We love the philosophical and lyrical meditations about stars and the laws of energy by physicist and writer Alan Lightman, who was the first professor at MIT to receive a dual faculty appointment in science and the humanities:
Lightman highlights how we already knew about the “constancy of atoms” during Roman times:
“Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius suggested that the power of the gods over us mortals is limited by the constancy of atoms. Atoms could not be created or destroyed, said Lucretius. The gods could not make objects suddenly appear out of nothing or vanish into nothing because all things are made out of atoms, and the number of atoms remains constant… Lucretius’s idea was a conservation law. The poet did not know how to tally up the number of atoms, as we tally up the number of joules in a box, but something was constant, and that constancy clearly provided great psychological comfort as well as understanding of nature. Let the gods and the supernatural have their sway, but they cannot alter the number of atoms here in our earthly world.”
This of course presages our modern law of the conservation of energy, but “we have lost the constancy of the stars but gained the constancy of energy”:
Ironically, we have traded one constancy for another. We have lost the constancy of the stars but gained the constancy of energy. The first is a physical object, the second a concept. Scientists cannot prove without a doubt that the total energy in a closed system is constant. But any violation of that principle would destroy the foundations of physics and suggest an unlawful universe. The idea of a lawful universe is itself an Absolute.”
Oftentimes our imaginations of the future precede inventions or discoveries by years …
The astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan noted how Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Eureka” (1848) spoke of the universe as restless and evolving. She noted:
“He had not conducted any scientific research, but he was right … It took astronomers more than 80 years to support Poe’s claim. In 1929, Edwin Powell Hubble, using state-of-the-art hundred-inch telescope on Mount Wilson in Southern California, uncovered an incredible correlation: the farther a galaxy was from us, the faster it appeared to be hurtling away. “
She continues, describing how “what if” questions and the imaginative power of writers and artists can be very fruitful and insightful:
“His observation made sense only if the universe was expanding. This discovery caused a radical shift in our conception of the cosmos. Before Hubble’s discovery, every civilization and mythology in every part of the world believed unstintingly in a universe that held steady – and was unchanging. In creation myths across millennia, cultures had grappled with the ever-changing natural phenomena on earth – rain, thunder, lightning, floods, and drought – by invoking a fixed heaven, a static cosmos. Right from classical antiquity, astronomers and philosophers (there was no distinction between the two until the modern age) divided the night sky into two categories – first, the fixed stars that appear to rise and set but which retain their relative arrangements over time, and second, “wandering stars” which included the planets, the sun, and the moon.”
Noting a connection between Ptolemy, Dante and Einstein, she links Einstein’s 1917 paper on general relativity and the cosmological constant with the concept of an unchanging universe of fixed stars as found in Dante’s paradise, and how Einstein’s lambda explains how the stars are held in place!