Happy New Year … Here on Earth

But What does the Cosmos Care?

It’s the New Year here on planet Earth, and we’re all celebrating, resolving new behaviors, and getting on with the business of life, acting for all the cosmos as if something portentous had just happened when one second ticked over to another on our Earth-based clocks. Certainly it was momentous… for those of us on and near Earth.

For the rest of the universe, time flowed on without the temporal milestone that we humans like to impose on the passage of time during this season. What do the stars care what year it is?  For a star, one moment is pretty much just like another one.  One second of burning fuel to shed light to warm nearby space (and any possible planets) flows to the next.  The same thing holds true for the cosmos at large. For galaxies and their stars and the dark matter halos and the galaxy clusters and the quasars, time isn’t really an issue of interest. Cosmic events take place as they are meant to occur and as governed by the laws of physics, gravity, and quantum mechanics. We understand that because we can observe the universe doing what it does and we can use these laws to explain and help us understand those activities. That’s the very cool thing about science, especially astronomy.  We can observe and explain using understood laws of nature.

But, you might suggest, time is important to us. That’s true.  We are a time-binding species of life. We can’t imagine perceiving or understanding the universe without using time as a kind of measuring device. And, that’s cool. But, that’s the way WE see things.

Stars and galaxies and planets don’t count time.  They are part of the time flow in the sense that their events (their creation, evolution, and deaths) all take place in a linear time flow. But, they don’t have “New Years” in the sense that we do. That is, I suspect, a purely human construct that helps us divide the time flow into something we can understand.

Still, time IS an important factor — it began when the universe did, in the Big Bang.

Now, the Big Bang is fascinating — and it’s a nice topic to start out with on January 1.  The Big Bang is the beginning of the flow of time and the distribution and creation of matter throughout the universe. It began with the universe in a state of existence as an infinitely dense and hot singularity. How long it existed in that state is unknown. At some point, however, something kick-started this singularity into an expansion that continues to this day. It’s not an expansion of matter, like an explosion. In fact, an explosion is not really a good analogy for the Big Bang, which was really the beginning of an expansion of space, carrying the newly created matter of the cosmos (hydrogen, helium,  and a little lithium) along with it. From that matter the first stars were created a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, and from those stars came the other elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.  And, of course, from those elements, came other stars, planets, and us — all in good time.

So, on this birth of the new year, which flowed naturally from the last moments of 2010, it’s interesting to contemplate the new universe, born some 13.7 billion years ago — as humans count time.  For the universe, 2011 is simply the continuation of the expansion of space and time, and the continual births and deaths of stars, collisions of galaxies, creation of planets, and the evolution of life in places where it can exist.