Theories of the

universe
By Dave Duffy

In a relatively short span of time, mankind has travelled from profound ignorance of our planet and the world in which we live to
a rather detailed picture of not only our earth, but the solar system, the universe, and the forces that underlie the workings of
most physical things. Not only do we have great understanding of the very large, such as clusters of galaxies on the fringes of
the universe, but of the very small, such as quarks and gluons which comprise some of the subatomic particles and forces of
nature.

Astoundingly, given the long amount of time we have inhabited this planet, most of this scientific knowledge has been acquired
only within the last 400 years, ever since Galileo gazed upon the heavens through the newly invented telescope.

In fact, the two major pillars of science today, namely relativity and quantum mechanics, were discovered just within the last 100
years. And in only the last 20 years, scientists have been working to unravel the secrets of superstring theory, which may prove
to be the final frontier in our quest to understand the ultimate laws of nature.

This astonishing science underlies our entire modern mechanical, electronics, and computer civilization. Without it we would be
back to horse and buggy days, wringer washers, and the pony express. Of course for some of us, like those who relish a
lifestyle truly primitive, that would be a nice turning back of the clock. But even they would take advantage of the remarkable
advances in medicine that are part of this modern science, or occasionally use the telephone or their computer.

In this article I would like to go back a couple of thousand years to the Greeks who were among the first to propose scientific
theories, and to travel forward in time on the backs of the great successful scientific theories that have advanced our knowledge
and technology to where they are today. It is a fascinating tale of discovery, as strange as the science fiction stories it has often
inspired. Even stranger are the new scientific theories of today, with their possibilities of time travel and their predictions of extra
dimensions and parallel universes that may lie unseen just inches from our own.

I’ll break the scientific theories up into five historical segments beginning with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, whose science
dominated scientific thinking for more than a millennium. Then we’ll explore Copernican theory and Newton’s classical
mechanics, which dominated science until about a hundred years ago. Finally we’ll visit the twin pillars of our modern science:
relativity and quantum mechanics. We’ll end up by exploring a modern scientific theory that has some scientists buzzing with
anticipation that they are onto something big, a theory that explains everything—superstring theory.

All are fascinating, and some, especially those that underlie the technology of our modern world, are downright bizarre.

A scientific theory is a working hypothesis

Before we examine the scientific theories, it’s important to understand just what a scientific theory is. It is simply a proposal of
how the world might work. When referring to modern physics, English physicist Stephen Hawking has said that a scientific
theory “is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds.” For simplicity of
understanding, I will take a nonmathematical approach in explaining the theories.

What is important to understand about any scientific theory is that it is valid only until a better scientific theory comes along. The
test of the validity of a scientific theory is that it must not only be able to explain present physical phenomena, but it must be
able to make predictions of how future phenomena will behave. It is tested by physical experimentation, as in a laboratory, to
determine if its predictions come true. No matter how many times experiment shows a theory to be a correct predictor, the next
experiment may prove the theory wrong, thereby necessitating the need for a new theory or at least the modification of the
current theory.

For example, when Isaac Newton proposed his theory of gravitation, the theory not only accounted for the orbit of the planets
around the sun, which had already been theorized, but it allowed us, for the first time, to accurately predict the ocean tides,
among many other things.

Newton’s theory of gravitation worked fine for more than 200 years, and even today we use it to help calculate the trajectories of
rockets we send into outer space. But scientists knew the theory was slightly off because it didn’t accurately account for some
things, such as the orbit of Mercury around the sun.

So in the early 1900s Albert Einstein proposed a new theory of gravitation, which was included in his general theory of relativity.
Einstein’s theory was able to accurately calculate the orbit of Mercury, plus his theory made a great many predictions that were
later experimentally shown to be accurate.

So you see, even though Newton’s theory was a bit off, it was still very useful to science for 200 years, and we still use it today.

The two major theories that underlie our modern world are relativity and quantum mechanics, which is the most successful
theory in history. They contradict each other in certain respects, so we know there is a problem that must be resolved. One
potential solution is a new theory called superstring theory, which holds the promise of unifying relativity and quantum
mechanics into a “theory of everything.”

The point is that scientific theories can never be said to be true. They can only be said to be useful working hypotheses that we
can use to explain physical phenomena and allow us to advance our technology.

Though Newton’s theory was slightly off, it still allows scientists, even today, to plot the orbits of the planets and comets, and to
determine the masses of galaxies though they are millions of light years away. And even though Einstein’s theory may be
slightly off, it still enables us to build nuclear power plants.

The great modern American scientist, Richard Feynman, who was the equal of Newton and Einstein in brilliance, equated
scientific theories with educated guesses about how Nature works. He said science’s main utility was to allow us to guess a
theory based on the success or failure of previous theories, make improvements in our technology, then guess an even better
theory that allows us to improve even more.

Let’s go back about 2340 years and examine the first great scientific guess that became a scientific theory. It was by Aristotle, a
Greek philosopher.

The first great theory: Aristotle and Ptolemy

In his work, On the Heavens, Aristotle proposed that terrestrial, or earthly, things were completely different than celestial, or
heavenly, things. The natural state for celestial things was to be in motion, and the natural state for earthly things was to be at
rest.

Ptolemy’s cosmological model placed the earth at the center

of the universe, with the moon, sun, planets, and stars orbiting
it on spheres. The outermost sphere carried the fixed stars.

The earth was round and located at the center of the universe, and the fixed stars rotated about the earth on a celestial sphere
that surrounded the earth.

Earthly things were made up of four basic elements: water, earth, fire, and air. Earth and water flowed toward their natural
resting place at the center of the earth, with water resting on top of earth. Fire and air’s natural state was to rise toward the
heavens.

In 150 AD, Ptolemy published his Almagest, which provided the mathematics to explain the motions of the wandering stars,
which included the moon, sun, and the planets. Mathematics was to become the language of physics, and Ptolemy’s detailed
calculations became part of Ptolemaic/Aristotelian theory.

In Ptolemy’s model the earth is a sphere, and the sun, moon, and planets are spheres that rotate in perfect circles around the
earth. The Aristotelian idea that circular motion was perfection was to stay with science until the 16th century.

Although other ancient Greeks had suggested that the sun was really at the center of the earth, and that the earth rotated about
it, the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic theory of the solar system came to be accepted and it held sway in science for about 1400 years.

The second great theory: the Copernican system

One of the problems with Ptolemy’s perfect spheres and circular motion was that he had to devise many deviations from the
trigonometry he used to account for the unusual motions of the roving stars, which we now know are planets.
Our Sun is a normal main-sequence G2 star, one of more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy.

diameter: 1,390,000 km.

mass: 1.989e30 kg
temperature: 5800 K (surface)
15,600,000 K (core)

The Sun is by far the largest object in the solar system. It contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System (Jupiter contains most
of the rest).

It is often said that the Sun is an "ordinary" star. That's true in the sense that there are many others similar to it. But there are many more smaller
stars than larger ones; the Sun is in the top 10% by mass. The median size of stars in our galaxy is probably less than half the mass of the Sun.

The Sun is personified in many mythologies: the Greeks called it Helios and the Romans called it Sol.

The Sun is, at present, about 70% hydrogen and 28% helium by mass everything else ("metals") amounts to less than 2%. This changes slowly
over time as the Sun converts hydrogen to helium in its core.

The outer layers of the Sun exhibit differential rotation: at the equator the surface rotates once every 25.4 days; near the poles it's as much as 36
days. This odd behavior is due to the fact that the Sun is not a solid body like the Earth. Similar effects are seen in the gas planets. The differential
rotation extends considerably down into the interior of the Sun but the core of the Sun rotates as a solid body.

Conditions at the Sun's core (approximately the inner 25% of its radius) are extreme. The temperature is 15.6 million Kelvin and the pressure is
250 billion atmospheres. At the center of the core the Sun's density is more than 150 times that of water.

The Sun's power (about 386 billion billion megaWatts) is produced by nuclear fusion reactions. Each second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen
are converted to about 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons (=3.86e33 ergs) of energy in the form of gamma rays. As it travels out
toward the surface, the energy is continuously absorbed and re-emitted at lower and lower temperatures so that by the time it reaches the surface,
it is primarily visible light. For the last 20% of the way to the surface the energy is carried more by convection than by radiation.

The surface of the Sun, called the photosphere, is at a temperature of about 5800 K. Sunspots are "cool" regions, only 3800 K (they look dark
only by comparison with the surrounding regions). Sunspots can be very large, as much as 50,000 km in diameter. Sunspots are caused by
complicated and not very well understood interactions with the Sun's magnetic field.

A small region known as the chromosphere lies above the photosphere.

The highly rarefied region above the chromosphere, called the corona, extends millions of kilometers into space but is visible only during a total
solar eclipse (left). Temperatures in the corona are over 1,000,000 K.

It just happens that the Moon and the Sun appear the same size in the sky as viewed from the Earth. And since the Moon orbits the Earth in
approximately the same plane as the Earth's orbit around the Sun sometimes the Moon comes directly between the Earth and the Sun. This is
called a solar eclipse; if the alignment is slighly imperfect then the Moon covers only part of the Sun's disk and the event is called a partial
eclipse. When it lines up perfectly the entire solar disk is blocked and it is called a total eclipse of the Sun. Partial eclipses are visible over a wide
area of the Earth but the region from which a total eclipse is visible, called the path of totality, is very narrow, just a few kilometers (though it is
usually thousands of kilometers long). Eclipses of the Sun happen once or twice a year. If you stay home, you're likely to see a partial eclipse
several times per decade. But since the path of totality is so small it is very unlikely that it will cross you home. So people often travel half way
around the world just to see a total solar eclipse. To stand in the shadow of the Moon is an awesome experience. For a few precious minutes it
gets dark in the middle of the day. The stars come out. The animals and birds think it's time to sleep. And you can see the solar corona. It is well
worth a major journey.

The Sun's magnetic field is very strong (by terrestrial standards) and very complicated. Its magnetosphere (also known as the heliosphere)
extends well beyond Pluto.

In addition to heat and light, the Sun also emits a low density stream of charged particles (mostly electrons and protons) known as the solar wind
which propagates throughout the solar system at about 450 km/sec. The solar wind and the much higher energy particles ejected by solar flares
can have dramatic effects on the Earth ranging from power line surges to radio interference to the beautiful aurora borealis.

Recent data from the spacecraft Ulysses show that during the minimum of the solar cycle the solar wind emanating from the polar regions flows
at nearly double the rate, 750 kilometers per second, than it does at lower latitudes. The composition of the solar wind also appears to differ in the
polar regions. During the solar maximum, however, the solar wind moves at an intermediate speed.
Further study of the solar wind will be done by the recently launched Wind, ACE and SOHO spacecraft from the dynamically stable vantage
point directly between the Earth and the Sun about 1.6 million km from Earth.

The solar wind has large effects on the tails of comets and even has measurable effects on the trajectories of spacecraft.

Spectacular loops and prominences are often visible on the Sun's limb (left).

The Sun's output is not entirely constant. Nor is the amount of sunspot activity. There was a period of very low sunspot activity in the latter half
of the 17th century called the Maunder Minimum. It coincides with an abnormally cold period in northern Europe sometimes known as the Little
Ice Age. Since the formation of the solar system the Sun's output has increased by about 40%.

The Sun is about 4.5 billion years old. Since its birth it has used up about half of the hydrogen in its core. It will continue to radiate "peacefully"
for another 5 billion years or so (although its luminosity will approximately double in that time). But eventually it will run out of hydrogen fuel. It
will then be forced into radical changes which, though commonplace by stellar standards, will result in the total destruction of the Earth (and
probably the creation of a planetary nebula).

The Sun's satellites

There are eight planets and a large number of smaller objects orbiting the Sun. (Exactly which bodies should be classified as planets and which
as "smaller objects" has been the source of some controversy, but in the end it is really only a matter of definition. Pluto is no longer officially a
planet but we'll keep it here for history's sake.)

Distance Radius Mass

Planet (000 km) (km) (kg) Discoverer Date
--------- --------- ------ ------- ---------- -----
Mercury 57,910 2439 3.30e23
Venus 108,200 6052 4.87e24
Earth 149,600 6378 5.98e24
Mars 227,940 3397 6.42e23
Jupiter 778,330 71492 1.90e27
Saturn 1,426,940 60268 5.69e26
Uranus 2,870,990 25559 8.69e25 Herschel 1781
Neptune 4,497,070 24764 1.02e26 Galle 1846
Pluto 5,913,520 1160 1.31e22 Tombaugh 1930

The Laws of Planetary Motion

Kepler obtained Brahe's data after his death despite the attempts by Brahe's family to keep the data from him in the hope of monetary gain.
There is some evidence that Kepler obtained the data by less than legal means; it is fortunate for the development of modern astronomy
that he was successful. Utilizing the voluminous and precise data of Brahe, Kepler was eventually able to build on the realization that the
orbits of the planets were ellipses to formulate his Three Laws of Planetary Motion. Kepler's First Law: . The orbits of the planets are

ellipses, with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse Kepler's First Law is illustrated in the image shown above. The
Sun is not at the center of the ellipse, but is instead at one focus (generally there is nothing at the other focus of the ellipse). The planet then
follows the ellipse in its orbit, which means that the Earth-Sun distance is constantly changing as the planet goes around its orbit. For
purpose of illustration we have shown the orbit as rather eccentric; remember that the actual orbits are much less eccentric than this.

Kepler's Second Law: The line joining the planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times as the planet travels around the

ellipse. Kepler's second law is illustrated in the preceding figure. The line joining the Sun and planet
sweeps out equal areas in equal times, so the planet moves faster when it is nearer the Sun. Thus, a planet executes elliptical motion with
constantly changing angular speed as it moves about its orbit. The point of nearest approach of the planet to the Sun is termed perihelion; the
point of greatest separation is termed aphelion. Hence, by Kepler's second law, the planet moves fastest when it is near perihelion and slowest
when it is near aphelion.
Kepler's Third Law: The ratio of the squares of the revolutionary periods for two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their
semimajor axes:

In this equation P represents the period of revolution for a planet and R represents the length of its semimajor axis. The
subscripts "1" and "2" distinguish quantities for planet 1 and 2 respectively. The periods for the two planets are assumed to be in the same time
units and the lengths of the semimajor axes for the two planets are assumed to be in the same distance units.

Kepler's Third Law implies that the period for a planet to orbit the Sun increases rapidly with the radius of its orbit. Thus, we find that
Mercury, the innermost planet, takes only 88 days to orbit the Sun but the outermost planet (Pluto) requires 248 years to do the same.