked about the future launching by NASA
of what was termed “The Magnificent Mission” by one author.
The mission was the launching of a probe known as the
Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP). In contrast to the
Columbia disaster and the failed Mars probes, NASA’s MAP
mission has been wildly successful in fulfilling all its lofty
objectives. What were the objectives? The primary objective
was to map, in fine detail and over the full sky, the cosmic
background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
A year’s worth of data are now available from MAP, now called
the Wilkinson MAP (WMAP) by NASA. Detailed results are
available on the NASA Web site. If you have the February 24
issue of Newsweek, on pages 22 and 23 you can see a 2-page
“snapshot” of our universe as it was some 380,000 years after the
Big Bang. This oval picture, with its blotches of red, yellow,
blue and green, is a map of the hotter and cooler regions what is
also termed the “oldest light in the universe”. The oval shape
represents a projection of the full sky onto a flat surface, much as
the surface of our globe is often projected on an oval shape
depicting all of the continents, oceans, etc. The “oldest light”
has degraded over billions of years to the cold (2.7 degrees
Kelvin) microwave radiation that is responsible for some of the
snow on your TV screen. The colored blotches in the map
represent differences in temperature of this “oldest light”, these
differences being as low as only millionths of a degree, hardly
worth the effort you might think. On the contrary, these blotches
are the “seeds” from which clumps of matter grew into the stars
and galaxies that make up our universe.
We’ve talked about this oldest light, the cosmic background
microwave radiation, before. It was Penzias’ and Wilson’s
discovery at Bell Labs of the radiation that confirmed the Big
Bang theory and garnered them the Nobel Prize. This oldest
light started out at several thousand degrees Kelvin when it was
released 380,000 years after the Big Bang but is now a cold 2.73
degrees Kelvin. Since its discovery this oldest light has been the
subject of intense investigation and tiny differences in
temperature had been recorded earlier. WMAP, however, was
targeted at measuring the full sky in much finer detail than in any
previous work. NASA likens the resulting picture to a baby
picture of an 80 year-old man taken the day of his birth.
WMAP has also “seen” stars formed only about 200 million
years after the Big Bang, much earlier than had been expected.
Actually they weren’t seen directly, but polarized light was seen,
a result of the energy released from a star. WMAP has nailed
down the age of our universe more precisely than before. Over
my lifetime, this figure has fluctuated back and forth by many
billions of years. Now we can confidently state that the Bang
occurred 13.7 billion years ago to within a hundred or two
hundred million years, just a digit or two in the first decimal
place.
WMAP has also helped to reveal to content of our universe as
consisting of only 4 percent ordinary matter (the stuff we are
familiar with), 23 percent cold dark matter (stuff we still don’t
understand) and 73 percent dark energy (more recently
discovered stuff we really don’t understand). The WMAP results
favor dark energy as being more like Einstein’s “cosmological
constant” than so-called “quintessence”, which I certainly don’t
understand. It seems that it’s likely Einstein was right again,
even though he considered his cosmological constant a mistake!
WMAP also confirms, within experimental error, that our
universe is flat – our good old high school geometry holds
anywhere in the universe. This, disappointingly to me, means
that it will go on expanding forever. This flatness helps bolster
the “inflation” scenario, a rapid expansion of the universe in its
first tiny fraction of a second. WMAP has also pinned down the
so-called Hubble constant, which is a measure of how fast the
universe is expanding. All in all, WMAP has indeed been a
magnificent mission.
Unfortunately, I have to end this now on another sad note.
We’ve just learned that our oldest son has been hospitalized with
a very serious illness. We welcome your support in hoping for a
speedy recovery.
Allen F. Bortrum
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