Our songs of love to those who bridge the arts and the sciences – #3: Stars held in place, energy is conserved

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:  

“Nature may at times appear to be a Painter or a Philosopher or a Celestial Spirit.  But deep down she is a Scientist.  She is quantitative.  She is logical.  And nothing better illustrates her ruthless and unyielding adherence to that logic than the law of the conservation of energy.  Energy does not appear out of nothing.  Energy does not disappear into nothing.  The energy law is a sacred cow of physics.”

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”:

“With this law [of the conservation of energy] and others like it, nature can be made sense of.  Nature can be calculated.  Nature can be depended on. If you know the initial energy of the unstruck match and then measure the energy in the heated air, you know how high the weight must be lifted.  The total energy is constant.

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!  

“The concept of an unchanging heaven has inspired many poets as a metaphor for permanence and constancy in a world that is ephemeral and changing.  This idea that there was a fixed realm, however remote and unreachable, provided the human psyche with a sense of stability.  No matter what else came and went, the stars were durable and silent witness to the short-lived drama of human lifespan.  The eternal backdrop reiterated a preordained divine origin for the cosmos.  Fixity not only held sway in the human imagination as a fact but also offered a way to anchor human experience.  In Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century allegorical poem, the Divine Comedy, the 8th concentric sphere, depicting paradise, is that of the fixed stars, as postulated by Ptolemy. 
It was in his 1917 paper on his theory of cosmology where outlines the implications of a now famous new theory of gravity, general relativity, that he included a term, the cosmological constant, denoted by the Greek letter lambda.  Lambda, a counterforce that opposes the attractive nature of gravity, in Einstein’s formulation ensured that stars and the nebulae (as galaxies were then known) remained fixed in the sky”.  

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