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The generally accepted practice throughout the English-speaking world on New Year’s Eve is to gather at midnight (usually in such locations as Times Square in New York and Trafalgar Square in London), drink a toast to the coming year and sing a rousing chorus of a song which has become indivisible with the celebration of modern New Year’s festivities. That song being “Auld Lang Syne,” with words in the Scottish dialect, transcribed by Robert Burns and written around 1788. The title means “old long since” or “long ago” and the melody based on an old Scottish folk tune. The lyrics and music were first published together in Volume V of the “Scots Musical Museum” in 1796, approximately six months after the death of Scotland’s Bard.Not only sung at New Year, but also sung on Burns’ Night, this song of friendship and salutation was by no means the first of its kind.
In a note written to one George Thomson in 1793, Burns describes the song as “the old song of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man’s singing.” A similar “Auld Lang Syne” tune, however, was actually printed in approximately 1700 and is therefore much older. The Burns’ version was adapted by Thomson (most likely with Burns’ acquiescence), but Johnson (the publisher) had already reprinted Allan Ramsay’s “Auld Lang Syne” (a different tune set to a love song rather than to a song of parting) in Volume I of the “Scots Musical Museum” in 1787. There also appear to be many even more ancient and/or intermediary variants of this New Year song. Nevertheless, the timeless Burns’ version remains the one that is most treasued and, in Scotland, “Auld Lang Syne” gradually displaced the century-old “Good-night and joy be wi’ you a’.”
Despite the popularity of “Auld Lang Syne,” it has aptly been described as “the song that nobody knows.” Even in Scotland, hardly a single gathering sings it correctly, or without some members of the party introducing the bogus line: “We’ll meet again some ither nicht” for: “And we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,” the words which Robert Burns actually rendered…and that is to say nothing of adding “the days of” to the original chorus.
CHORUS
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
VERSES
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to min’?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne!
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fitt,
Sin auld land syne.
We twa hae paidl’t i’ the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d,
Sin auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right guid-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.
jo = dear
ye’ll…stowp = you’ll pay for your pint measure (of drink)
twa = two
braes = hills or hillsides
pou’d = pulled or plucked
gowans = daises
mony = many
fitt = foot or step
paidl’d = paddled or waded
burn = brook or stream
dine = dinner time or noon
braid = broad
fiere = friend
gie’s = give us
guid willie-waught = goodwill drink
NEW YEARS
New Year’s Day is the first day of the calendar year. Celebrated in almost every country today, January 1st has only been recognized as a holiday by Western nations for approximately 400 years. Since earliest times, people have sought to satisfy the deep-rooted longing for recreation by celebrating the New Year. Observed on varying dates in different lands, New Year festivals mark the pivotal point where time is deemed to begin anew…an emergence of the pure and pristine for both the world itself and individuals alike, provided the proper steps are taken. First, celebrants must banish the malicious spirits and accumulated evils of the past in order to prevent infection of the coming year. Next, come rites of purification, followed by positive acts which ensure an auspicious future. Sometimes, participants are unaware that they are following ancient mystical practices. Few Westerners, for example, realize that their New Year horns and fireworks were once used as tools intended to banish evil spirits.
Although they had no written calendar, ancient Babylonians (who resided in modern day Iraq) celebrated the beginning of a New Year on what is now March 23rd, the time of year when Spring arrives and new crops planted. It was a festival which lasted for 11 days, during which the King was stripped of his clothes and banished. For a few days, the people could do as they pleased. Upon the return of the King…in grand procession and wearing fine robes…the Babylonians went back to work and behaved in proper fashion once more. Thus, each New Year, did the people make a fresh start to their lives.
Ancient Egyptians originally celebrated the New Year with the Feast of Opet around the middle of June, which was when the Nile River usually overflowed its banks. Consequently, people were unable to work and would be free to take part in the festivities. Statues of the God, Amon, together with effigies of his wife and son, would be taken by boat down the Nile from Karnak to Luxor, where the people would sing, dance and feast for a 24 days before transporting the statues back to the temple. Phoenicians and Persians proclaimed the beginning of the New Year on the Autumnal Equinox (September22nd). Early Greeks first observed the occasion at the Winter Solstice (December 21st) and later, at the Summer Solstice (June 21st).
The Romans initially observed their New Year in March, a festival which they called Calends or Kalends. It was a time when people decorated their homes with lights and greenery and gave each other gifts carefully chosen for their luck-bringing properties, such as sweets or honey to ensure peace…gold, silver or monetary presents to ensure propsperity…and lamps for a year filled with light. The festival lasted for three days, during which time slaves and masters dined together and normal rules of the society were put on hold while everyone was permitted to do what they pleased. The Emperor and other select politicians would usually be presented with gifts and wishes of good fortune for the year ahead. However, since the Roman calendar was constantly being tampered with by the Emperors, it became out of synchronization with the Sun. In order to set the calendar right, the Senate, in 153 B.C., proclaimed that the first day of a New Year would be observed on January 1st. Nevertheless, tampering with the calendar continued until 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar established what was to later be known as the Julian Calendar. Again, it designated January 1st as the New Year but, in order to synchronize the calendar with the Sun, Caesar was obliged to allow the previous year to continue for 445 days.
New Year’s Day became a Holy Day in the Christian Church in 487 A.D., when it was declared the Feast of the Circumcision. Originally, parties were not allowed on this day because the pagans had followed that custom. However, in time, attitudes changed and it was deemed that celebrations could again be held. January 1st became generally recognized as New Year’s Day in the 1500s, when the Gregorian Calendar was introduced. By this time, the Julian Calendar, once more out of calibration, placed the first day of the year 13 days later on January 14th.
In Ancient Rome, the beginning of the New Year was a time to expunge the ills of the past twelve months and establish a pattern for the twelve months to come through good conduct. Friends reconciled any differences, adversaries suspended litigation and people exchanged gifts. Many Roman citizens also brought gifts to the Emperor and wished him good fortune. Initially, these donations were simple branches of bay and palm leaves but later, more expensive presents were given. Roman Senators received flowers and fruits…or even bolts of beautiful fabrics…from people who wanted favors. Roman merchants carried this gift-giving custom as far east as Persia (now known as Iran). There, the ancient Persians followed the Roman tradition by exchanging presents of eggs. Since an egg hatches into life, this custom meant much the same thing as “turning over a new leaf.” The Celts, a race of people who lived in Gaul (now known as France) and some areas of Britain prior to the Roman invasion celebrated their New Year at the end of October. The festival was called Samhain, which means “summer’s end.”
When the Roman legions arrived in England, they found that the Druid priests celebrated their New Year on March 10th. The priests would cut branches of mistletoe which grew on the sacred oak and give the boughs to the people for charms. The early English adopted many of the Roman traditions. Later, English people followed the custom of cleaning chimneys on New Year’s Day. This was supposed to bring good luck to the household during the coming year. Today, the common phrase is “cleaning the slate,” rather than “cleaning the chimney,” but the intent is the same…the making of resolutions to correct faults and bad habits and the resolve to make the coming year a better one than before. The actual tradition of making New Year Resolutions is believed to have originated with the ancient Babylonians, whose most popular resolution is thought to have been the return of borrowed farm equipment.
The Roman custom of giving gifts to their Emperor was revived by the English in the 1200s. Jewelry, gloves and other presents were brought to the English monarch. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), for example, built up a fine collection of hundreds of pairs of richly-embroidered and bejeweled gloves by virtue of this custom. English husbands also adopted the habit of giving their wives money on New Year’s Day with which to buy pins for the whole year. This custom disappeared in the 1800s when machines were developed to manufacture pins, but the term “pin money” still refers to small amounts of spending cash.
Many ancient Roman traditions continue to survive in Europe and Latin America, overlaid with new superstitions. In many areas, the first person to enter a house on New Year’s Day is thought to determine the luck for the coming year. Bad luck is believed to accompany a woman…particularly one with fair or red hair. Tall, dark-haired men are highly favored as “first-footers,” supposedly bringing the assurance of a happy year to come.
Another of Burn’s Songs Sometimes Sung at New Years
Comin Through the Rye
Robert Burns
O, Jenny’s a’ weet, poor body,
Jenny’s seldom dry:
She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie,
Comin thro’ the rye!
Comin thro’ the rye, poor body,
Comin thro’ the rye,
She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie,
Comin thro’ the rye!
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the glen,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need the warl’ ken?
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the grain;
Gin a body kiss a body,
The thing’s a body’s ain.
Across the morning sky, all the birds are leaving
Ah, how can they know, it’s time for them to go
Before the winter fire, we’d still be dreaming
I do not count the time
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
Sad, deserted shore
your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know it’s time for them to go
But I will still be here
I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
Bridge
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
And I am not alone
while my love is near me
And I know it will be so ’til its time to go
So come the storms in Winter and then the birds in Spring again
I do not count the time
Who knows how my love grows?
Who knows where the time goes?
Who?
father time
Chronos (also known as Chronus) is the personification of time itself. Indeed, the word means “time” and is the root of “chronology” and other modern words. It was, however, originally employed in a purely poetic sense. There is no God or Goddess directly associated with time per se in the annals of Greek mythology, but there may have been a Titan of Time.
Saturn (referred to by the Greeks as Cronus or Kronos) was the Roman Deity of Time and an ancient Italian Corn God known as the Sower. Male ruler of the Roman Gods prior to Jupiter, Saturn’s weapon was a scythe or sickle. The Romans honored Saturn at a MidWinter festival called Saturnalia, which lasted several days and at which there was much feasting and making merry. All business was suspended and schools were closed. Parents gave toys to their children and there was a public banquet. Saturn may have been worshiped by the pre-Hellenic population of the country but probably not widely revered by the Greeks themselves. His functions were concerned with agriculture and his festival, held in Attica and known as Kronia, resembled the Roman Saturnalia in that it was a celebration of the harvest. In art, Saturn has always been depicted as a old man holding an implement which has often been interpreted as a harpeor curved sword, but which appears likely to have actually represented a scythe or a sickle.
Since ancient history, time has been identified with Saturn. In mythology, he was the son of Uranus (Heaven or Sky-Father) and Gaea (Earth-Mother) and the youngest of the Twelve Titans. Upon the advice of Gaea (who understood the changes of life and knew that Uranus would never, of his own accord, yield to the younger generation), Saturn castrated his father and thus separated Heaven from Earth. Gaea created out of flint…a mineral of her own substance…a sickle with which to complete the deed. It was the tool by which life was cut down at the time of harvest and was crescent-shaped like the moon, symbolic of cyclic rise and fall.
It was believed that the spilled blood of Uranus formed such creatures as the Giants and the Furies, and that his genitals (which were tossed into the sea eventually produced the beautiful Venus/Aphrodite). Saturn’s emasculation of Uranus now made Saturn King of the Titans and the rotation of the generations was thereby effected. Consequently, the sickle (and later, the scythe) became representative of the cruel and unrelenting flow of time which, in the end, cuts down all things.
After the demise of Uranus, Saturn took his sister, Rhea (Goddess of Necessity), as consort and together they ruled. She bore him five children: Vesta, Ceres, Juno, Pluto and Neptune…all of whom he swallowed because it had been foretold that he would be overthrown by his own child. When Jupiter was born, however, Rhea hid the baby in Crete and tricked Saturn into swallowing a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead. When Jupiter reached adulthood, he forced Saturn to disgorge his three sisters and two brothers. United, the siblings waged war and defeated their father. According to variations in the legend, Saturn was then either imprisoned in Tartarus or banished to Latium in Italy where he took refuge. According to some folktales, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto were representative of Air, Water and Death…the three things that time itself cannot kill…and the overthrow of Saturn symbolized the demise of the old culture which worshiped this ancient God.
Alternative legends maintain that Saturn became King of the Lost Golden Age and turned his attention to gardening, thus applying his sickle to less violent ends. A statue of Saturn holding his sickle once stood in the temple erected to the God on the road leading the Roman Capitol. This much wiser Saturn was an incorruptible deity and reigned supreme during a time when there were no wars or hardships. He depicted fertility in its most exalted sense. Having learned his lesson, Saturn is said to have eventually stepped down in favor of his son, Picus (also known as Woodpecker) and retired altogether from human company. Some say that he now rules Elysium, the Isle of the Blest…others say he lies in a magic sleep, tended by nymphs, on an island near Britain and that he will one day return, bringing yet another Golden Age.
Saturn symbolizes the inexorable flow of time in both its destructive and constructive effects. His decrepit body is a reminder that time is the devourer of all things and that, like the substance in the hourglass he often carries, his physical vitality will run out until it is totally exhausted. However, just as the hourglass can be inverted, so a new generation restores the font of physical vitality. Nonetheless, time is not wholly destructive, for the gift of time is the serenity and wisdom that are attainable only through the experiences of a long life. In addition, the white beard with which Saturn is frequently depicted indicates that age has given him a new purity and innocence.
The downward flow of the contents in the hourglass is balanced by an upward flow of spirit. Thus, the loss of vitality in the body is balanced by the increasing spiritualization of the mind, which gradually becomes filled less with earthly matters than those of the spirit. Saturn’s flint sickle represents the harvest… cruel destruction for last year’s crop, but nevertheless necessary to make room for the new crop in order to reap the fruits of the current harvest. In a similar fashion does the old crescent moon bring to finality the old cycle while being harbinger of a new one.
A modern notion of the relationship of time with Saturn or Kronos is that the association may have originated due to the confusion created by similar-sounding words (“Kronos” and “Chronos”). The image of the Grim Reaper bearing a scythe is believed to have derived directly from Kronos. Both of these modern figures…Father Time and the Grim Reaper…are sometimes accompanied by a crow and there is speculation that the word “Chronos” and the subsequent associated God may have actually been representative of this bird, which was symbolic of both fertility and death. However, this hypothesis could again be as a result of confusion concerning similar-sounding words since the Latin for crow is “cornix.” By the Middle Ages there were many engravings of the Grim Reaper which depict a skeletal figure holding a scythe and hourglass with a crow nearby.
Later, three Greek words added to the confusion of symbolic time: Chronus, which meant “time” itself; Kronos, the ancient Roman God of the Harvest; and Corone, the Greek word for crow. Whether these three were connected due to similar roots, or whether they were connected simply due to their similarity in sound is something which has yet to be proven. As with most mythological lore, the concepts tend to reach so far back into history that the origins cannot be reliably traced to any definitive conclusion.
And an astronomer said, “Master, what of Time?”
And he answered: You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable. You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons. Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.
Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.
And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.
Who among you does not feel that his power to love is boundless?
And yet who does not feel that very love, though boundless, encompassed within the centre of his being, and moving not from love thought to love thought, nor from love deeds to other love deeds?
And is not time even as love is, undivided and placeless?
But if in you thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
Today’s world demand strict time keeping, with atomic clocks discriminating time down to a billionth of a second. It was not always so. At first farmers split the year into periods for planting and harvesting: the Egyptians used the shadow from an obelisk to divide the day in two. Later developments included ingenious devices such as graduated candles or hourglasses and the Middle Ages saw the advent of tower clocks to regulate the call to prayers.
Galileo first observed the regular motion of a pendulem in 1580 and planned to incorporate this into a clock. His intentions were realized in 1656 by the Dutch inventer Christian Huygens, thus paving the way for the development of clocks suitable for domestic use. Although today we credit the Swiss with the ultimate developments in clock mechanisms; it was the English who were supreme in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In the heyday of the mechanical clock it was not just the movement that was special: the cases of carriage and ‘Grandfather Clocks’ were often extremely beautiful, with the French and British famed for their craftmanship.
An antique clock has a magic that cannot be captured by an electronic timepiece combining beauty and mechanical ingenuity to measure one of our most precious commodities: time.
this page is dedicated to my friend Jimmy…
who knows how to let time flow but still keeps a fine watch…
My Take: The 3 biggest biblical misconceptions
Editor’s note: John Shelby Spong, a former Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey, is author of “Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.”
By John Shelby Spong, Special to CNN
The Bible is both a reservoir of spiritual insight and a cultural icon to which lip service is still paid in the Western world. Yet when the Bible is talked about in public by both believers and critics, it becomes clear that misconceptions abound.
To me, three misconceptions stand out and serve to make the Bible hard to comprehend.
First, people assume the Bible accurately reflects history. That is absolutely not so, and every biblical scholar recognizes it.
The facts are that Abraham, the biblically acknowledged founding father of the Jewish people, whose story forms the earliest content of the Bible, died about 900 years before the first story of Abraham was written in the Old Testament.
Can a defining tribal narrative that is passed on orally for 45 generations ever be regarded as history, at least as history is understood today?
Moses, the religious genius who put his stamp on the religion of the Old Testament more powerfully than any other figure, died about 300 years before the first story of Moses entered the written form we call Holy Scripture.
This means that everything we know about Moses in the Bible had to have passed orally through about 15 generations before achieving written form. Do stories of heroic figures not grow, experience magnifying tendencies and become surrounded by interpretive mythology as the years roll by?
Jesus of Nazareth, according to our best research, lived between the years 4 B.C. and A.D. 30. Yet all of the gospels were written between the years 70 to 100 A.D., or 40 to 70 years after his crucifixion, and they were written in Greek, a language that neither Jesus nor any of his disciples spoke or were able to write.
Are the gospels then capable of being effective guides to history? If we line up the gospels in the time sequence in which they were written – that is, with Mark first, followed by Matthew, then by Luke and ending with John – we can see exactly how the story expanded between the years 70 and 100.
For example, miracles do not get attached to the memory of Jesus story until the eighth decade. The miraculous birth of Jesus is a ninth-decade addition; the story of Jesus ascending into heaven is a 10th-decade narrative.
In the first gospel, Mark, the risen Christ appears physically to no one, but by the time we come to the last gospel, John, Thomas is invited to feel the nail prints in Christ’s hands and feet and the spear wound in his side.
Perhaps the most telling witness against the claim of accurate history for the Bible comes when we read the earliest narrative of the crucifixion found in Mark’s gospel and discover that it is not based on eyewitness testimony at all.
Instead, it’s an interpretive account designed to conform the story of Jesus’ death to the messianic yearnings of the Hebrew Scriptures, including Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.
The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.
The second major misconception comes from the distorting claim that the Bible is in any literal sense “the word of God.” Only someone who has never read the Bible could make such a claim. The Bible portrays God as hating the Egyptians, stopping the sun in the sky to allow more daylight to enable Joshua to kill more Amorites and ordering King Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites.
Can these acts of immorality ever be called “the word of God”? The book of Psalms promises happiness to the defeated and exiled Jews only when they can dash the heads of Babylonian children against the rocks! Is this “the word of God? What kind of God would that be?
The Bible, when read literally, calls for the execution of children who are willfully disobedient to their parents, for those who worship false gods, for those who commit adultery, for homosexual persons and for any man who has sex with his mother-in-law, just to name a few.
The Bible exhorts slaves to be obedient to their masters and wives to be obedient to their husbands. Over the centuries, texts like these, taken from the Bible and interpreted literally, have been used as powerful and evil weapons to support killing prejudices and to justify the cruelest kind of inhumanity.
The third major misconception is that biblical truth is somehow static and thus unchanging. Instead, the Bible presents us with an evolutionary story, and in those evolving patterns, the permanent value of the Bible is ultimately revealed.
It was a long road for human beings and human values to travel between the tribal deity found in the book of Exodus, who orders the death of the firstborn male in every Egyptian household on the night of the Passover, until we reach an understanding of God who commands us to love our enemies.
The transition moments on this journey can be studied easily. It was the prophet named Hosea, writing in the eighth century B.C., who changed God’s name to love. It was the prophet named Amos who changed God’s name to justice. It was the prophet we call Jonah who taught us that the love of God is not bounded by the limits of our own ability to love.
It was the prophet Micah who understood that beautiful religious rituals and even lavish sacrifices were not the things that worship requires, but rather “to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” It was the prophet we call Malachi, writing in the fifth century B.C., who finally saw God as a universal experience, transcending all national and tribal boundaries.
One has only to look at Christian history to see why these misconceptions are dangerous. They have fed religious persecution and religious wars. They have fueled racism, anti-female biases, anti-Semitism and homophobia.They have fought against science and the explosion of knowledge.
The ultimate meaning of the Bible escapes human limits and calls us to a recognition that every life is holy, every life is loved, and every life is called to be all that that life is capable of being. The Bible is, thus, not about religion at all but about becoming deeply and fully human. It issues the invitation to live fully, to love wastefully and to have the courage to be our most complete selves.
That is why I treasure this book and why I struggle to reclaim its essential message for our increasingly non-religious world.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of John Shelby Spong.
Galaxy cluster MACS 1206, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, is a galaxy cluster that was recently surveyed by CLASH. It lies 4.5 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo in our night sky. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), and the CLASH Team
Dark matter makes up 23% of the universe but we know very little about it. A multi-wavelength survey called the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (words which together make the obviously completely unintentional acronym CLASH) hopes to change that, by observing 25 clusters of galaxies in greater detail than ever before. The CLASH team have already completed observations of six clusters and plan to finish another five before the year is out.
The accidental universe:
Science’s crisis of faith
Alan Lightman, a physicist and novelist, teaches at MIT. His new book, Mr g: A Novel About the Creation, will be published in January by Pantheon.
In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic particles that orbit its nucleus. And we now know that all atoms heavier than helium were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars.
The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.
This long and appealing trend may be coming to an end. Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.” Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.”
The scientists most distressed by Weinberg’s “fork in the road” are theoretical physicists. Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion. Experimental scientists occupy themselves with observing and measuring the cosmos, finding out what stuff exists, no matter how strange that stuff may be. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, are not satisfied with observing the universe. They want to know why. They want to explain all the properties of the universe in terms of a few fundamental principles and parameters. These fundamental principles, in turn, lead to the “laws of nature,” which govern the behavior of all matter and energy. An example of a fundamental principle in physics, first proposed by Galileo in 1632 and extended by Einstein in 1905, is the following: All observers traveling at constant velocity relative to one another should witness identical laws of nature. From this principle, Einstein derived his theory of special relativity. An example of a fundamental parameter is the mass of an electron, considered one of the two dozen or so “elementary” particles of nature. As far as physicists are concerned, the fewer the fundamental principles and parameters, the better. The underlying hope and belief of this enterprise has always been that these basic principles are so restrictive that only one, self-consistent universe is possible, like a crossword puzzle with only one solution. That one universe would be, of course, the universe we live in. Theoretical physicists are Platonists. Until the past few years, they agreed that the entire universe, the one universe, is generated from a few mathematical truths and principles of symmetry, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of the electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood.
However, two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.
“Back in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Alan Guth, “the feeling was that we were so smart, we almost had everything figured out.” What physicists had figured out were very accurate theories of three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force that binds atomic nuclei together, the weak force that is responsible for some forms of radioactive decay, and the electromagnetic force between electrically charged particles. And there were prospects for merging the theory known as quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of the fourth force, gravity, and thus pulling all of them into the fold of what physicists called the Theory of Everything, or the Final Theory. These theories of the 1970s and 1980s required the specification of a couple dozen parameters corresponding to the masses of the elementary particles, and another half dozen or so parameters corresponding to the strengths of the fundamental forces. The next step would then have been to derive most of the elementary particle masses in terms of one or two fundamental masses and define the strengths of all the fundamental forces in terms of a single fundamental force.
There were good reasons to think that physicists were poised to take this next step. Indeed, since the time of Galileo, physics has been extremely successful in discovering principles and laws that have fewer and fewer free parameters and that are also in close agreement with the observed facts of the world. For example, the observed rotation of the ellipse of the orbit of Mercury, 0.012 degrees per century, was successfully calculated using the theory of general relativity, and the observed magnetic strength of an electron, 2.002319 magnetons, was derived using the theory of quantum electrodynamics. More than any other science, physics brims with highly accurate agreements between theory and experiment.
Guth started his physics career in this sunny scientific world. Now sixty-four years old and a professor at MIT, he was in his early thirties when he proposed a major revision to the Big Bang theory, something called inflation. We now have a great deal of evidence suggesting that our universe began as a nugget of extremely high density and temperature about 14 billion years ago and has been expanding, thinning out, and cooling ever since. The theory of inflation proposes that when our universe was only about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, a peculiar type of energy caused the cosmos to expand very rapidly. A tiny fraction of a second later, the universe returned to the more leisurely rate of expansion of the standard Big Bang model. Inflation solved a number of outstanding problems in cosmology, such as why the universe appears so homogeneous on large scales.
When I visited Guth in his third-floor office at MIT one cool day in May, I could barely see him above the stacks of paper and empty Diet Coke bottles on his desk. More piles of paper and dozens of magazines littered the floor. In fact, a few years ago Guth won a contest sponsored by the Boston Globe for the messiest office in the city. The prize was the services of a professional organizer for one day. “She was actually more a nuisance than a help. She took piles of envelopes from the floor and began sorting them according to size.” He wears aviator-style eyeglasses, keeps his hair long, and chain-drinks Diet Cokes. “The reason I went into theoretical physics,” Guth tells me, “is that I liked the idea that we could understand everything—i.e., the universe—in terms of mathematics and logic.” He gives a bitter laugh. We have been talking about the multiverse.
While challenging the Platonic dream of theoretical physicists, the multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are required for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be “fine-tuned” to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this finetuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it. Actually, the word anthropic, from the Greek for “man,” is a misnomer: if these fundamental parameters were much different from what they are, it is not only human beings who would not exist. No life of any kind would exist.
If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”
Intelligent design, however, is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation. If there are countless different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not. Some of those universes will be dead, lifeless hulks of matter and energy, and others will permit the emergence of cells, plants and animals, minds. From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter. We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.
The explanation is similar to the explanation of why we happen to live on a planet that has so many nice things for our comfortable existence: oxygen, water, a temperature between the freezing and boiling points of water, and so on. Is this happy coincidence just good luck, or an act of Providence, or what? No, it is simply that we could not live on planets without such properties. Many other planets exist that are not so hospitable to life, such as Uranus, where the temperature is –371 degrees Fahrenheit, and Venus, where it rains sulfuric acid.
The multiverse offers an explanation to the fine-tuning conundrum that does not require the presence of a Designer. As Steven Weinberg says: “Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.”
Some physicists remain skeptical of the anthropic principle and the reliance on multiple universes to explain the values of the fundamental parameters of physics. Others, such as Weinberg and Guth, have reluctantly accepted the anthropic principle and the multiverse idea as together providing the best possible explanation for the observed facts.
If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles—to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are—is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between.
The most striking example of fine-tuning, and one that practically demands the multiverse to explain it, is the unexpected detection of what scientists call dark energy. Little more than a decade ago, using robotic telescopes in Arizona, Chile, Hawaii, and outer space that can comb through nearly a million galaxies a night, astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. As mentioned previously, it has been known since the late 1920s that the universe is expanding; it’s a central feature of the Big Bang model. Orthodox cosmological thought held that the expansion is slowing down. After all, gravity is an attractive force; it pulls masses closer together. So it was quite a surprise in 1998 when two teams of astronomers announced that some unknown force appears to be jamming its foot down on the cosmic accelerator pedal. The expansion is speeding up. Galaxies are flying away from each other as if repelled by antigravity. Says Robert Kirshner, one of the team members who made the discovery: “This is not your father’s universe.” (In October, members of both teams were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.)
Physicists have named the energy associated with this cosmological force dark energy. No one knows what it is. Not only invisible, dark energy apparently hides out in empty space. Yet, based on our observations of the accelerating rate of expansion, dark energy constitutes a whopping three quarters of the total energy of the universe. It is the invisible elephant in the room of science.
The amount of dark energy, or more precisely the amount of dark energy in every cubic centimeter of space, has been calculated to be about one hundred-millionth (10–8) of an erg per cubic centimeter. (For comparison, a penny dropped from waist-high hits the floor with an energy of about three hundred thousand—that is, 3 × 105—ergs.) This may not seem like much, but it adds up in the vast volumes of outer space. Astronomers were able to determine this number by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe at different epochs—if the universe is accelerating, then its rate of expansion was slower in the past. From the amount of acceleration, astronomers can calculate the amount of dark energy in the universe.
Theoretical physicists have several hypotheses about the identity of dark energy. It may be the energy of ghostly subatomic particles that can briefly appear out of nothing before selfannihilating and slipping back into the vacuum. According to quantum physics, empty space is a pandemonium of subatomic particles rushing about and then vanishing before they can be seen. Dark energy may also be associated with an as-yet-unobserved force field called the Higgs field, which is sometimes invoked to explain why certain kinds of matter have mass. (Theoretical physicists ponder things that other people do not.) And in the models proposed by string theory, dark energy may be associated with the way in which extra dimensions of space—beyond the usual length, width, and breadth—get compressed down to sizes much smaller than atoms, so that we do not notice them.
These various hypotheses give a fantastically large range for the theoretically possible amounts of dark energy in a universe, from something like 10115 ergs per cubic centimeter to –10115 ergs per cubic centimeter. (A negative value for dark energy would mean that it acts to decelerate the universe, in contrast to what is observed.) Thus, in absolute magnitude, the amount of dark energy actually present in our universe is either very, very small or very, very large compared with what it could be. This fact alone is surprising. If the theoretically possible positive values for dark energy were marked out on a ruler stretching from here to the sun, with zero at one end of the ruler and 10115 ergs per cubic centimeter at the other end, the value of dark energy actually found in our universe (10–8 ergs per cubic centimeter) would be closer to the zero end than the width of an atom.
On one thing most physicists agree: If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little more and the universe would accelerate so rapidly that the matter in the young cosmos could never pull itself together to form stars and thence form the complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little less and the universe would decelerate so rapidly that it would recollapse before there was time to form even the simplest atoms.
Here we have a clear example of fine-tuning: out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. There is little argument on this point. It does not depend on assumptions about whether we need liquid water for life or oxygen or particular biochemistries. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: The multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular universe is one of the universes with a small value, permitting the emergence of life. We are here, so our universe must be such a universe. We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds.
The concept of the multiverse is compelling not only because it explains the problem of fine-tuning. As I mentioned earlier, the possibility of the multiverse is actually predicted by modern theories of physics. One such theory, called eternal inflation, is a revision of Guth’s inflation theory developed by Andrei Linde, Paul Steinhardt, and Alex Vilenkin in the early and mid-1980s. In regular inflation theory, the very rapid expansion of the infant universe is caused by an energy field, like dark energy, that is temporarily trapped in a condition that does not represent the lowest possible energy for the universe as a whole—like a marble sitting in a small dent on a table. The marble can stay there, but if it is jostled it will roll out of the dent, roll across the table, and then fall to the floor (which represents the lowest possible energy level). In the theory of eternal inflation, the dark energy field has many different values at different points of space, analogous to lots of marbles sitting in lots of dents on the cosmic table. Moreover, as space expands rapidly, the number of marbles increases. Each of these marbles is jostled by the random processes inherent in quantum mechanics, and some of the marbles will begin rolling across the table and onto the floor. Each marble starts a new Big Bang, essentially a new universe. Thus, the original, rapidly expanding universe spawns a multitude of new universes, in a never-ending process.
String theory, too, predicts the possibility of the multiverse. Originally conceived in the late 1960s as a theory of the strong nuclear force but soon enlarged far beyond that ambition, string theory postulates that the smallest constituents of matter are not subatomic particles like the electron but extremely tiny one-dimensional “strings” of energy. These elemental strings can vibrate at different frequencies, like the strings of a violin, and the different modes of vibration correspond to different fundamental particles and forces. String theories typically require seven dimensions of space in addition to the usual three, which are compacted down to such small sizes that we never experience them, like a three-dimensional garden hose that appears as a one-dimensional line when seen from a great distance. There are, in fact, a vast number of ways that the extra dimensions in string theory can be folded up, and each of the different ways corresponds to a different universe with different physical properties.
It was originally hoped that from a theory of these strings, with very few additional parameters, physicists would be able to explain all the forces and particles of nature—all of reality would be a manifestation of the vibrations of elemental strings. String theory would then be the ultimate realization of the Platonic ideal of a fully explicable cosmos. In the past few years, however, physicists have discovered that string theory predicts not a unique universe but a huge number of possible universes with different properties. It has been estimated that the “string landscape” contains 10500 different possible universes. For all practical purposes, that number is infinite.
It is important to point out that neither eternal inflation nor string theory has anywhere near the experimental support of many previous theories in physics, such as special relativity or quantum electrodynamics, mentioned earlier. Eternal inflation or string theory, or both, could turn out to be wrong. However, some of the world’s leading physicists have devoted their careers to the study of these two theories.
Back to the intelligent fish. The wizened old fish conjecture that there are many other worlds, some with dry land and some with water. Some of the fish grudgingly accept this explanation. Some feel relieved. Some feel like their lifelong ruminations have been pointless. And some remain deeply concerned. Because there is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.
Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith. Scientists are not. All we can do is hope that the same theories that predict the multiverse also produce many other predictions that we can test here in our own universe. But the other universes themselves will almost certainly remain a conjecture.
“We had a lot more confidence in our intuition before the discovery of dark energy and the multiverse idea,” says Guth. “There will still be a lot for us to understand, but we will miss out on the fun of figuring everything out from first principles.”
One wonders whether a young Alan Guth, considering a career in science today, would choose theoretical physics.
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