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Excellent evening to you all!
I can't actually see any of you.
My name is Esko.
This is my name in sign language.
I used to work as the night janitor of a vocational school for the hearing impared in 1979-80.
For some reason this became the sign for my name.
Alright, let's get to matter at hand. Movements.
The theme of this evening is movements and I wanted to talk about - after I check
how much time I have left before they unplug me -
about the greatest movement, the Universe, and why there are any movements at all in this Universe.
This is a fundamental question,
perhaps the most fundamental question of them all, for which us, the third chimpanzees, don't know the answer.
But let's start from the beginning -
BOOM. There it was, the Big ***.
The Universe bothered to exist, like Stephen Hawking famously wrote in his book, the Brief History of Time
Why?
We do not know that. Our theories don't reach that far back.
Hawking has his idea why,
but only him and his close friends believe it - And even they have their doubts.
It wasn't really an explosion.
Initial explosion is a very bad name for it. The Universe just appeared.
But now the brief history of the Universe.
Much shorter, if you don't want to read the 300 pages of the Brief History of time.
Here it comes in three minutes.
Universe, after bothering to exist, started to expand,
cool down and get less and less dense.
After a few hundred million years,
stars, the first stars started to illuminate space.
They lived, died and exploded.
The next generation of stars, the third and so on.
And soon some small debris that we call planets started to accumulate around the stars.
After about 9 billion years since the beginning,
about 4,5 billion years ago, yet another star
was born in out Milky Way galaxy. Sun, a yellow dwarf star of who knows which generation.
Well, it is not that small.
There are smaller stars, but it is not a giant either.
There are stars millions of times brighter, more luminous.
Sun was born.
From the junk, the waste, the nuclear ashes of long dead stars, planets were formed.
You know how it goes. There was a nice picture of what happens when you don't clean your home.
Dust bunnies start to grow at an alarming rate.
Skip the weekly cleaning for about ten million years
and you will get a dust bunny the size of Earth.
That is how planets were born around the Sun.
And on one of the planets, third rock from the Sun, something even more strange started to happen.
Life appeared there.
We don't know how.
We know, or we can estimate that four thousand million years ago,
when the Solar System had settled and the Earth was no longer bombarded by massive rocks.
There might have been,
if not tolerable conditions, at least the temperature was below one hundred degrees
and you didn't have to fear that the sky would fall down.
That is when life appeared here. Eve.
The ancestral mother of all of us. A molecule that self-replicated.
In the beginning there was Eve, not Adam, like some books claim.
Adams arrived on the scene about 2 billion years later.
That is how you lure us males out, letting us know there is some sex to be had.
*** reproduction was invented.
That sped things up. Now an offspring was no longer
an almost exact copy of its mother, like in cloning,
but had a mixture of two genetic codes.
And, as you know, the end result is no longer a copy of the father or the mother.
Sometimes it resembles the plumber.
But that speeds up evolution too.
From there things really started going on.
Incredible turns of events, mass extinctions, natural disasters,
super ice ages when almost the entire Earth was covered in a thick mantle of ice.
Life endured even though
95 % of all species went extinct from time to time.
It is necessary to remind all nature lovers out there
in the audience that mother nature is not a gentle mommy,
but a misbehaving substance abuser.
If there was a cosmic social services, we would have been placed in foster care a long time ago.
This world is a dangerous place if you look at how life has done so far.
But survived it has.
The latest unfortunate incindent happened 65 million years ago. Or maybe it was a good thing.
It depends on how you look at it. Bad for the dinosaurs.
A big rock happened to hit the Earth. One of those remnants that had floated
around for 4,5 billion years since the formation of the Solar System.
It hit the Earth causing a true ecological catastrophy.
All dinosaurs,
rulers of Earth, went extinct. Puny little creatures
crawled from the undergrowth and looked around in wonder after surviving a nuclear winter.
Small creatures resembling shrews and rats.
Our ancestors. Then they pulled on t-shirts:
'All this and brains too'. Age of the mammals had begun.
Fast forward again. Maybe 5 million years ago
somewhere in Africa a group on apes jumped down from trees.
They moved to the savannahs. And after a blink of an eye
they were developing stone axes and space rockets.
There was the short history of the Universe in about 3 minutes.
But! Now you don't have to read the Brief History of Time.
But, this doesn't really tell anything, if we think about it.
This is just what happened.
If we start to think about it, something smells fishy.
Namely, how did this happen.
How did the Universe get more and more complex from that simple beginning.
And because,
apart from one, you don't look quite smart enough to be astronomy students,
I took the Universe with me today.
I have it here.
Let's take out the Universe and play with it.
There you go.
Last night I was sitting at home and built a toy model of the Universe.
I hope it hasn't been broken. Universes are so fragile, especially the badly made ones.
Here we have a fancy, complex universe.
I'm quite proud of this one.
It only took two glasses of fine malt whiskey.
We have trees here. And, if you look carefully, there are a couple of apes that have climbed down from trees.
This is what the Universe is like.
Full of complex structures and movements.
This is what all researchers study and regular people wonder.
There is always something new, something surprising.
But here comes the big but.
The Universe was broken.
This is what happens in life.
Everything always seems to go downhill.
Order turns into disorder.
Let's take an egg and play with it.
Oops. I was planning to take an egg with me, but I thought I would have to clean after myself.
How did it go.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
This is how it always is. Everything seems to go downhill.
If I want to make something, something more complex, I have to build it.
Apparently I am no lego expert. Oh, and it broke again.
Always these things break.
So, how did the Universe get the way it is. Where did all this structure,
this information, all these surprises come from.
Here I have the early Universe like I promised.
All sorts of things.
Total mess. This is what the Universe was like.
Different kinds of particles. Protons, neutrons,
Higgs bosons and so on.
And then the Universe just started to expand, to spread out.
Well, how do we get any structures from this.
This is the great, fundamental question to which we don't know the answer.
If this lego block universe was the real Universe,
we would see that in some places blocks would join together
without me pressing them together like this.
Here and there structures appear.
Stars, dance theaters,
pop-up days. How? Why?
What is the invisible hand that makes all this happen?
Let's go back to the very beginning. Goodbye Universe for now.
You have done your duty.
If someone wants, you can come play with the Universe with me during intermission.
This is where it all began.
Universe, when it was one millionth of a second old.
There were only three kinds of blocks.
There were other blocks, but you don't have to care about them.
They are not part of this story, like Jenni Vartiainen would sing.
There were three kinds of quarks. Quark porridge.
The Universe was homogenous. No stars,
no structures. If someone had been there to observe the Universe,
it would have looked quite hopeless. That's not going to become anything, born dead.
No pop-up universe even though it popped out into existence.
Totally useless.
But then...
The Universe plays fair. It abides its own set of rules.
Two quarks found each other.
And a third quark.
And just like when Matt and Mary get together,
the result is not just Matt+Mary.
It is family Smith, which is something completely different from Matt and Mary, together or separately.
Emergence. Something new was born.
Three quarks joined together and they were no longer just three quarks.
Particles are more fun than people, they like to do things in threes.
It's a proton.
What we are all made of. Look at that.
Another three particles found each other.
Click, Click. Click. A different kind of threesome.
What is this? Oh my, it has become a neutron.
This is how matter was born.
Quarks joined together in the first fraction of a second of the Universe.
There was no more quark porridge. Now there was proton and neutron porridge.
Why did this happen? Why did three quarks find each other?
Why three? Why not five or seventeen?
Or why didn't they just live bachelor or bachelorette lives all the time?
Because the laws of the Universe are like that. Because the world is ordered like that.
And in time,
when some more time had passed, when the Universe was a few seconds old,
two protons - two hydrogen nuclei
and two neutrons found each other.
They joined together.
And what did we get?
Helium. The next element.
And so on and so forth. The laws of the Universe are such that somewhere,
locally, order can increase.
Particles have a tendency to join together. To form ever longer, strange chains.
And the end result is not just the sum of its parts but something new altogether.
This kind of white block for example.
In legos this lump won't change into a white block, but let's say this is helium.
This is hydrogen.
And all the time the story continues. Always more complexity.
The Big *** couldn't do anything more.
Only hydrogen and helium. Those two building blocks.
But even that was a step forward from the boring quark porridge.
Then, here and there,
the homogenous, cooling gas started to lump together.
Why?
Because it had to obey the laws of the cosmos. In this case gravity.
It simply collapsed under its own weight.
Denser and denser, hotter and hotter.
The same way that I can hit my own forehead. My forehead gets hotter,
because the energy has to go somewhere. It heats up my forehead.
I shouldn't have hit quite so hard.
Gas got hotter. It became a star.
The gas had no option. It had to organize itself like that.
A star was born, and a star is much more complex than a cloud of gas in space.
At Tuorla Observatory many of my colleagues have spent
their entire professional careers as astronomers trying to understand what the Sun is doing.
Sun's activity, magnetic fields,
sunspots, eruptions etc.
All the time order increases in the Universe.
And inside stars too.
In the hot centers of stars particles have no option but to fuse together.
Hydrogen turns into helium and helium into heavier elements.
Carbon,
oxygen, nitrogen,
phosphorus, sulphur,
iron and so on.
This kind of a universe started to form.
Full of building blocks. And blocks that started to join together according to their own laws.
To more and more complex structures.
There is structure in the world.
The world is not just chaos, just a mess.
Because laws of nature drive particles together.
Atoms join into molecules.
Molecules form longer and longer chains.
This is no fantasy. We can see this happen in interstellar space.
Blocks, heavier elements spewed out by stars that died ages ago.
There they join together. Carbon having fun with all other atoms
forming longer and longer chains. Even amino acids are formed.
Basic building blocks that we are made of.
It would be tempting to think that something like DNA could be formed there too,
but we can't detect that with current technology.
Complexity increases all the time.
More and more wonderful Universe.
The Earth, after it had formed,
was literally full of manna from heaven - complex molecules.
Nuclear ashes of long dead stars.
Remember that you are nuclear waste.
Or, if we are more exact, men are nuclear waste and women are stardust.
Same thing, we all come from stars that died long time ago.
When I pick my nose,
a narrow-minded person might see just a booger.
But I see the insides of an ancient giant star. That is where the heavier elements
- carbon, nitrogen, oxygen - raw materials of life have come.
Complexity grows on Earth.
Our universe, living things, come from that.
Except that I just broke my living creature.
It becomes... here is the first Eve:
molecule that made a copy of itself.
That was it. Now we are here.
The world, because it follows it own rules, had no option after it had bothered to exist.
Step by step, evolution of particles. Quarks couldn't survive on their own.
They had to form threesomes.
Atoms couldn't make it on their own, except for a few noble gases.
When they see another atom somewhere, they go at it like a *** player in a nightclub.
They couple, and not just couple.
They cluster.
And evolution goes on from stars to interstellar gas, back to stars,
planets, to surfaces of planets. And finally we are here to marvel the world.
Was this a better story? More believable?
If you think about it, it is still missing something.
Namely, why?
Why do three quarks have to click-click-click join together and form a proton?
Indeed they have to. According to laws of the world, like I said.
But where do the laws come from? I am just postponing the explanation.
Why does the Universe have such laws
that it started to expand instead of collapsing back in
and saying 'not today'?
Why did the quarks find each other?
Why do stars explode and not just collapse into black holes?
Why? Why? Why?
All this story... why we live in a universe like this?
We understand how structures grew.
We understand how order increases locally,
although it decreases elsewhere according to the laws of thermodynamics, according to entropy.
But local increase of structures, increase of order,
increase of surprises. A happier and happier Universe.
But where did the laws come from? Where did the laws come from that made those things?
One option is, of course,
that God snapped his metaphysical fingers in the beginning
and, because he was more educated than first year physics students, was able to make the Universe.
Adjust the laws in ways that all this would come to pass.
That throughout billions of years
he wouldn't have to gather up his sleeves and make the molecules and living things himself,
but it would happen on its own.
It is one possible option.
If you believe, like many here undoubtedly believe, that God exists,
this the best proof I know that God really exists.
Because he has created us a universe where it is possible for
structure, complexity, happiness, surprise and movements to grow.
Where humans can appear.
We can easily imagine other universes where something, gravitational constant for instance,
is slightly different.
There stars collapse into black holes and you can't make a lot from them.
At least not TED events.
Don't invite black holes to the next TED event.
Is there another option? Of course there is.
Godless astronomers and cosmologists, like Kari Enqvist and others, ponder what else there could be.
Perhaps our Universe, this vast and wonderful Universe is just one bubble in a multiverse.
A concept incomprehensible to our minds, but not necessarily to mathematics.
Like in a fine glass of champagne,
bubbles appear out of nowhere: pop-pop-pop-pop.
There is a picture of a multiverse.
Our Universe is just one bubble there.
And in which bubble are we?
Of course the one that is suitable for us. We are not in a bubble where all stars collapse into black holes.
Not in a bubble where laws of nature are different.
Not in a bubble where there is no time,
which would be a very boring but plausible alternative.
So, what is going on?
Like the introduction said,
we, the third chimpanzees, don't know everything about the Universe yet.
We somewhat understand the history of the world.
The things I told in three minutes.
We understand how that history has come to pass.
The things I told in the following 14 minutes
- at least I hope so. But why?
The ultimate question. What is really going on? That we still do not know.
Thank you!