Big Bang

OK, I’ve supposedly read “A Brief History of Time”, but that was 10 years ago, at the very start of my 10 year old reading binge and possibly I just read the words without fully understanding most of the stuff. A lot like how I used to study a lot of stuff at school and haven’t had much time to think through it (because I have a bad habit where every semester I will take a subject I have never encountered and consequently do not have a background in.)

Now, when I read the biography of Stephen Hawking by John Gribbin, I start to understand how strange his big bang theories are. The first strange thing that we know about are black holes. We know that stars are made of massive lumps of hydrogen which are densely packed, owing to their own weight. Due to the heat generated by the release of gravitational energy, nuclear fusion takes place – a process that produces massive amounts of radiation and converts hydrogen to helium.

In the late stage of the development of stars, after a certain amount of hydrogen is used up, the sun swells up to become a yellow giant or a red giant. When even more hydrogen is used up, the star becomes more dense (spent hydrogen fuel is more dense than hydrogen – anything other than hydrogen is more dense, for that matter) and starts to collapse under its own weight. I think that the nuclear fusion process helps to make the star less dense by counteracting the gravity but I don’t remember how. Then you have stranger stars like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes.

Black holes are the most interesting. They occur when matter becomes so densely packed that nothing – not even light can escape it. In Newtonian physics, gravity is merely an attractive force between 2 massive objects. Einstein changed this concept slightly with his general relativity, and showed that gravity is actually a warp in the space-time that produces an effect similar to an attractive force, but with 1 difference – gravity also works on light. So far, everything is understandable from what we know from our intuition about physics.

Here’s when it gets weird. Hawking found out that black holes produce radiation. Black holes, supposedly a triumph of gravity over everything else, produces radiation. Just like a black body! Now, one of the main features of the black hole is the event horizon, which is effectively a curtain separating the black hole from the rest of the universe. Because of how the black hole distorts space, within the event horizon, all space leads inwards. There is no way you can get out of a black hole. However, due to quantum theory, which posits that by chance, small amounts of matter and its anti-matter can form spontaneously, it is possible that some stuff is formed on both sides of the event horizon. That stuff can emit a small amount of radiation, known as Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation was calculated using some maths that was traditionally used to reason about thermodynamics. For this reason, black holes are thought to have this property called “temperature”, which analogously to other forms of matter

Another cool thing about black holes is that they have very few properties. They are matter which is so dense and collapsed that they don’t really exists like other kinds of matter which exists in the form of atoms and molecules and have chemical properties. If you have 2 black holes with the same event horizon radius, angular velocity and electrical charge, they are basically identical. All black holes are perfectly spherical because the gravity makes it that way.

The really strange part is how you could have a spin-off universe within the event horizon, and how some rip in the space time fabric could cause there to be “baby universes” whose existence is not detectable to us because they exist in dimensions that are orthogonal to our 3 dimensions. (just as people who live inside a sheet of paper cannot conceive of the universe outside of that sheet of paper). I thought, well that’s really weird. He’s really pushing it this time. Is the big bang the result of the formation of a bubble universe? He posits that the big bang is not a singularity (ie everything is squeezed into a geometric point, which is mathematically troublesome because you have a lot of dividing stuff by zero.) Instead the geometry of the big bang looks like the North pole, where you keep on going north until you reach a point where you can’t go north anymore because everywhere else leads south.

I’m like, fine. You want to say all this, it’s OK. You can keep on scratching out weird maths equations on your paper and talk about weird stuff that goes on out there that we don’t know about, that’s fine. But it is freaking weird. Is it freakier that we are coexisting in some mother universe which exists in dimensions that we are not aware of, or is it freakier that there is some heavenly father out there who said, “let there be light” and everything came to be? Is the creationist theory more compatible with the singularity type big bang, or the smoother continuous north pole style big bang?

These are weighty questions – portentous in the extreme and bearing absolutely no practical relevance whatsoever. No wonder even when I went to a university which had one of the best physics departments in the world I ended up not doing Physics but more real world stuff like – uh mathematics.

On another note, my book jacket is from Times the Bookshop, at its imperious phase before Borders and Kino came to town and totally pummeled its business. Some of us have been in Singapore for long enough to remember when it was the biggest book chain in Singapore. We remember the love hate relationship with that bookstore. It’s wonderful to see so many books around, but they had such a lousy small range of books.

I will list down the branches that Times used to have. Pls note that Times as of today has around 5 branches.

Times Centerpoint (this used to be the largest Times around and the flagship store. Now go look at what’s happened to it.)
Times Raffles City (Taken over by MPH, and then MPH moved to the basement.)
Times Plaza Singapura (this had to close when the entire building had to have a makeover. Now there is a smaller one on the 4th floor)
Times Lucky Plaza (I kid you not. closed down.)
Times Marina Square (see entry for “Plaza Singapura”)
Times United Square (United Square had a makeover, and then there was no more Times)
Times Northpoint (Driven out by Popular?)
Times World Trade Centre (same as “United Square”)
Times OUB Centre (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Holland V (see “Lucky Plaza”. I think its now a steakhouse.)
Times Columbo Court (see “United square”)
Times Bishan (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Kesington Park (This means Serangoon Gardens. see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Kovan Centre (Never been there)
Times Kalm’s Marina Centre (Why do you need 2 bookshops in the same place?)
Times Apex Jurong East (never been there)
Times Ginza Plaza (never been there)
Times Clarke Quay (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Hougang (never been there)
Times Toa Payoh (see “Lucky Plaza”)
Times Tiong Bahru (see “Northpoint”)

MPH actually had the biggest bookshop in town. I can’t bear to look at it now because they’ve changed it into a furniture shop as the location turned out to not have very much traffic going there. Armenian street used to be one of the coolest places around, because you had the big MPH on one side of the street, and on the other – the substation and the National Library. Now the national library is gone – demolished, like Arthur Dent’s house, to make way for a highway bypass. The MPH I think had been running up losses because there’s not much passenger traffic going there – a bookshop must always thrive on passenger traffic. And I suspect that the authorities are not too unhappy to separate the respectable symbols of informal education away from the less respectable artistic weirdos at the Substation.