September 1, 2006 - Googols and Quarks

© 2006 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Brin and Page

The story is that there was this mathematician, Edward Kasner, and he had this very large number:

10¹⁰⁰

He didn't want to call it just "a zillion" or "ten to the hundredth power," he wanted a catchy name for it. So he asked his 9-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, for a name, and the boy came up with "googol." (Page and Brin were going to call their company that, but somebody made a mistake when writing a check and the name stuck as Google.)

If you write it out in full, a googol is:

1 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0

One followed by 100 zeroes. It seems there is no real mathematical use for this number, it just serves as a comparison to incredibly large quantities. For instance, it's way more than the number of elementary particles in the universe.

But that wasn't enough. Kasner invented a somewhat larger number, which he called a googolplex, that can be written as:

10^googol , or 10^10(100), that is, 10 to the 10^th to the 100^th power.

There is absolutely no question of writing this number in any other way, as it is 10 with a googol zeroes behind it. Say a proton is a little ball about 10^-16 feet in diameter (which it isn't, but so what?) and you jammed the entire universe, a sphere 30 billion light years in diameter (which it isn't, but ditto), edge to edge with protons. That would be a hell of a lot of protons. I set out to calculate it but kept dropping exponents ... but it really doesn't matter, I could have been off by a million orders of magnitude and it really wouldn't have mattered, because if you took my wildest overestimate of that number of protons, then wrote a quintillion zeroes on each proton ... you still wouldn't even be in the neighborhood of a googolplex. You wouldn't be within 30 billion light-years of it.

Whew!

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Now consider the quark. (I do have a point here, but you'll have to wait for it. I'm having too much fun.)

The concept of a quark was formulated by Murray Gell-Mann in 1961. He was pissed off that the list of "elementary" particles was then in the dozens. He didn't think it made sense for the universe to be constructed that way, he longed for the days when there were just the proton, neutron, and electron. He thought there might be some simpler underlying substructure to matter and energy.

He came up with something called the "Eightfold way." It was a mathematical construct of what might really be going on in the atomic nucleus, and it consisted of a small set of things that could never leave the nucleus, so finding them was going to be tough. But if you could predict what might be produced when you smashed an atom and cracked these particles into constituent particles, and then found them, it would be strong evidence that these thingies really existed. Sure enough, over the years the theory has worked out pretty well, to the extent that nuclear physicists can use it as reliably as the theory of gravitation.

Gell-Mann could have called these thingies anything he wanted. Luckily, he opted not to call them "thingies." Instead, he used a line from Finnegan's Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark." I have no idea what Joyce meant by that (I have no idea what he meant by anything in that book), but today the particles are called quarks.

Things got complicated again, by the way. I've been unable to discover just how many quarks are currently postulated, but they are distinguished from each other by "flavors" called topness and bottomness, spin, hypercharge ... and strangeness and charm. Those last two describe qualities that can't be envisioned, but are needed to make the equations balance, and rather than use Greek letters—which physicists were running out of—some playful person came up with those names. I sort of like them, as I like the words quark and googol. There are anti-quarks and virtual quarks and who-knows what else. It's a regular zoo. Last time I looked, the existence of 6 quarks had actually been observed ... or as much as such things can be observed at all, given the limits of quantum theory.

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Lately we've heard some news stories about something called "dark matter." Most of the headlines I've read assert that astronomers have "proved" its existence. This seems to me to be a pretty strong verb to describe the discovery of something that, all astronomers will admit, we don't have the foggiest notion as to what it actually is.

Dark matter was postulated in the first place (back in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky) because the universe seems to be behaving as if it had more matter than we can account for through the radiation it emits. A lot more matter. Current estimates are that what we can see accounts for only 4% of the total energy density (mass=energy, remember, because of E=mc²) of the universe. 22% is this mysterious "dark matter" stuff ... and 74% is thought to be "dark energy," ... and I'm not even going there. Not yet, anyway.

Spinning galaxies, for instance, should fling themselves into space if the only gravitation they have is provided by the stars we can see. Galactic clusters shouldn't be able to endure, either. Some other force, gravitation or otherwise, seems to be holding it all together.

What happened recently to bolster the dark matter theory is, they looked at two incredibly vast clusters of galaxies, pieces of what are known as the Bullet Cluster, that happened to be colliding. (Well, since they're 4 billion light-years from us, they actually collided a long time ago and the news is just getting here by the infinitely slow [at these distances] photon pony express.) The stars in the galaxies barely noticed this, except to slow each other through gravity. Even the densest galaxy is mostly empty space; they just passed right through each other ... at 10 million miles per hour!

The bulk of the clusters is made not of stars, but of very hot, luminous gas (though it's so diffuse that you'd freeze to death in this cloud of "hot" gas). This stuff reacted electromagnetically, which is a much stronger force than gravity. It heated up more, and it slowed down, like the stars. But the "dark matter" just kept on going. Apparently it's not affected by gravity or electromagnetism. Why it isn't gets into theories of baryonic vs. non-baryonic matter and ultrarelativity that I'm not competent to understand, much less explain ... and all of it is highly theoretical, anyway.

The point is, something with a vast amount of mass just kept moving, unaffected by the cosmic cataclysm going on all around it. Something dark. Something we can't see, something we'll probably never see.

So how do we know it's there? Because of something called "gravitational lensing." So much mass distorts the light passing though it, and makes the objects behind it appear to be bigger or closer than they really are. (I don't know how they measure this; I accept that they can.) This lensing, where cosmologists predicted it would happen if dark matter existed, has gone a long way to bolster the theory that something exists there, which we are currently calling dark matter.

And now we get to the point of today's physics and astronomy lesson. I think the term "dark matter" sucks! Old Fritz Zwicky was asleep at the wheel when he came up with that one. Where is the inventiveness, the sense of playfulness that inspired the words googol and quark? Strangeness and charm? Even the term "black hole," not inspiring in itself, has proven to be a treasure trove of metaphor, as in "pouring taxpayers' money into a black hole." I just don't think the public is ever going to be very interested in dark matter. It needs to be punched up, it needs a bit of public relations. It needs a catchier name, one that editorial writers can latch onto.

I propose that we stop calling this mysterious stuff dark matter and start using a term that wasn't available to old Fritz when he first did his calculations. I think we should call it "oobleck."

Murray Gell-Mann steals from James Joyce. I steal from Dr. Seuss. This is probably a useful gauge of our relative intellects.

Oobleck was a substance described in Bartholomew and the Oobleck, in 1949. Bartholomew Cubbins is page to King Derwin of Didd, a spoiled old monarch who grows bored with the regular stuff that comes from the sky: sunshine, fog, rain, sleet, hail, snow. He wants something new, so his magicians come up with oobleck. Trouble is, they don't know what it is. But it starts to fall, in pretty little green drops. The king loves it.

But it keeps falling, in larger and larger drops, and it's sticky. Pretty soon everything in the kingdom is stuck to everything else. Get it? Dark matter holds everything together, but we don't know what it is. Like oobleck.

I expect to have a hard time getting this proposal published in the scientific journals, so I'm asking you all to do your part in spreading the word. Whenever dark matter comes up in casual conversation—at a cocktail party, in your neighborhood bar, at political rallies, after a steamy session of hot sex—just say "All the smart set is calling it oobleck now." Soon all the smart set will be calling it oobleck, you just wait and see.

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Now, just a word about "dark energy." You'll agree it's an inelegant term. What it is, as far as anyone is able to describe it ... it's a fudge factor to account for the observation that the universe is not only expanding, but it's doing so at an accelerating rate. It's not like the Big Bang (another term that could use some tweaking, as it doesn't seem to have been a bang at all), where everything started moving away from everything else all at once, as in an explosion ... because in an explosion from the moment it happens everything starts to slow down, from the effects of gravity pulling everything together. No, the universe seems to be gaining speed in all directions, as if there is some force continually pushing on each particle of it. It's a weird concept, but that's what it looks like.

Since dark energy is thought to account for three-quarters of everything in existence, it's not a trivial substance, or force. It's probably exerting more of an influence on the universe than everything else put together, but we don't have the faintest notion of what it is.

I think scientists would work harder on the problem if they had a better, funnier, or classier name to work with, sort of like it's easier to think about Judy Garland (tra-la!) than Frances Gumm (glum). I've been ransacking the dustier corners of my brain and I feel the name might lie in the works of Al Capp, Kickapoo Joy Juice or something like that, but so far I've not been happy with anything I've come up with.

Something that everything flees from, faster and faster. Should be one word, so Britney Spears is out ...

I throw it over to you. Suggestions?
 

Judy Garland