IN DA Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth. If the text message bible makes you cringe, perhaps you’d better stop reading now. Because some physicists believe there is another way to pick up a divine message that will leave traditionalists rolling their eyes to the heavens. Forget scripture, they say, try looking out to space instead.
Impossible? Not necessarily, according to physicists Stephen Hsu and Anthony Zee. No one knows why our universe came into existence. But Hsu and Zee argue that if some superior being or beings did intentionally create it, they might have left an elaborate signature in the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation of the big bang. And in 20 or 30 years’ time, we might finally be able to spot the message, the “word of God” if you like.
“I sometimes wonder what’s the most mind-boggling thing that could happen during my lifetime,” says Hsu, a particle physicist at the University of Oregon in Eugene. “One of them would be to come into contact with an alien civilisation. But it would be more exciting to find some message from a creator – the implications would be even more profound.”
Advertisement
While we don’t know what triggered the creation of our universe, there is good evidence that it came into being as a searing hot, expanding fireball some 13.7 billion years ago. During the first split second, the theory goes, it underwent a particularly dramatic expansion, with space ballooning outwards faster than light.
One of the developers of this inflation theory, Andrei Linde of Stanford University in California, has speculated that some techno-wizard in another universe could have provided the initial trigger. Linde’s work hints that it might be possible for someone to spawn a universe like ours by compressing a speck of matter to an unimaginably high density, something like 1065 megatonnes per cubic centimetre. That could create a strange state called a false vacuum and trigger catastrophic inflation, with new space and matter exploding into existence from the negative energy of the gravitational field.
No one knows whether that is really possible. But imagine that some being, or beings, did create our universe – and they wanted us to know that. How would they send us a message?
From a religious standpoint at least, there has been no shortage of suggestions. People have proposed, for example, that God might have encoded a message in the genetic sequence of our DNA, or within the striking rock formations of Colorado’s Grand Canyon. But would a hypothetical creator leave a message only for humans, and specifically Americans? “That’s just chauvinism – as if God would only write His message in the United States,” says Zee, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Messages of this kind would also require some inconvenient, last-minute intervention from the creator, who would be hastily scribbling a message into DNA or rock formations billions of years after the big bang. That doesn’t make sense, Hsu and Zee argue. The logical thing would be for the creator to send a single, universal message, one that would be visible to every technologically advanced civilisation. That points to one obvious option: the message would lie in the cosmic microwave background.
The microwave background formed when the universe was just 380,000 years old. By this time, the expanding big bang fireball had thinned out enough to become transparent to the photons of light bouncing around inside. So for the first time, light could flood freely through the universe. Today, we can still measure this radiation as microwaves heading in every direction in the sky. The radiation has slight variations in temperature that reflect small density variations of the early universe.
What’s special about the microwave background is that it is universal. The expanding universe has swept some distant pockets of space beyond the reach of any man-made telescope, so we cannot see galaxies evolving there. But the microwave background radiation is like ubiquitous cosmic wallpaper with the same mottled pattern, and it is potentially visible to advanced civilisations everywhere. “I think of it like a giant billboard in the sky,” says Zee. “Anybody can see it, regardless of whether you have five heads and three eyes, even if your biology is not based on carbon.”
“Even if you have five heads and three eyes, you can still see the microwave background”
Our most accurate measurements of the ripples in the microwave background come from NASA’s WMAP satellite, launched in 2001. Its measurements are often plotted to show the temperature difference between pairs of points on the sky versus their angular separation, which creates a curve with series of peaks (see Graph). The signals so far show no sign of any cryptic message. But the error margins are still fairly large, so it does not necessarily mean there isn’t one.
Hsu and Zee say that when future, more detailed observations are made – with the error bars reduced by a factor of about 100 – it is possible that a message could come into focus as little lumps and bumps on the curve.
Earlier this year, they calculated how much information such a message could contain (). The amount of information is limited by a slight statistical variation in the microwave background ripples depending on where you live in the universe. Having allowed for that noise, Hsu and Zee calculate that the ripples could encode approximately 100,000 bits of information – enough to relate the entire first scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “That’s enough to say something substantive, to say something that no one could deny was a real message,” says Hsu.
Except the message is hardly going to be from Shakespeare. So what might it say? Hsu draws a parallel with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI researchers assume that aliens would reveal their existence by sending a signal that is obviously not random and encodes some natural sequence, like the digits of the number pi. The message would essentially be: “We’re here, and we’ve figured out what you’ve figured out.”
Similarly, the creator of the universe might hallmark His handiwork with a message about universal laws. Hsu speculates that the first part of the message could be a kind of key – a simple statement that is easy to decode. That might be the simplest matrices of the algebra that describes nature’s fundamental forces. “They could give out very specific information that all the physicists of all the advanced civilisations would immediately recognise,” says Hsu. There would still be room for plenty more information – maybe even telling us something we didn’t know, like the route to a “theory of everything”.
But how could a creator physically stamp the code on the microwave background? That bit is tricky. Maybe He encoded a message by somehow programming the details of inflation before kick-starting the new cosmos. “The creator would not have to interfere with the universe after the initial moment – it would merely evolve according to physical laws,” says Hsu.
Anyway, he argues, someone with technology sophisticated enough to make a new universe would probably also be smart enough to work out how to write a message.
Hsu and Zee know that it’s a pretty wacky idea. But then again, it’s not impossible. “The ultimate thing, as always with physics, is to do the observations and look,” says Hsu. “We should consider everything that is possible and testable, and I think this will be testable within the next 20 to 30 years.”
In that time, precise observations of the microwave background could become available from satellites. When they do, Hsu thinks someone might set up a project like SETI@home to look for a possible message. Since 1999, more than 5 million people have downloaded SETI@home programs onto their home computers to analyse signals from the Arecibo radio telescope and look for patterns that might be broadcasts from alien civilisations.
Likewise, your humble home computer might one day trawl the microwave background in search of a divine message. “People could donate their computer time to just beat on the data and see if there are any strange patterns,” Hsu says. It’s a long shot, maybe, but finding God on your laptop? That beats little green men any day.
