Claustrophobia: Part III

In Steven Weinberg's introduction to cosmology, The First Three Minutes--along with enumerating a dizzying, even ludicrous array of subatomic particles--he describes the beginning of the universe as well as speculates on the end of it. Near the end of his discussion he comments on the reality of the universe: "Flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston . . . below, the earth looks very soft and comfortable--fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" (154). Earlier, in commenting on the end of the universe, when it "collapses" and atoms separate into constituent elements and particles, he asks: "Can we really carry this sad story all the way to its end, to a state of infinite temperature and density? Does time really have a stop some three minutes after the temperature reaches a thousand million degrees? Obviously, we cannot be sure. All the uncetainties . . . in trying to explore the first hundredth of a second . . . will return to perplex us as we look into the last hundredth of a second. Above all, the whole universe must be described in the language of quantum mechanics at temperatures above 100 million million million million degrees (10 32nd degreee K), and no one has any idea what happened then" (152-3). Somehow, words like "Wyoming," "San Francisco," and "Boston" seem comprehensible and tolerable, especially when juxtaposed to "infinite temperature and density." But, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter. Still, what does Robert Frost write? "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars--on stars where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / to scare myself with my own desert places" ("Desert Places" 195).