George Smoot's Wrinkles in Time: Thrill of the Hunt

(Reflections on WRINKLES IN TIME by George Smoot with Keay Davidson, published by Morrow Press.)

I never look at the stars without remembering that I'm looking back into time. The light of one star left its source a century ago, and the light of another left at the time of Jesus, and so forth. I also understand the Doppler effect, how we can know that an object is approaching or receding by the wavelength of its light. I "get" the idea that gravity is the curvature of space rather than some kind of magnetic tugging. But when I try to grasp George Smoot's lifetime work of mapping the universe's grand structure, well, it's like I've got too many variables to juggle in my mind at once, and I drop all of them.

Mapping the universe, looking at light from its first seconds, and measuring distances between clusters of galaxies: Wouldn't that be like trying to drive through town with blacked-out windows, using photos of the streets made during the previous decade?

So this book contains large swaths of text that I just had to take for granted, couched in a narrative of decades spent on one hunt, pursuing leads and double-checking results over a period of five decades. Smoot begins the story with a primer in ancient physics, mixed in with the story of his own childhood fascinations with stars.

Throughout the story, he communicates gratitude for others whose work flowed into his, and for many others who worked with him. The work takes him to mountaintop observatories, to launches of balloons three stories tall, to Antarctica (where he vividly describes his panic when his overexertion caused him to inhale too quickly, freezing the liquid in his runny nose, stopping his ability to breathe, doubling the gasping...) and to launchpads for satellites. Much of the work seems to be mundane problem-solving, such as how to screen out light and radio waves from earth when trying to detect those from outer space. He's always working in teams, and it always feels like guys in a college dorm room somewhere, puzzling over a problem together. Sometimes he fretted that another team would get the data first, but he seems to have been genuinely disinterested in the outcome, actively trying to prove himself wrong in order to be sure that he was right.

For me, the new concept that I can grasp is the idea that, in the first seconds of bang, there were "seeds" or wrinkles that, eons later, are the sources of inconceivably vast curtains of "dark matter" that dwarf galaxies by comparison, drawing those galaxies with gravitational force at outrageous speeds.

His conclusion mentions those who scorn the Big Bang theory because it seems to lend support to Christian fundamentalists. Smoot diplomatically slides to an assertion that he disagrees with his old teacher: the universe isn't pointless, isn't random. The discoveries of which he is a part point to an increasing sense of unity - as all organs and limbs of a human body stem from the same DNA, he says (p. 296). And, he concludes, "We are awed by the ultimate simplicity and power of the creativity of physical nature -- and by its beauty on all scales."