Whether it concerns the genome project and arrives daily through the newspaper or whether it deals with chaos and trickles into the public consciousness through the occasional magazine article, one of the basic problems when it comes to interpreting science and its data involves context. The word context comes to us from Latin verb contextere, which meant, to weave together. Unfortunately, in its modern usage, the word has lost its capacity to denote, not merely the way meaning occurs, but the idea of a fabric, an entirety built by details. In fact, as communication theorists use the word today, context is merely the parts that precede and follow a certain piece of information and which give it meaning. Now a day, we think of context as if it were the frame to a picture, a rectangle that is completely foreign to the picture it frames. It is perhaps this rather superficial way in which we think of context that makes it extremely difficult for us to take any of the important scientific theories of our times and draw larger conclusions from them.

The phenomenon is not a post-modern malaise altogether. From the end of the 18th century on, with the Kantian critique of reason really, the culture has taken as its task the questioning of meaning. This attitude, while healthy in its political ramifications, is the complete opposite of what both thinkers and their readers tried to accomplish before the onset of the modern period. The pre-Enlightenment thinker, the thinkers like Descartes, Bacon, and Spinoza thought that their task was to interpret and present an unified vision of nature and the human condition. While this goal remained with many post-Enlightenment philosophers, the onset of the 20th century, or WWI to be more precise, saw the end of this intellectual project. Since then, our knowledge has become more and more atomized. Whereas in previous periods it was the thinker's task to link the humanities and the sciences, know, the thinker has moved from the wideness of a panopticon -that intellectual dream of an all encompassing vision- the microscope. The historian does not write the chronicles of rises and falls, like Gibbon did in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but has become a colorist, so to speak, who vividly recreates a single event, or phenomena. The philosopher does not attempt connections between cosmology, history and knowledge, but has become a stubborn voice insisting on the impossibility of logic.

Ultimately, the shift in thinker's emphases and interests has reached a moral and epistemological crisis which thinkers themselves like to refer to as the post-modern condition. It is not within the scope of this chapter or book to go into the anachronistic vision of the term or to its historical narrow-mindedness. However, it is important to mention the main strain of postmodern thought not merely because it runs so counter to the main ideas we want to present, but also, because they exemplify the ways in which thinkers have made all but impossible to put information into context. A brief glance at some of these thinker's projects should suffice. Though his fame has diminished somewhat, one of the most influential post-war philosophers has been Jacques Derrida. His works include books on Plato and Freud, Rousseu and Herder, painting and literature. Yet, despite the diversity of his subjects, his philosophy is an insistent and rather flawed exploration into the impossibility of meaning. While a bit more expansive and less monomaniacal, Michel Foucault, another very influential French philosopher, has take an historical approach to philosophy. Under his aegis, many scholars have argued that science is not a method by which we understand the natural phenomena that surround us, but rather a "discourse" a way of organizing information which, like any other discourse is imbued and merely reflects the bias of the culture which raised the scientists. In other words, according to Foucault and his accolades, science reflects the hegemony of the culture.

There is a grain of truth to Foucault's critique. His work on medicine, on the institutionalization of madness and the birth of the clinic, is insightful and mostly accurate. However, what many of his followers have failed to notice is the difference between medicine, a science which is, for lack of a better word, demotic; and physics or biology, sciences which might impact the culture, but whose methods and aims are, if not rarefied, at least outside the mainstream culture. Yes, many scientific findings have been possible because of government funding and the pharmacological industry. However the interference of political or economic gain in science does not result in a biased result, nor does it mean that the hard-facts about genetics or about particles, etc. are any less valid. In politics, the means and the end go hand in hand. In the sciences and arts the end cannot be immediately equated with the means. Handel's early Chandos' Anthems aren't any lesser masterpieces because the Duke of Chandos commissioned them. Nor are Haydn's London symphonies mere meretricious works simply because Solomon paid him to write them. Yes, they reflect the culture of their time, reflect the raise of a merchant class in their symphonic form among other things, but they also move beyond mere pleasantries or bourgeois pats in the back. Similarly, in science, much of what we know of the atom and atomic energy came, unfortunately, from the Manhattan project. The social outcome of the Manhattan project is and will remain until the last conscious being in this earth disappears, one of the greatest human atrocities. And while we do not mean to divorce the scientists' personal and moral responsibility from the event - no one could- we would argue that the insights they gained into the atom are unparalleled. And even though, we are not the kind that weights the future benefits of mankind against the immediate costs, we would argue that it is possible to divest the findings from the rather utilitarian and economic idea of benefit and look at them as insights in and of their own. In other words, just as it is possible to be moved by Chartres Cathedral and see it as greater than an outcome church corruption and exploitation which allowed for its construction, it is possible to assess the findings of science an divorce them from the social forces and the cultural discourse which created them.

We have gone a long way to address the need for context and covered perhaps too much ground. Still, it is important to deal with these current ideas because in many ways, what we propose to do runs contrary to the new orthodoxy. The ideas of philosopher and historian, in fact, do trickle in the way scientists interpret their material. As we have seen in the previous chapter, when we discussed Stephen Jay Gould's work, the contemporary interpretation of evolution has been influenced by social thinkers. Gould's caveat, that evolution is not the place for us to find our place in the world or that if we wish to elicit an ethical code, we should find it elsewhere, but not in evolution, is akin to the cultural critiques we have discussed above. Both Gould, and cultural critics insist that we cannot fit any scientific finding into a larger scheme. They insist, in other words, that it is impossible to put evolution, or particle physics or cosmology into any context.

By refusing to put evolution or cosmology into context scientists have turned their disciplines into mere jargon, an argot that has no relevance. Yet, we think like quantum physicist David Bohm did when in his book Wholeness and Implicate Order he argued that we are not in an era defined by a series of scientific impasses, an era where all the sciences are atomized, but rather, stand at a crucial moment, at the doorstep of a scientific revolution as important or more important than the Galilean revolution which brought modern physics and modern science to us. And our insistence of context stems from the fact that unless we contextualize each branch of the sciences, such revolution will be impossible. Consequently, the bulk of this chapter will be dedicated to seeing how evolution, which is a historical description of the emergence of life and the species, fits in the larger history, the larger canvas so to speak of cosmic history.

In his book The Fabric of Reality David Deutch has argued that modern science has three important branches. Each of these branches is represented by a theory that explains the natural world. The first two branches are quantum physics, which deals with the atom and its components, and relativity, which deals with the universe, its architecture and its history. The third branch is evolution. In attempting to explain how each branch relates to the other. Deutch differentiates between low-level and high-level sciences. By high-level Deutch means the sciences whose ability to predict an outcome is very accurate. By low-level, he means sciences whose ability to predict an outcome is either inaccurate or well nearly impossible. The only branch of science which is able to predict outcomes with almost unerring precision is quantum. Quantum scientists deal primarily with probabilities and their equations are the most exact in describing the possible behaviors of particles. We will deal with quantum at length in the next chapter. For the time being, suffice it to say that among all the branches of science, quantum is the most accurate and this accuracy stems from the fact that quantum is able to more accurately predict the behavior of its subjects.

Alas, it goes without saying that the same cannot be said of evolution. Hence, Deutch labels evolution as low-level science. Why is evolution "low-level"? Why is evolution not accurate even though it describes life's history in the planet rather well? The answer lies in evolution's own historicity. Darwin's discovery, in other words, was a historical one. It relied on the observation of morphological transformations which had already taken place. And it was only confirmed when the geological record parsed with Darwin's calculation since the process he described required the earth to be much older than what 19th century scientists believed to be. Evolution, then, cannot, on its own, without recourse to genetics or physics, predict an outcome, it cannot tell us the future of our or any other species in the planet. It might describe possible outcomes. But its predictions are highly fallible. The source of this fallibility is what scientists call chaotic behavior. A chaotic element is a mathematical term which refers to the number of unpredictable variables within a system. Quantum is accurate because the number of variables each probability is calculated with is limited and finite. Evolutionary biology, on the other hand, is fallible because the evolution of organic systems in this planet is intertwined with other factors. In other words, evolution can predict morphological changes within a species given that the species remains in a stable environment for a long time and retain certain mating habits. As we all know, however, a stable environment is not a given in this planet. Even before the industrial revolution and the population explosion would ravage our frail and finely tunes ecosystems, the species have been pawns to unpredictable factors like weather, accident and disease.

To many, the fallibility inherent in evolutionary biology is proof that there is as yet no possible way to unify the three branches of scientific knowledge. Evolution's fallibility, in other words, is to these people, the very reason why it is impossible to put it in some larger context. In fact, to most scientists, the prospect of applying an evolutionary perspective to anything other than organic systems is either preposterous or impossible. To them, the world that quantum and relativity describe is all too different from, too foreign to the world that evolution describes. So any talk of evolution outside of the realm of living beings is merely metaphorical and/or forced.

Part of scientists refusal to see evolution as descriptive of a world other than the organic one originates, we think, from the lack of perspective and accurate analogies. Most of the analogies that we use to understand evolution and the time line that it describes are didactic in nature and fail to use analogy and metaphor as it should be done, as poets do, as a source of epistemological discovery. So, in order to begin putting evolution in some sort of context, we should start by looking at for a new analogy.

As every schoolboy and every visitor to a natural history museum knows, Homo sapiens, though in the planet for many years is at least, when put beside either the time line for evolution of or more dauntingly a cosmic timeline, dwarfed as far as chronology is concerned. Most of the time, in textbooks and museums, when scientists try to compare the age of the planet to our own history, they use the analogy of the calendar year. The analogy runs as follows: if the planet's history were to be contained within a year, then the exact moment when homo sapiens surfaced would be the last minute of the New year's eve. While the analogy is somewhat accurate and very useful for us to visualize the vast ages that preceded the human race, what it fails at, of course, is at putting evolution within a larger context. To do that, we would need a completely different metaphor. A metaphor which is able to simulate a process that unfolds in time but which also contains different kinds of times or measures.

Poets have attempted such metaphor from early on in our literary history. Ovid would open his metamorphoses with an extended catalogue of the ages. Our own epigram, however, uses what we think a better analogy. If we are to compare all of history from the inception of the universe to the present, a better comparison would involve our chronologies, our clocks, calendars, etc., only marginally. And if humans have any way to measure time other than clocks, calendars, etc., an art like music, which is dependent and deals with time, might be the best comparison. In other words, to visualize, so to speak, the whole of cosmic history one should imagine a musical work composed in a vast scale. Like anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who at the beginning on his mammoth four volume work on myth argued that Wagner's music dramas seemed the perfect analogue for the way in which myths develop, we think that only works of similar scale can help us imagine the vast amounts of time with which science deals. So, imagine a large scale work. For our purpose one does not have to deal with Wagner's music dramas. In fact let us go back to Beethoven, the composer we started the book with. And let us be more daring with our analogy and forget the long year that scientists use to illustrate our belatedness. Let's imagine instead that the history of the universe, the whole history of the cosmos is contained in one of his late piano sonatas. The Hammerklavier sonata is perhaps the most apt example.

Like the quartets with which we started the book, the Hammerklavier is one of Beethoven's most daring works. A large scale work, over a thousand bars of music to be exact, the sonata explores a variety of musical forms, including the sonata's own, the theme and variation and a truly large scale fugue which in Beethoven's output is only rivaled by the Grosse fugue of the late quartets. For those to whom over a thousand scales means nothing, then an approximation of how long the sonata is might give some idea as to the scale. On average, most pianists take forty-four minutes to play the piece. In those 44 minutes what we get is a transmutation of ideas. This transmutation, from the energetic opening to the sorrowful Adagio, occur not only through the linear or diachronic development of the music, but through the synchronic aspects of the music: namely, the harmonic 'experiments' which Beethoven performs. In other words, if we are to use the Hammerklavier as metaphor to understand the history and the evolution of the universe then we should consider, not only the linear thrust on which the universe embarked shortly after the Big Bang, but also those "synchronic" cells which add up to something more. Let us explain. The diachronic axis is an axis where things move forward. Chronologies and genealogies are diachronic because they are linear. The synchronic axis is the one where there is no movement per se but rather, there is an instant where various things happen simultaneously. In music if we had only the diachronic axis, we would have rhythm and the basics of melody. In other words we would have a rudimentary form of music.

What gives depth to music, what makes it a sophisticated art form, is harmony. Our contention is that as in music, in the history of the universe, the chronologies can only be understood and put in context if we look at the stages and the occurrence of synchronic events. The Big Bang is of course one of those events. But so is the formation of matter and so is that of solar systems. What do we gain from looking at these stages? An anecdote about our sonata might suffice. When Ries, one of Beethoven's student, was about to publish the sonata in London, Beethoven mailed him two notes so that he would insert them as an opening bar in the Adagio. Most of us would react just as Ries did. With over a thousand bars, with over forty minutes of music what difference would 2 seconds or even less really make? To anyone who owns a recording of the sonata we would recommend that he try the experiment by tracking his CD player past the two notes. For those who are not about to buy a record then we will have to persuade that the two notes make all the difference. Not only are they the basic sonic cells which set tone and direction to the whole movement, but they are the emotional lynchpin. Yes, those transitory two seconds resonate in the whole movement. The universe, we will argue, is not that different. Large chronologies are inevitable. If there is a way to make sense of those chronologies, we will have to look at the relatively tiny events in cosmic history and how they too are lynchpin to other events. Remember, the prehistory of matter, like the pre history of Beethoven's adagio is simple, not two notes, but two elements.

So that we don't only deal with metaphor, it is necessary to go into the minutia of the universe, to glance at what scientists know about it. There are two ways to do this. The first one, and the most unavoidable is to take a historical approach, to look at when and how the history began, when and how the universe developed and where and how will it go in the future. Hence, we call this approach historical. To understand such universe, one has to place it in a timeline. However, while the universe certainly has a long history, and while this history is more than relevant to us, there is another way to understand it. For all of human history, the cosmos that philosophers and scientists have observed, has remained almost unchanged. Yes, we know that there are violent events occurring within the universe, explosions, disappearances, etc. These events, as far as humans are concerns have been imperceptible or if not imperceptible, then they have not significantly altered the structure of the universe. In short, whatever cataclysms there might have been since our arrival here, they have been small enough to keep the fabric of the universe intact. Consequently, the second way to look and study the universe is by looking at its structure. For most of the remainder of this chapter we will be looking at both, structure and history of the universe. Before we embark into the structure of the universe, and we are using the word structure rather gingerly here, we should write a disclaimer. Many people still, when they are told that they are going to read about the structure of the universe, believe that they'll be told about star, pulsars, galaxies etc. We will discuss such structures and attempt to see how they thread the entirety of the cosmos. However, our purpose is not taxonomical. This book, while didactic at points, does not set out to be a textbook and we won't work like naturalists that collect dried plants and stuffed birds, but will focus instead on the plausible explanation scientists give of the different phenomena like pulsars, galaxies, etc.

There are several problems in trying to deal with either the history or the structure of the universe. The first and most difficult to overcome is that most of what we know about the universe defies common sense. We are not merely referring to some of the phenomena one encounters in the universe, but to the universe itself. If the gravitational forces in a black whole - of which we will talk more later - seem unfathomable and unimaginable, then not only the size of the universe but its structure and the way in which scientists have come upon this structure is truly mind-boggling. Another more technical problem when we discuss the structure of the universe is that our "map" of the universe, the mathematical model by which we understand the universe cannot be completely discussed without discussing the universe through a historical viewpoint. This mathematical model was deduced for the most part by Einstein and is what we know as general relativity. Before we get into the minutiae of general relativity, suffice it so say that the grid through which general relativity maps the universe is a four dimensional grid. Just as the earth is 3 dimensional and no two dimensional map could accurately capture its features, the universe cannot be understood without a fourth dimension. So, before we start looking at how the universe is put together, we need to keep in mind that even if momentarily we speak of galaxies or stars as if they were three dimensional, the entire structure and the entire concept of space can only be understood in a four dimensional grid where space is allotted its usual three dimensions and time is assigned as the fourth: hence general relativity and scientists who came after general relativity will talk about space-time.

What is space-time and what does it tell us about the structure of our universe? The idea of space-time emerged from a fairly practical scientific problem. For thousands of years, most physicists adopted an Aristotelian map of the universe where the celestial, the space beyond the moon was governed by different laws than that space bellow the moon. This model began to tear at the edges once the Copernican model of the universe was adopted, However, it was not until Newton that anyone was able to provide an account that explained and synthesized the dichotomy. Newton's account of gravitation explained both the terrestrial and the celestial. There are particularly poignant moments in the history of human thought and sometimes we are able to witness them, if in somewhat idealized form, in the autobiographical musings of their creators. Stravinsky for instance would later recall that:

One day, when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau de Feu in St. Petesburg, I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise, my mind as the moment being full of other things. I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.

Stravinsky's account, while apparently innocuous, traces, of course the germ of one of the Western musical masterpieces, The Rite of Spring. We find it significant because not only The Rite of Spring is a masterpiece, but also a watershed in the history of music, a piece that would transform Western music, its rhythmic, melodic and harmonic idioms. We quote Stravinsky for some sense of proportion. For if his account chronicles a staggering instant, Newton's account literally and metaphorically strides the stratosphere:

In those days I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematics and Philosophy more than any time since ... I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the moon & ... from Kepler's rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in sesquilateral proportion of their distances from the center of their Orbs, I deduced that the forces which keep the planets in their Orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve: & thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty neatly. ^{[ Note 1 ]}

What Newton's theory ultimately did in his time was to provide an explanation for the behavior of things on earth as well as things in the heavens. We will only go into Newtonian Mechanics briefly. Not merely did Newton's accomplishments pave the way for modern physics; his "failures," the gaps and paradoxes that his system left unanswered or open were the springboards from which Einstein and others started.

Some of Newton's discoveries are so common sense, that it seems wasteful to even repeat them. However, since what we will see with Einstein is not so common sense, it is worth taking another look. Newton's first law involves motion and the motion of bodies. Before Newton, most scientists subscribed to the Aristotelian concept that the dynamics of objects depended upon their elemental composition: that water was ruled by a different law than wind. In Newtonian Mechanics, every object is described by a single variable, its mass. (Note that despite the fact that Einstein will overhaul Newtonian mechanics, his theory of relativity and his most famous formula will include Newton's term). In his first law Newton argued that "every body preserves its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a rights line, unless it is compelled to change its state." ^{[ Note 2 ]} While the latter statement may seem now obvious and innocuous, its implications are major, since whatever compels a given object to move is also standardized under Newtonian math and seen as a force. When a force compels a mass to move, the change can be recorder as acceleration. Hence, Newton's second law:

F=ma

Applying a force however, has a price. Consequently, Newton's third law states that "to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction." ^{[ Note 3 ]} Again, these three laws seem to us now rather common sense. They were not then and Newton's genius was that he would apply them to the entire dynamics of the known solar system. According to the first law, the planets would not orbit the sun but move in a straight line, they would, in short "preserve their uniform motion." Since they do not move in a straight line, it is possible that a force is responsible for bending their trajectory. Newton ultimately proved that gravity generates Kepler's laws of planetary motion. The planets orbit around the sun because of the inverse-square law - the force diminishes by the square of the distance.

Newton provided a beautiful mathematical model of planetary motion. He could not, however, explain gravitation itself. His Principia does not contain a causal explanation for gravity. In fact, Newton himself would admit that "the cause of gravity [was] what [he] did not pretend to know." ^{[ Note 4 ]} This "flaw," so to speak, in Newton's universe will be the source of Einstein's physics. It is not, though it might look as such at first sight, a minor problem. In fact, not having a cause for gravity meant to Newton that he could not explain how gravitation managed to make itself felt across vast amounts of space without any contact. To explain this problem, Newton's followers argued that space was full of an invisible substance called ether. Ether was seen as a sort of insubstantial conductor.

We will not go into the rather convoluted arguments that various scientists postulated for the existence of ether. Suffice it to say, that Einstein, among others, were able to get rid of the concept and replace it by providing us with more elegant equations to explain planetary motion. Einstein's course was not an easy one. In fact, in his we have if not the greatest, then one of the greatest minds not only of the 20th century, but of all times. Still the course by which he was able to provide us with a map of the universe, is a long one and, unlike Newton's mechanics, often defies common sense. To start understanding how Einstein was able to get rid of ether as a necessary constituent to explain action at a distance or even to explain the way light travels across vast space; and ultimately, to understand the kind of map that Einstein would leave us, it is necessary to backtrack a bit because before Einstein solved the problem of the origin of gravity in his general theory of relativity, he was able to explain the absence of ether in his special theory of relativity. The special theory of relativity did not stem from a cosmological problem, though it does explain the workings of stars and of matter everywhere. Einstein came upon the special theory of relativity as he tried to solve two problems that arose from Faraday and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic fields when these were considered within an Newtonian absolute space. A field is a domain or environment where the actual or potential action of a force can be described mathematically at every point in space. In other words, a field explains how a force acts upon a mass through differential equations. With equations, the presence of ether is unnecessary, since no element is needed to explain why the compass needle moves. Instead, the interaction of forces and mass are explained as mathematical entities. In other words, just as Newton's equations explained inertia, Maxwell's explained how a force can act at a distance. In fact, Einstein would call Maxwell's formulae: "revolutionary" because it "was the transition of forces at a distance to fields as fundamental variables." ^{[ Note 5 ]}

Field theory, instead of completely resolving the "flaws" in Newton's theory only exacerbated them, because in Newton's world, position, velocity and acceleration are absolutes. So Einstein devised a thought experiment -as he mostly did - that embodied the paradox. He asked himself what would he observe if he were to travel at the speed of light. A Newtonian would answer that he'd see the "beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest." ^{[ Note 6 ]} As Einstein argued though "there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwell's equations." ^{[ Note 7 ]} Einstein resolved this paradox via Ernst Mach, the leading philosopher-of-science-mathematicians of his time. Like Leibniz and Huygens before him, who critiqued Newton's absolute space, Mach though it a "metaphysical obscurity." To Mach, space was not an absolute but "All masses and all velocities and consequently all forces are relative." ^{[ Note 8 ]} Mach was Einstein's inspiration, but Mach's system or his criteria were not completely fulfilled in Einstein's Special Relativity. Einstein resolved the paradox nonetheless and concluded that one cannot accelerate to the speed of light, and that the velocity of light was all of all observes regardless of their relative motion. The implications of Einstein's Special Relativity are momentous and require quite a bit of explanation. At this point, Einstein is not yet dealing with gravity but with light. Still, this is important to us because the General Theory of Relativity, which is the means by which we map the universe is the way in which Einstein set out to create an account of gravitation that would pare with the results of the special theory of relativity.

What the special theory did which was groundbreaking was that it got rid of an unmoving frame of reference where measurements are done, and consequently it also got rid of absolute space and time and replaced those yardsticks with light. Light is the only absolute measurement. Special Relativity replaced absolute space with a grid of light beams. There were other consequences to the thought experiment and they involved the imagined traveler. Lets, for an instant return to Newton and remember that whenever an object is set into motion a force is responsible. In other words, for an object to accelerate, another object has to loose energy. The energy that the force looses is gained by the object in motion. So now, let us imagine the common scenario that Special relativity proposes and imagine a spaceship accelerating to the speed of light. Since this acceleration would entail an exchange of energy, since, in other words, the astronaut will absorb the energy his mass would be rendered plastic, it would dilate and increase and time will slow down. Here is where we leave off Newton's common sense universe and step into Einstein's non sense one, though we know that the latter is more precise. What the thought experiment ultimately revealed, the ultimate upshot of Einstein scenario came with the conclusion that if the mass of an object absorbs energy, then mass decreases when an object radiates energy. With this conclusion, Einstein was able to move Maxwell's electromagnetism from the lab to the entire universe, since all of matter, stars and planets, cars and the pages of a book are governed by the same law. Mass and energy in other words are interchangeable. Upon discovering this fact, Einstein equated mass to energy:

m=E/c2

In which m is the mass of an object, E is energy content and c2 is the speed of light squared. Again, the constant against things, whether mass or energy are measured is the speed of light. In its more famous form, the formula solves not for mass but for energy:

E=mc2

Whichever way one reads the formula, the conclusions are the same: for Einstein, matter is frozen energy. This insight as we know has had tragic historical and ecological consequences in its practical applications. It will also have tremendous ramifications as we tackle not the structure but the history of the universe.

But before we can, let us look at Einstein's next great breakthrough. As we have already said, Special Relativity deals with energy, mass and light. It synthesizes Maxwell's electromagnetic equations by seeing electromagnetism as the bartering system by which mass and energy are exchanged. What it does not address is gravitation. Again, Einstein composed the General Theory of relativity to create an account of gravitation that would pare with the special theory of relativity. Einstein in the Special Theory had solved for the inertial mass of objects. Let us see an example. Imagine an airplane serving cart. When flight attendants are preparing their cart on land and the slide the cart, they feel the inertial mass. If they would try to lift it, they would feel the gravitational mass. In other words, inertial mass is the property of objects. Gravitational mass is felt only when there is a gravitational force. Now imagine a horrifying scenario. Once the plane takes of it encounters turbulence and while the flight attendants are serving, the plane plunges into a downdraft: the cart will maintain its inertial mass, but it will not have gravitational mass. In fact, if the downdraft is severe enough, the horrified traveler will witness the cart's weightlessness and probably see the cart flying toward someone.

The former experiment is not that different than the one Einstein came upon when he devised the General Theory of Relativity. One phenomenon that led Einstein to his insight has to do with the fact that the gravitational mass of an object and the inertial mass of an object are the same. Einstein's insight came in 1907 and since we have been reading recollections of creative breakthroughs, let us read Einstein's own account:

I was sitting in a chair at the patent office at Bern, when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: "If a person falls freely, he will not feel his weight." I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me to the theory of gravitation. ^{[ Note 9 ]}

Just as the man in Einstein's thought experiment is weightless, the serving cart in the airplane when the airplane plunges is weightless because what the plane is doing in the downdraft is a free fall. What does it all mean though? Let's imagine a spacecraft. The spacecraft is kept in orbit by the earth's gravitational field. The astronauts do not feel their weight, however, because they are falling. If you sealed their windows and make them guess whether they were free falling in deep space or towards the ground, they could not tell. No sensory experience will tell them the difference. Now, lets imagine that we reverse the experiment and with the windows closed still we have the spaceship plunge toward the earth. The earth would be pulling the spaceship with the force equal to earth gravitation, one G. If instead of having the spaceship fall, one would start the engine and accelerate to one G, the astronauts, unable to see whether they are traveling or falling, would not feel the difference, they would feel exactly the same. Ultimately, Einstein concluded that if the results of Gravitation are similar than those of acceleration, then gravitation was a form of acceleration. The question, however, is acceleration through what reference frame. As we have seen with the thought experiments, with the astronauts' inability to tell acceleration from gravity, the gravitational field is relative.

The answer to the question required a paradigm shift and it is this paradigm shift that ultimately lead us to what we have been calling our map to the cosmos. The reason why Einstein's answer constitutes one of the greatest paradigm shifts in the history of the species is because it abandons the Euclidean geometry which dealt with two and tree dimensions and adopts a four dimensional geometry. Einstein's fourth dimensional geometry allots the usual three dimensions to space - height, depth, length - and one more dimension to time. Einstein's formulation is the true requiem to Newton's absolute space. There is no space but a space-time continuum. Within this framework, Einstein was able to answer the question that Newton could never answer. Where does gravity come from and what is it? Gravity is the acceleration of objects as they fall through world lines, traces in a three dimensional space which is curved in the fourth dimension. In other words, Einstein's theory does away with gravitation per se and tells us that matter curves space and what we call gravitation is the acceleration of objects as they slide through the curves described by their trajectories in time.

The fourth dimension is still mind-boggling. To many scientists and to the lay public, the results seemed more than a little strange. Nevertheless, the theory has been proved correct time and again. The first evidence of the theory's correctness came when Eddington observe light bend near the sun during a solar eclipse in 1919. What the bent light proved was that space curve around massive objects. According to Einstein. Light is traveling in a straight line. Space is what is curved. General Relativity proves, in other words, that gravity, usually thought of as a force, can be understood instead as an effect of hyper dimensionality on the three dimensional world of out normal experience.

General relativity does not only get rid of the problems that stemmed out of Newton's formulations, but it actually gives us an actual map of the universe through the predictions it makes. As a structure General relativity envisions the universe as a curved space. The question of whether the universe is hyperbolic and open or spherical is yet to be resolved. However, in a curved space, one of the things we observe is that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous. Isotropic means that wherever we look, what we find will look the same in every direction. This is an effect similar to that of walking in the middle of a desert. Homogeneous means that while matter is clustered into nebulae, galaxies etc. The overall composition of the universe is pretty much the same.

General Relativity explains this through the curvature. Its most important predictions however, were predictions that Einstein himself was not too comfortable with. The first and most important was that the universe was expanding. Einstein was aware of this prediction and introduced the idea of a "cosmological constant." The "cosmological constant" was Einstein's attempt to make his theory agree with observational facts. No one yet had proof that the universe was expanding. As Einstein wrote in 1917:

I had to introduce an extension of the field equations of gravitation which is not justified by our actual knowledge of gravitation ... That term is necessary only for the purpose of making possible a quasi-static distribution of matter, as required by the fact of the small velocities of stars. ^{[ Note 10 ]}

Later, Einstein would call the "cosmological constant" the biggest mistake in his career. Strangely enough, as we will see later, because cosmologists cannot figure out why the universe's is speeding up, they have revived the concept, if only theoretically at least. Einstein, though, despite his resistance to an expanding universe, finally saw evidence of this when Edwin Hubble, quite unaware of what he had uncovered, showed him evidence of a displacement of the spectral lines toward the end of the spectrum. He found, in other words, through the Doppler effect that the stars were moving away from the sun.

There are two upshots to an expanding universe. The first one is that if the universe has been expanding, then there has to be a place where the expansion began. George Lemaitre, a Belgian priest and mathematician would be the one scientist to point the latter out. What Lemaitre saw was that if the universe is expanding, then it was possible to imagine that in the past all of space was denser and converged in the same axis. In fact, Lemaitre proposed that the universe began as an infinitely small point, a "singularity," "a day without yesterday." ^{[ Note 11 ]} In short, since General Relativity argued that space was not merely space but space time, and it predicted that the universe was expanding, then to imagine the universe at its inception would be to imagine a point with no time. Lemaitre never took his idea to completion. Nevertheless, as it has developed, the big bang opened the doors for nuclear physicists to enter into cosmology. General Relativity does not only stop short at deducing the origin of the universe. In fact one of its predictions involves the fate of the universe too.

In its mapping of the universe, General relativity argues that since matter curves space, the density of matter will determine the fate of the universe. Scientists refer to this density as Omega. If omega is greater than one, meaning that the universe is relatively dense, the gravitational force will force the universe to collapse within itself. If omega is lesser than one, the universe will continue to expand. We do not know the value for omega yet. And even though we will discuss it at a later point, what is of relevance here is that general relativity does not only give the universe a shape, but it also envisions it not as static and absolute but as a continuum.

Few looked into the consequences of envisioning a universe which is also a continuum until George Gamow, a Russian émigré, began to speculate on the state of matter in a smaller, denser universe. Lemaitre had already argued that that the universe had begun in an "eruption" of sorts. Gamow contended though, that if the early universe was so dense, the possibility of there being matter as we know it was mute. At such conditions, the atomic nuclei would have been too hot to be fused into the elements we know. It was Gamow that predicted the cosmic background radiation. His most important contribution though was the insight that if the universe expanded from a dense hot plasma, it must have cooled as it expanded, allowing for matter to form. It is this insight that allows for us to place human evolution in a cosmic context for what Gamow saw was that the universe underwent a similar evolutionary process. In fact, we know now that the early universe, the universe at 3 minutes and 42 seconds of its inception produced mainly light elements, about 20 percent helium and 80 percent hydrogen. And not until matter began to congeal or cluster into galaxies and stars did heavier elements were formed. In other words, the periodic table is a record of evolutionary development.

There are scientists who refuse to accept this model and argue, as Stephen Jay Gould does with organic evolution, that the universe and its history cannot be understood through an evolutionary scheme. In the following chapter, we will look at the universe as a continuum and try to see what evidence exists of an evolutionary process. To do so will require for us to look at matter since the elements are the source of our speculation. And to look at matter, we will need to understand the other branch of physics: quantum and what quantum has to say about the early universe.