Cosmic Dawn
The early Universe was dominated by photons, or radiation so hot that matter could then exist only in a dense state of ‘plasma’. As the Universe expanded, it cooled, but it was still too hot for electrons to combine with protons to form the simplest atoms of hydrogen. About 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the ambient temperature had dropped to about 3000 degrees and when hydrogen atoms started forming, photons were no longer energetic enough to knock electrons off the atoms which would absorb and re-emit the photons to be scattered by other atoms, slowly making the Universe transparent to light.
Photons or radiation which had embraced matter particles ever since they had met each other at the beginning of time, were now letting loose this embrace to permanently decouple from each other, and the Universe was now transparent and filled with yellowish light, the colour corresponding to matter heated to 3000 degrees. This light would subsequently fade away with progressive expansion of the Universe, its wavelength getting stretched by the expansion, and through billions of years of cooling, would lose most of its energy to lie in microwaves now at a temperature of only 2.73-degree Kelvin forming what is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).
If we can take a picture of our 300,000-year-old Universe, we would be able to see the nascent structures in that Universe ~ the small lumps of matter that were formed from the tiny perturbations in the very early stages. These lumps would later evolve into proto-galaxies, galaxies, stars and planets shaping the large-scale structure of the Universe of today. This Universe would be open to our sight, unlike the plasma-dominated Universe before. Since plasma is opaque to radiation, the surface of the 300,000- year-old Universe would permanently block our sight and we would not be able to ‘see’ anything earlier than that, since we can see only with the help of light.
Therefore, the 300,000-yearold Universe is the earliest frame of reference for any measurement to be made, and we can call it the Cosmic Dawn. But no telescope has as yet peered that deep. At 5:50 PM IST on 25 December when the world was celebrating another muted Christmas, a majestic beast of a space telescope ~ the most powerful ever built so far-was launched into the sky on European Space Agency’s Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou in French Guiana, heralding what scientists are calling the “Apollo Moment” for astronomy.
As the 7- ton, $10 billion, James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ), named after the NASA boss during its heydays of 1960s, began its space journey after countless delays, it will look far deeper into the early Universe than ever before and will be our premier observatory in space for the next decade. It will hopefully be able to peer into the Cosmic Dawn.
Space telescopes, also known as astronomical space observatories, are our eyes to the Universe. Space offers clearer views not obstructed by the Earth’s atmosphere, enabling a look into the farthest reaches of the Cosmos. They are like time machines since the light reaching them today from distant galaxies and stars had begun their journey millions of years ago. If today a star is discovered at a distance of say one million light-years away, as its light reaches the telescope, it carries visual information about it pertaining to the time light has left the star and we see its image as it existed one million years ago. The more distant star or the galaxy, the farther back in time are the telescopes able to gaze.
The golden era of astronomy began with the launch of Hubble space telescope in 1990, which so far been our most reliable eye into deep space. With its 2.4 metre (diameter) mirror and operating in the visible and ultraviolet and near-infrared (IR) range of the electromagnetic spectrum, Hubble has provided stunning images of countless cosmic objects, shedding light on the scale of the universe, the life cycle of stars, black holes, and formation of the first galaxies. Currently receiving its fifth and final makeover, it is expected to last at least another five years, overlapping with the JWST. Since Hubble, NASA has launched several powerful space telescopes ~ most importantly the Chandra X-ray Observatory (1999 and still working), Spitzer (2003-2020), Herschel (2009-2013) and Planck (2009- 2013).
There are now more than a dozen major observatories in space but most of these, like Hubble, are placed in orbits between 500-600 kms above the earth. But JWST dwarfs all in scale and scope. With its 6.5-metre primary mirror shielded by a five-layer, tennis court-sized sunshield that is designed to block the heat from Sun and ensure the extremely cool temperatures essential for its operation and designed to operate at the IR range of the spectrum, it will be 100 times more sensitive than Hubble. It will also be positioned far deeper into space, 1.5 million km from Earth, far away from the earth’s ‘radiation pollution’ at a point known as L2 which is one of the five points, called the Lagrange’s points, where the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth cancel each other out, giving it stability while requiring the minimal energy to keep it there.
Directly behind Earth in the line joining the Sun and the Earth, an object placed at L2 would be shielded by the Earth from the Sun’s rays as it goes around the Sun, in sync with the Earth, making it cold enough to reach the cryogenic temperatures its instruments have been designed to operate at. Light from the early Universe is no longer in the visible range but in the IR range and can detected only with IR cameras. Its four IR cameras can pierce through stellar dust to reveal structure that can’t otherwise be seen in the visible range.
The JWST’s primary mirror should be cooled to ~ 223 degree Celsius to enable it to pick up the faintest IR light from distant galaxies that formed in the early Universe. The other side of the shields facing the Sun would be scorching hot, at average temperatures of 93 degrees. The mirror and the sunshields are so large that no rocket could carry them unless folded ~ 18 hexagonal sections will unfold it. The mirror is made of beryllium that has tensile strength more than steel but is lighter than aluminium; it is plated with gold to reflect the IR light.
The equipment is incredibly complex ~ it has as many as 250,000 individually controlled shutters to ensure its illumination by the correct narrow slice of the sky. No scientific instrument as complex and sophisticated has ever been sent into space and should something go wrong while the telescope redeploys itself, there will be no possibility of any astronaut performing repairs on it that far away, unlike the Hubble. Apart from the IR cameras, it will be equipped with coronagraphs to block light from a star to enable observing the planets orbiting around it.
Among the most eagerly awaited images from the JWST are those of the first proto-galaxies emerging on a flat and shapeless cosmos, evolving into massive galaxies that would host the first generation of stars. It would probe the mysterious quasers that are believed to be superluminous, supermassive black holes typically located at the galactic centres, feeding on infalling matter, and unleashing fantastic torrents of radiation. It would peer into planetary origins and smaller bodies like asteroids and comets, our solar system, and yes, exoplanets ~ planets that lie in the so-called Goldilocks Zone where water exists in the liquid form ~ these are most suited for life to evolve and develop into intelligent life.
It is to be seen if the JWST would be able to help resolve the Cosmic enigmas like dark energy ~ the unknown 68 per cent of the universe’s content which is responsible for its accelerating expansion and the elusive dark matter that makes up another 27 per cent of the Universe and is believed crucial to galaxy formation, as measurements suggest that most galaxies are accumulations of dark matter with stars scattered in between.
There is also a recent mystery involving the so-called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) ~ the unexplained flashes of radiation that last for milliseconds and are detectable from billions of lightyears away but not attributable to any source. These mysteries today lie at the frontier of physics and resolving them would really usher in a new golden age in astronomy and astrophysics.
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Why STEAM Needs the Humanities to Understand Science
Materialism has been waning in influence in the scientific community, but what has replaced it is not clear. Are we in the midst of a Kuhnian paradigm shift? Possibly.
The decline of materialist philosophy has been rooted in 1) the belief in "intelligent design," that God exists, and it is immaterial how it came to be; 2) unsatisfactory explanations for mental and conscious phenomena and the "mind-body problem"; and 3) recent developments in 20th century quantum physics.
Thomas Nagle's Mind and Cosmos is a recent example of the waning of the materialist paradigm. He suggests that given that the human mind is part of the natural order of things, any philosophy of human nature that cannot account for it is fundamentally flawed.
The recent studies of psychedelic substances have shown that mind is irreducible to matter. The "mystical experiences" at the heart of individual transformations have led to an acceptance of the mind-altering power of psychoactive medicinal plants, long seen as the purview of mystics and quacks.
As Michael Pollan stated in the Wall Street Journal, "Typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a merging of the self with nature or the universe, a 'mystical experience' can permanently shift a person’s perspective and priorities. The pivotal role of the mystical experience points to something novel about psychedelic therapy: It depends for its success not strictly on the action of a chemical but on the powerful psychological experience that the chemical can occasion."
Thus, I reached out to a colleague, Jeffrey Kripal, an expert in the history of religion, to enlighten us on the connection between science and spirituality, mind and matter, and humanities and the STEAM fields. In his recent book, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, he makes a strong case for the humanities, and why the STEAM fields would be empty without the human psyche or the collective soul.
Dinesh Sharma: You propose that we reimagine the humanities as the study of consciousness coded in culture. The study of "culture" since the work of Clifford Geertz is the study of local cultures, but the consciousness you are proposing to study is almost beyond time, place, and context.
Jeffrey Kripal: Your question encodes my answer. It is a both-and, not an either-or. The anthropology you are describing is conventional anthropology. Its dogmatic localism is precisely what has gotten us into the situation we are now in—a kind of nihilism and inability to imagine shared meaning across cultures.
DS: You say Western knowledge systems are at a precipice of making a 'flip'. This is actually the case in physics. But the new physics is being constrained within the domain of the hard sciences, not permeating the larger culture, due to the politics of knowledge.
JK: You are reading me correctly. I think we are at a crossroads. Our social and spiritual imaginations have not caught up with the quantum reality our mathematics, our physics, and frankly our technologies all use and suppose. We are living in a vast schizophrenia. It does little good when elite physicists complain about popular attempts to permeate culture or mistake the quantum physics. So what? Correct them. Help them. And let’s move on.
DS: Are you looking to "flip" the "materialistic paradigm" dominant in the academy since the enlightenment period?
JK: Well, yes, of course, but the book is not about me doing anything. It’s about a larger cultural, philosophical, and scientific shift that is happening all around us. I am just reporting.
DS: I like your phrase, "science only studies the things it can study." Thus, it can be defined by what is selectively excluded from the sciences?
JK: Science works so well because it gets to say what it will study, and what it will not. We are not so fortunate, or we are more fortunate, in the humanities. We study human beings, who never really fit into our paradigms or our models, and, strangest of all, we are human beings studying human beings, so it’s loopy. What I am trying to say in the book is that human beings have all kinds of strange, quantum-like experiences, and we should not ignore or discount them just because they do not play by the rules of our scientific or humanistic games. Quite the contrary, we should change the rules of those games.
DS: Yet, there has been a perennial dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, the "two cultures of the scientific revolution," as CP Snow called it. Do you think the study of Eastern religions helped to remove this impasse?
JK: The study of Asian cultures has mostly been slotted into traditional Western academic categories, like “culture,” “philosophy,” and “religion.” We have really not taken their ontologies seriously. For the most part, we have only “described” them as “discourses” or considered various political and social identities and thus shoved them into our little boxes. If we took their own philosophical views (and experiences) truly seriously, we would likely take consciousness much more seriously.
DS: You focus on the personal experiences of the 'secular' or 'materialist' scientists, who have had mystical experiences through spiritual practices. How long have you been collecting these stories?
JK: I focus on secular engineers, scientists, and medical professionals because I teach at a STEM-focused university and realized long ago that students will not take traditional religious sources seriously. But when I present them with modern, secular scientists, they do a double-take. It is much harder to ignore them. I have been collecting these stories for about two decades.
DS: What are precognitive dreams that you think are prophetic or tapping into another realm of time?
JK: Of all psychical or paranormal phenomena, I am probably most impressed with precognitive phenomena, which tend to happen in dreams. The work of Eric Wargo is astonishing here. If you have not read it, drop this immediately and go read Time Loops. Trust me. Eric’s ideas predict a lot of the things I actually encounter in the stories I've collected. I have always been more Freudian, but the “unconscious” here is hardly what Freud thought. Eric basically argues that there is no such thing as the unconscious; that the unconscious is consciousness transposed in time; that what Freud was studying was really communications spread out in time and often seeping back from the future. I do not know if he is correct, but these are the kinds of rabbit holes one is led down once one begins to take these phenomena truly seriously.
DS: In the book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, the socio-biologist EO Wilson discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might, in the future, unite them with the humanities. Biologists are likely to see consciousness as evolving over time, through millions of years, in various adaptations and mutations through reptiles, fish, amphibians, mammals, and humans.
JK: Well, sure, but the biological sciences have a long way to go. They have real hang-ups around vitalism and teleology, for example. I think both of those are real mistakes—they might be pragmatic and useful mistakes, but they are still wrong. Life is not reducible to chemistry. Evolution evolves itself over and over again toward obvious goals (like the eye). I have a favorite quote here. It’s a definition of hydrogen that goes something like this, “Hydrogen: a light odorless gas that, given enough time, turns into people.” Appropriately, it is listed as anonymous. No one wrote it.
DS: Finally, Elon Musk says, SpaceX Starship could protect the 'Light of Consciousness.’ The human-carrying spaceship could play a key role in preserving humanity in the universe. What do you say to Musk's idea? He wants humans to be a multi-planetary civilization.
JK: I always hesitate to address topics I know very little about, so I am not sure what to say about Elon Musk. I do know that intellectuals are very good at critique, at saying “No,” and very bad at affirmation, at saying “Yes.” I also know that individuals and communities very much need something cosmic to affirm and dream about. I work and live in Houston, just across campus from the very football stadium where President Kennedy gave his famous “moon-shot” speech in September of 1962. I think we need moon-shots. We also need, of course, to ask serious questions about such grand projects: "Why not work harder to preserve this planet?" "How can we be more thoughtful about who benefits from such a project?" "Are we really even capable of subsisting off-planet?" Having asked such questions, I am certain that, had previous grand human enterprises (including the Apollo space program), none of which were morally pure, waited for the blessings of academics, they would have never happened. In short, I don’t know about Elon Musk or his project, but I am suspicious of our suspicions.
