Cracks in the Big Bang

A few weeks ago came the puzzling discovery of a huge, fully formed galaxy at the edges of the observable universe. Since looking far into the distance means looking way back in time, thanks to the long interval it took that galaxy’s light to reach us, we’re seeing one of the earliest galaxies.

The problem is that, back near the beginning, only the first clouds of hydrogen should have been around. It would take a billion years for fully developed galaxies to form. And yet, there it is.

We hoped the new James Webb Telescope would reveal the earliest stars and galaxies once the universe became transparent 300,000 years after the Big Bang.

The universe was a fog before then, and light could not travel freely. But once everything had cooled enough, light flew everywhere, with some places just 1/50,000 of a degree hotter or cooler than everywhere else. These small anisotropies were presumably the seeds of today’s stars and galaxies.

We assume the Big Bang was indeed the birth of the universe for a variety of very sound scientific reasons, but also because we know of nothing that’s birthless, unless you believe Erwin Schrodinger and his Quantum Theory buddies when they concluded that consciousness (awareness) is eternal, and that it’s the most fundamental property of the cosmos.

If the universe is eternal, the Big Bang could still have happened. Given the flat overall topology of space discovered by Berkeley researchers in 2012, the Big Bang could merely be a local event, so that deep within the non-observable, most-distant cosmos lurk other Big Bangs.

Or, going in a different direction, skeptics and cynics could use this latest discovery as evidence that the Big Bang never happened at all. 

Oppenheimer legacy: You’re radioactive

Now that the film Oppenheimer has earned justly warranted awards, more people than ever are aware of the myriad atmospheric nuclear bomb testing in the 1950’s. What folks don’t generally know is that the radioactive material blown into the air is still with us.

Out of every trillion normal carbon atoms in your body, there’s a single atom of carbon 14. And while that chemically acts like normal carbon, it’s a bit radioactive.

Carbon 14 is created when cosmic rays — mostly high-speed protons zooming here from distant parts of our galaxy — strike nitrogen in our atmosphere. This changes it to “heavy” carbon, an unstable atom with two extra neutrons. As your body’s C14 decays, it gives you a radiation dose of one millirem per year. That’s about 1/360th of the natural radiation you receive annually. Nothing to worry about.

It’s less than what you get from eating bananas. The potassium radioactivity of a single banana fully equals one percent of your daily natural exposure. It’s enough that the radioactivity from a truckload of bananas has set off alarms when passing through Radiation Portal Monitors, now routinely used at U.S. ports to detect nuclear material. Still, you’d need to gobble down 70,000 bananas to equal the radiation from one CT scan.

But let’s stick with radioactive carbon. There’s normally 50 tons of it in our atmosphere. When you dine on plants or animals or both, you’re continually taking into your body the same ratio of carbon 14 that is found in the air and everywhere on Earth. But testing of atom bombs in the 1950s significantly increased atmospheric C-14: for about eight years the air had 51½ tons of it. Thus, if you were born in the fifties, you have much more C14 in your tooth enamel and elsewhere in your body than the rest of us. So even if you want to keep your age a secret, “they” could find out by testing you.

Half of any batch of C14 decays in 5740 years. When an animal or plant dies it stops breathing and therefore stops replenishing its C-14. A corpse’s normal carbon 12 lasts forever, but its C-14 continually diminishes. After 5700 years half of the carbon 14 is gone, and after 23,000 years only 1/8 of it remains. Thus measuring a body’s ratio of normal carbon to C14 lets you ascertain the age of anything that was once alive, including clothing made of once-living materials like wool or cotton, like the fragments found on mummies. 

And, thanks to Oppenheimer and his team, even living items can now be precisely dated. Like yourself.