Theos-Talk Archives (March 2003 Message tt00416)

Scientist Predicts Profound Shift in Thinking 
About Universe 
By Johnathon Williams 
The Morning News/NWAonline.net * 
jwilliams@nwaonline.net
<mailto:jwilliams@nwaonline.net> 
FAYETTEVILLE -- The universe is big. 
The universe is old. 
Most of all, the universe is strange, and it's 
about to get even stranger,
according to a leading physicist. 
Those are vastly oversimplified versions of some 
of the insights delivered
Thursday at the University of Arkansas by Leon 
Lederman, 
a nobel laureate and the director of the Fermi 
National Accelerator
Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. 
Lederman spoke to a capacity crowd in Giffels 
auditorium, delivering a
lecture titled "How Does the Universe Work?" 
The short answer is this: Science isn't sure. Not 
exactly. Not yet. 
One of the great efforts now facing science, 
Lederman said, is to reconcile
Quantum Theory -- which seeks to explain the 
behavior of very 
small objects, such as atoms, electrons and other 
particles -- with the
general theory of relativity -- which seeks to 
explain the behavior of big 
things, such as planets and galaxies. 
Individually, he said, each theory does a nice 
job of explaining its portion
of the universe. The problem occurs when you try 
to combine them. 
"These two things hold up 20th Century Science. 
... The trouble is they're
not compatible," he said. 
Ordinarily, he said, that incompatibility is not 
a problem, since the two
theories apply to different things. But modern 
science supposes a time at 
the beginning of time when everything in the 
universe was condensed into a
single microscopic point. 
This was just before the big bang, an explosion 
that scattered the scalding,
primitive matter and allowed it to cool and 
expand into the universe, 
the galaxy and the planet that humanity now 
occupies. 
Current theories cannot account for that 
environment, or for another, even
more recent, observation about the universe. 
Scientists have supposed for some time that the 
universe is expanding. Now
they suppose that expansion is accelerating. 
The only theories offered to explain this 
acceleration suppose the existence
of a smaller force called dark energy, he said. 
"That's a big mystery. It means there must be 
some new thing out there in
space that's pushing all of the galaxies apart," 
he said. 
"We have this incredible mystery of a new 
phenomenon, and two theories which
don't get along so we can't apply them," he said. 
These inconsistencies and the rate at which new 
information is being learned
through experimental physics and astrophysics may 
soon lead to a huge 
shift in scientific thinking, Lederman said. This 
new theory will likely
change human thinking about the world as 
profoundly as quantum mechanics did

when it was first suggested. 
"So there's a general feeling that something very 
exciting is about to
happen. About means maybe the day after tomorrow 
or maybe five years from
now," he said. 
"We know that the world is fundamentally simple 
and beautiful. We also know
that there must be major discoveries in the air 
which will join the inner
space 
of particles to the outer space of the universe," 
he said. 
Lederman will speak again at 4 p.m. today in the 
same place about science
education in high schools. 
His visit to campus was sponsored by the 
university physics department and
the Arkansas Space Grant Consortium through the 
Robert D. Mauer lecture
series.