Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  Knowledge of our eventual death requires that we pay attention to life. The situation we find ourselves in—not just the fact that we die, but how incredibly rich the world is, how many things it offers us—demands that we manage the many choices we have in our relatively short lifespan. We’ve got this burden of figuring out what things are most worth going after, knowing, consciously or not, that someday we’ll look back and possibly discover we didn’t make the best choices. Although we have the chance for some do-overs, both in terms of our goals and our strategies for reaching them, we’ve got to be careful.

  Okay, I’m paying attention. I’m trying to be careful. Swimming alone in the Amazon River might not be strategically sound, but to me, the experience—the challenge—was an important activity to engage in. Following my father through the Mexican desert of Cataviña, poking the sand for rattlesnakes—okay, the odds are a little dicey again. Worth the risk? The answer depends on what I’m trying to do with my life.

  What adds value to our lives is the content of our lives—what should we fill our lives with? Sure, we want to pack in as much stuff as we can. But what’s really worth going after? The way I see it, there are two different strategies.

  •Strategy #1: Given the dangers of failure if you aim too ambitiously, you should settle for the kinds of goals that you’re virtually guaranteed you’ll accomplish. The pleasures of food, company, sex, hot fudge sundaes: eat, drink, and be merry. Pack in lots of small pleasures.

  •Strategy #2: The first option is all well and good—you’ve got a pretty high chance of succeeding. The trouble is, those are small potatoes. Some of the most valuable things life don’t come so readily, and there are no guarantees you’ll achieve them. You might want to write a novel, compose a symphony, solve the biological mysteries of macro-evolution and punctuated equilibrium theory, or, for that matter, raise a family. Some fans of strategy number two might argue that these things are the most valuable things life can offer, that a life filled with these is more valuable than a life filled with small potatoes.

  But if you had a guarantee—if God or the Universe or the Random Force Behind Sitting-up Mud said, “I promise you’ll get the life you want. Would you rather have your blip-of-a-life filled with food and drink, or do you want a life filled with accomplishment?”—you might say the life filled with accomplishment holds more value. The trouble is, of course, a life aiming for greater accomplishments is also a life with a greater chance of failure. You aim to write the great American novel, and ten years later you decide you don’t have it in you. Your article detailing the evolution of the arachnid internal skeleton of scorpions doesn’t make quite the academic splash you’d hoped for. You have no children, and now that you’re caring for your elderly parents—often begrudgingly—you wonder who will do the same for you someday, and wouldn’t that be the end-all-be-all of just deserts for your ungrateful, unenthusiastic attitude? Spectrum of reconciliation, my ass. Buck up, sister. Find a damn place to stand and occupy the space with intent—are you in the cave, or out? I wonder who will clean out the contents of my empty house.

  So what’s the right strategy to take? I suppose many of us would say there’s another option:

  •Strategy #3: Get the right mixture. Aim for a certain number of large potatoes. Go for some large accomplishments, because if you manage to pull them off, your life will have more value. But also throw in a smattering of small potatoes—at least then, big-potato harvest or not, you’re assured of something.

  Most of us would agree to the benefits of Strategy #3. But what is the right mixture?

  Thirty-Two

  San Vicente, Mexico (1994)—

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard his Big Bang monologue on the origins of the universe, nor would it be the last, but it was the first time I really listened to his words, and the first time I noticed the Big Bang sequence playing out before my eyes—in a town, a person, a life. In San Vicente, I caught my first glimpse of what I’d come to recognize as the “somethingness-that-erupts-from-nothingness” in one man’s world, and the subsequent detonations that fire again and again, yet with slightly greater velocity each time.

  My father and I had just begun our Tuesdays with Morrie play-it-by-ear road trip through Baja, and night number one was upon us. We drove along Mexican Federal Highway 1 in the dark. From where I sat behind the wheel, the black sky had fused with the horizon so tightly that the distinction between earth and sky ceased to exist. Bone-dry air pounded through the open windows of the car, drowning out the music tinning from the tape deck. From the dashboard speakers, Don McLean crooned his vigil to Vincent Van Gogh in the song “Starry, Starry Night” (we practically wore out the American Pie cassette during that trip, so if “Starry, Starry Night” wasn’t actually playing at that moment, it was at least stuck in my head). We should have stopped for the night an hour ago, back in Ensenada or perhaps Rosarito Beach. Never drive at night—rule number one in Mexico, where dark roads are notorious for potholes, meandering animals, and gun-toting bandits. The perpetual desolation of the Baja Desert seemed to go on forever, and for a long time the headlights’ dim glow did nothing more than illuminate the emptiness ahead.

  When we rolled into the dusty town of San Vicente, its explosion of activity and light sprang from the barren land like an oasis. It wasn’t the sort of town that attracted tourists. I imagine most Americans would visit only by default while driving the trans-peninsular highway on their way to someplace else. We inched along the two-lane highway, which was the one and only paved street in the town, past stray dogs and food carts and pickup beds loaded with passengers, kids playing soccer in the dirt, and men sprawled in white plastic chairs that leaned against turquoise stucco walls. Maybe a couple hundred souls populated this town, with its one Pemex gas station, one grocery store, a couple of tire shops, an auto mechanic, two sit-down restaurants, and lighted pole signs blaring Tecate, Coca-Cola, and Pharmacia. Despite its bleak appearance, the town teemed with life. The air was full of pedestrian chatter and exhaust and music and the smell of roasting corn.

  My father did all the talking at the motel counter. I don’t speak Spanish fluently, but I recognized enough words to get the gist of the conversation. Just as the town seemed to burst from the nothingness of the nighttime desert, my father sprang forth in his interactions with the motel clerk.

  Yes, the woman said, we have a room available, and no, the beds do not have fleas.

  I didn’t know if was customary to ask about fleas, but the question struck me as a bit odd. We weren’t yet twenty-four hours into this getting-to-know-you excursion, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, either from my father or from the circumstances.

  My father asked the young woman her name, then proceeded to fill her in on our situation...and then some. This is my thirty-year-old daughter, Carolina, he said in Spanish, pronouncing my “Spanish” name “Cat-o-leen-a.” She lives in Central California where she teaches elementary school. My wife, Marina, is Mexican, but she’s at home in Southern California with my other daughter, Liza. I have two daughters and one son, but only one daughter from my Mexican wife. Carolina here, she doesn’t speak Spanish. She tells me she took French in high school, but of course, that doesn’t do her any good here in Mexico, does it? Ha, ha!

  Okay, Dad, time to wrap up, I thought.

  The young woman and my father went back and forth for several minutes, but the conversation moved too quickly for me to pick out anything more than a few of the major words. It seemed like he was giving our life stories to this stranger. I’m a professor, he said of himself. I have been speaking Spanish for forty years. My wife doesn’t enjoy traveling like I do. The car is packed with camping gear but we decided to get a room for the night. Do you think our gear will be safe from thieves in the parking lot, or should we empty the car’s contents and take everything to the room?

  Jesus H. Christ, is that a wise thing to ask, I wondered.

  Before my father asked how much the room would cost,
he opened his wallet, which bulged so wide with its dozens of credit cards that he kept a rubber band around it. He removed the rubber band, flopped the wallet open, and fanned out the paper bills so the corner of each bill and its numerical imprint extended from the billfold slit to reveal one thousand dollars in American twenty-dollar bills.

  Do you take American cash?

  Yes, of course.

  Splendid. How much for the night?

  Thirty-Three

  After settling into the room, we unfolded our camping chairs out in the courtyard and uncorked a bottle of red wine, eager to watch what the news had promised would be a minor but vivid meteor shower. As we watched the night sky, my father continued the cosmology lecture he’d started earlier in the day, one he’d touch on not only during our trip but for the next two decades, a conversation he resumes every chance he gets, even to this day.

  “Billions of stars,” he said with his face turned up to the sky, his neck resting along the back of his chair. “We live in the Milky Way galaxy.” He pronounced it mill-kk-ee way, with such emphasis on the “l” and hard “k” that it sounded like a totally different word than “milky.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “There are so many things you don’t know. Can I tell you?”

  As he spoke, I noticed the young woman from behind the check-in counter was now standing under the patio cover across from us in the courtyard, washing laundry by hand in a big tub. Out near the road, several men had gathered to socialize, some leaning back in their white plastic chairs, others propped against the open back of a flatbed truck. Although I could not make out the words, their conversation lilted in a jovial tone. Friday night, time to unwind. Uno mas cerveza.

  “All the stars you see are part of the Milky Way galaxy. Its name derives from the hazy band of white light in the sky, the milky clouds arching over us. The Milky Way is shaped like a disc,” he said, and motioned with his hands, “bulging at its bar-shaped core, with arms spiraling outward. It’s one hundred thousand light-years in diameter, one thousand light-years thick, and contains four hundred billion stars.”

  I filled our thermos camping mugs with wine.

  “Our planet sits close to the inner rim of one of those arms,” he said, “which means we’re near the outer edge of the galaxy itself. And even though we can’t feel it, our galaxy rotates at four hundred miles per second.”

  I imagined what it might be like to be the galaxy itself, if the galaxy were a conscious being—spinning around and around, a whirling dervish with arms extended, fanned outward into the abyss.

  “Which means you’re hurling through space at the same rate,” he said.

  I sat up in my chair and spread a blanket on the ground. What better way to take in the narration than to gaze straight up into the heavens, like a narrated slide show? “I’m gonna lay down,” I said.

  “No,” he said, referring to my grammar. “Lay and lie. Lay requires a direct object. So you lie down on the ground. One says, ‘I lie down, but I lay the book down.’”

  “Whatever.”

  “Say it: ‘I will lie down.’”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it matters,” he insisted.

  We’d had this conversation twice today already. “It only matters in written speech. Nobody cares when you’re talking out loud.”

  “I care. You should care. My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Loretta Swift, she cared. And she had perfect grammar.”

  “She died a spinster.” Which was true. We’d talked about Ms. Swift that day, too. “Now she’s cold, dead, and alone.” I sat back up and gulped my mug of wine.

  The woman doing laundry hunched over the tub, her shoulders rising and falling, her arms extended, submerged in water. The men out front whooped at what must have been the punch line to a story, their laughter punctuated with the pop-fizz, pop-fizz of Tecate.

  “Say, ‘I lie down,’” he said.

  I pointed to the sky. “There. A shooting star. Did you see it?”

  “Yes. That’s a meteor, though, not really a star. It’s a fragment the size of a grain of sand burning up in the atmosphere. The stars are constant.”

  “I know. More wine?”

  He repeated almost word for word what he’d said in the car. “Before the Big Bang, there were no stars. The universe was created by a cosmic Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. Before that, there was an infinity of nothingness. That’s one of great mysteries: how we got from nothingness to somethingness. Starting with the chaos of radiation at over one hundred billion degrees Kelvin, in a universe initially smaller than a single atom, the universe started to expand. It blasted outward, and then cooled as it expanded. There was no actual bang because there were no ears to hear a bang.”

  “How do you know there was no sound if you weren’t there to hear it?” I wiseacred. But it fell on deaf ears.

  “After a tenth of a second—are you listening?—just one tenth of one second—subatomic particles condensed from pure energy: electrons, positrons, neutrinos and antineutrinos, photons—by which time the temperature had cooled to thirty billion degrees Kelvin. By the time the universe was two seconds old, neutrons formed, and a neutron can decay into a proton and an electron, although not all of them did. By the time the universe cooled to four billion degrees, the first hydrogen atoms appeared, followed by heavy hydrogen and tritium; then, fusion of these particles produced helium atoms.”

  I tried to imagine how lonely it must have been before the bang—how absolute nothingness, how complete solitude, how utter darkness and total seclusion would feel. And then all of a sudden: pop! The joy of activity—little nano-things buzzing about. But if I were the universe, and if I had been used to solitude—if all I had known was solitude—would I like the nano-things buzzing about, or would I find their chatter mundane and annoying?

  “The first stars were huge, much larger than our sun, and they were composed almost entirely of hydrogen. No new hydrogen is formed in the stars. They fuse hydrogen in their cores to produce helium. When the hydrogen runs out, the tremendous temperature allows helium atoms to fuse up to iron. Atoms heavier than iron are not produced until the star explodes, at which time the heavy atoms are blown out into space, where they are incorporated into new stars. Our Sun is calculated to be a third-generation star because it has all the heavy atoms, up to uranium. Atoms heavier than uranium are so radioactive that they decay into lighter elements. The atomic number of uranium is 92. Atomic physicists have produced man-made transuranium atoms up to number 118. I have memorized the names of all 118 elements in the order of their atomic numbers. Reciting them each day is a kind of meditative exercise that gives me access to the throne of the Creator.”

  “Huh.” It was all I could think to respond.

  The woman rinsed her laundry using a hose and a second wash basin, then began passing it through rubber rollers to squeeze out the water with a contraption that reminded me of the old wringer washer my great-grandmother had used.

  “You came from this nothingness, Carole. You originated in the Big Bang. Your very existence was improbable, in that each cosmic bifurcation that could have led to a no-Carole universe providentially favored you. There were millions of events that could have otherwise led to a no-Carole universe. For example, if gravity had been just 0.02 percent stronger, the stars would have burned themselves out before human life could evolve. Likewise, if gravity had been just 0.02 percent weaker, there would be no galaxies or stellar systems, no oceans and no people. It turns out that the entire cosmos is tailor-made to accommodate human evolution. This is a stunning insight called the anthropic principle. The observations of the physical universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “I want you to understand this,” he said, referring to cosmic principles. He paused for a moment as he looked at the sky. “I’m sorry I couldn’t send you to Stanford,” he finally said.

  My father got his master’s and doctorate at
Stanford, yet never contributed a single penny toward my education. I worked full time (and my mother ran her credit cards sky high) to get through the local community college and state university. The possibility of a private school like Stanford never even entered my universe.

  “A particular school is irrelevant. Anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted to go, not at that time in my life. So, the chances of events?”

  He continued with his previous train of thought. “If the Earth had no continents, there would be no you. If there had been no moon, there would be no you. If the Earth had not been struck by an asteroid sixty-five million years ago, there would be no humans or other primates. My point is that if any of the laws of nature or timing of cosmic historical events had been different, there would be no humans and no Carole.”

  A pair of stray dogs meandered into the men’s circle. One of the guys bent to pet them, and someone turned up the music, which seemed to come from a radio inside the hotel lobby, or perhaps a boom box just outside the arched corridor. The woman hung her laundry on a line inside the courtyard. She called something to one the men out front, and one of the men called something back.

  “I’m so glad I can talk to you about these things, Carole, because my wife is not interested at all.” He often referred to Marina as “my wife,” even to me, though I’d known her some fourteen or fifteen years.