Fire, Brimstone and Space Warps

In Isaac Newton’s day, physics gave us a reassuring, orderly picture of the cosmos, wherein events neatly followed one another like the ticking of brass cogs in a clock. That Newtonian certainty gave way to complexity when Albert Einstein hypothesized that the universe lacks a central reference point, looking much the same in every direction, as would the ocean to a swimmer far out at sea.

Now, a paper published in Physical Review Letters posits that even Einstein’s theories may not be complex enough. Borge Nodland of the University of Rochester and John Ralston of the University of Kansas suggest that either Einstein was wrong and space does not look the same in every direction, or that some as yet undiscovered phenomenon, like a second universe, is warping the shape of space.

As if that weren’t enough to bend our minds, a second major discovery announced this week suggests that the peaceful cloud we see as the Milky Way galaxy may be a caldron of fire and brimstone. A team of American astrophysicists has discovered what one of its leaders, Charles Dermer, calls a “boiling caldron of exploding stars” erupting outward from our galaxy’s core.

Cosmologists have no choice but to confront these new complexities head on, for the job of hard science is not to embrace received wisdoms but to constantly test claims by observation and experimentation.

The rest of us, however, may be forgiven for still gazing up at the sky and seeing not what Dermer calls “a fountain of annihilating death from exploding stars” but twinkling stars instead. Or for thinking, as the physicist Werner Heisenberg once put it, that “space is blue and birds fly through it.”