On 14 November 2009, The New York Times published an article Water Found on Moon, Researchers Say (free registration might be required). I found that interesting because wherever there is water here on earth, there is life. Even in the most inhospitable places on earth, where there is water, there is usually life. So now that we have found water on our own nearby moon, is water found with abundance throughout our universe?
As a kid, I was never satisfied with the notion that life only exists on earth. Other stars and planets are so far away for us to understand them well. How could scientists and others possibly have concluded that life does not exist elsewhere? I wonder if our educational system still teaches students that earth is the only planet that supports life. I hope not, because I have confidence that someday we will find life existing elsewhere within our universe.
Late last week, over at the Edge.org, I viewed an interesting video presentation on Why Does The Universe Look The Way It Does. I particularly enjoyed his discussion on why there might be more than one universe.
Why do we find ourselves so close to the aftermath of this very strange event, this Big Bang, that has such low entropy? The answer is, we just don't know. The anthropic principle is just not enough to explain this. We really need to think deeply about what could have happened both at the Big Bang and even before the Big Bang. My favorite guess at the answer is that the reason why the universe started out at such a low entropy is the same reason that an egg starts out at low entropy. The classic example of entropy is that you can take an egg and make an omelette. You cannot take an omlette and turn it into an egg. That is because the entropy increases when you mix up the egg to make it into an omelette. Why did the egg start with such a low entropy in the first place? The answer is that it is not alone in the universe. The universe consists of more than just an egg. The egg came from a chicken. It was created by something that had a very low entropy that was part of a bigger system. The point is that our universe is part of a bigger system. Then you can start to try to understand why it had such a low entropy to begin with. I actually think that the fact that we can observe the early universe having such a low entropy is the best evidence we currently have that we live in a multiverse, that the universe we observe is not all that there is, that we are actually embedded in some much larger structure.
If this science material interests you at all, I encourage you to read The New York Times article and watch Sean Carroll's video. It's fun to ponder where we came from and why are we here.
On Thursday, 4 June 2009, I photographed Ana Avramovic at Heritage Park in Calgary Alberta. If you click on my Flickr profile link, you will be taken to Flickr where you can see more of my pictures.
