Surfing Rogue Waves (eBook)

The Beginning of Theory

Complexity is not a new concept; it has been around since the beginning of time. In prior times, we had a habit of repeating our mistakes and seeing history repeat itself time and again. Things were simpler then. Today, our world is becoming so complex that not only will we never make the same mistake twice; we won’t even have time to recover from the errors or learn that they were mistakes in the first place. To understand how the world came to be, we have to know where it all started. Understanding our past is essential not only to understanding the present but also in shaping our future.

Go back to the real beginning, as far back as we can mentally comprehend, to when our planet was created out of complexity. The story starts about 14 billion years ago, when all the space, matter, and energy of the known universe would fit, as Neil Degrasse Tyson puts it, “in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.” Small. Then, an explosion occurred, one that we knew little about until we met a Belgian named Gilles Lemaître in the early 1900s. He observed how neighboring galaxies were moving farther away from us, giving him the grounds of the expanding universe theory. Lemaître later proposed what most of us know today as the “big bang theory” to explain the universe’s origin. Ironically, in addition to being a noted mathematician, astronomer, and physics professor, Gilles was a Catholic priest. Unlike other Catholic tendencies, Gilles didn’t proclaim much of anything. There was no “Big Bang Proclamation,” but a theory. Modern science, even in the earliest days, was built on the persistent testing of theories.

Theories rely on testing to deem their accuracy. Therein, a theory needs to be established in a way it can be routinely tested against numerous variables. The more times the theory is proven correct, the stronger it tends to be. It turns out this Gilles guy was pretty bang on with his theories and calculations, but sometimes we need to see things with our own eyes to believe them—which is exactly what happened. Shortly after Lemaître proposed his theory, another scientist confirmed it through physical observation. You know this other scientist as Edwin Hubble, the famous American astronomer after which the Hubble Telescope would later be named. Additional scientists who came to support Father Lemaître’s big bang theory include other familiar names, like Albert Einstein.

Einstein used Thought Experiments to explain and prove phenomena through mathematics. In 1916, Einstein published a paper with a theory that would forever change our understanding of the universe. This theory outlined the detailed mathematical calculations about, well, essentially how everything in the universe moves by the influence of gravity. This theory explains “our modern understanding of gravity, in which the presence of matter and energy curves the fabric of space and time surrounding it,” as Tyson would say with convincing simplicity.

Again, theories are made to be tested. In the early 1900s, what Einstein proposed must have seemed beyond absurd. His calculations and theory claimed that it should precisely bend the light from another star due to the sun’s gravitational pull, causing an eclipse that could be calculated with exact precision. On May 29, 1919, a group of English scientists trekked over West Africa to see if they could witness a total solar eclipse predicted with Einstein’s theory. As the haters and critics gathered and waited to scoff at the failed results, they were all terribly disappointed to see that the eclipse’s measurements revealed that Einstein’s predictions were correct with incredible precision. Since that day, the smartest minds in the world have challenged, attacked, and rigorously tested this law of General Relativity. The more they fail, the more it strengthens our view of the universe’s theory and understanding. This was a theory devised in a person’s mind, proven through math, about things they had no way of testing or seeing at the time. Yet it has somehow stood the test of time for over a hundred years now. Every day in labs around the world, the smartest scientists with increasingly precise technology and instruments further test and experiment with this theory. We tested this theory on everything, including variables we didn’t know existed in 2019, never mind 1916. As we continuously test and accurately predict outcomes explained by the theory, our confidence in the theory is reinforced. This is what makes science so great: Opinions do not matter unless we can test them. On the other hand, even if a theory holds up and is strengthened by testing a thousand variables against it, the entire theory can fall apart if even one test fails.

Complexity explains emergence, but we see and experience emergence at macro and micro levels differently. Take the example of our cosmos timeline, which we all know starts with a bang, but then not many observable things happen. At the micro level, electrons start fusing to protons. Temperatures drop below 100,000,000 degrees Kelvin. Protons and neutrons get jiggy with it and form a universe made up of a nuclei breakdown of 90% hydrogen, 10% helium, and trace amounts of other stuff. Not much happens for the next 380,000 years—particles just rip about doing whatever. Eventually, things cool down to 3,000 degrees Kelvin and the particle party comes to a halt. All the free electrons mate with nuclei, creating light at the macro level! Light is essential because it gives us the start of the permanent ledger in our history. The light we see at night from stars represents time—and the arrival of light provides us with a recording of where all of the matter in the universe was at a specific time.

Skipping ahead 9,000,000,000 years or so, after all this micro-level complexity, we arrive at the Virgo Supercluster and within it, the Milky Way. While there may not be anything objectively special about the Milky Way galaxy, there is a tiny location within this galaxy, also not unique or special, called the Orion Arm, where an exceptional star was born. Well, exceptional to us, as it is our Sun!

Skipping a few hundred million years, a planet forms under fortunate circumstances and locks into orbit with this star (our Sun). This planet is primarily made up of liquid, which would have evaporated if the planet had been closer. Any farther away, and it would have frozen solid. In this perfect balance and dance with the Sun emerges a planet we know as “Earth,” now primarily made up of the liquid we call oceans.

Without wandering down the complicated path of evolution, we can know that the newly cooled, liquid Earth is home to tiny, single-celled organic molecules that can self-duplicate. While the simple anaerobic bacteria did not require oxygen to do their thing, they did produce a fair amount of oxygen as a byproduct of their replication. At this point in our history, the Earth’s atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide. As these simple anaerobic bacteria replicated, they created more oxygen until there was enough for aerobic organisms to emerge.

From here, we start to see more complex-celled organisms capable of breathing air. They start to reproduce. The planet now had organisms roaming about both land and water. Another neat takeaway from all this oxygen production? The creation of our atmosphere, which would serve to protect us from the constant barrage of ultraviolet photons (or “sunshine,” as you may know it) that would otherwise roast us to death. Even here, with breathing creatures and atmosphere, we are still a long way away from what we know as humanity.

In the meantime: enter the dinosaurs! There isn’t a child alive who, at one point, hasn’t loved dinosaurs, so it only makes sense to give them a shout-out. As we rip through the next billion years or so, the Earth continues to develop increasingly complex organisms and lifeforms such as grass, trees, weeds (unfortunately), flowers, reptiles, mammals, and of course, dinosaurs. Sadly, the dinosaurs exit the story just as quickly as they entered it. Looking back at the scale of the last 14 billion years, dinosaurs roamed the Earth for less than the time you took to blink just now. As we continue to fast-forward through our timeline, we pause around 75,000 years ago. By now, primates, a sub-branch of mammals, have developed frontal lobes. A subdivision of these primates experienced a genetic mutation that would allow for speech, ultimately resulting in what we know as Homo sapiens.

We know, for sure, that something wiped out the dinosaurs. Then, something else nearly wiped out Homo sapiens—we almost shared the same fate, as though history were repeating itself. Right at this point in our history, Indonesia exploded. Like, as a region, it just…exploded. One of the Earth’s largest-known eruptions—we are talking about a supervolcanic eruption, the biggest volcanic event in the last 25,000,000 years—took place. If you were around then, it would be the eruption you talked about for the next 75,000 years, assuming you survived.

This massive and incredible explosion spewed a thick curtain of dust, junk, rubble, smoke, and ash that covered the skies and blocked out the sun for thousands and thousands of kilometers. This eruption was so violent that an estimated 2,793 cubic kilometers of dirt exploded into the air, covering massive parts of India and Malaysia in 30 feet of deep volcanic ash. The parts not buried in volcanic ash likely suffocated under an enormous blanket of deadly, poisonous smoke and dust. Suddenly, most of the planet was not what our...