An Introduction To

The Book Of Nature

Bruce Nelson
October, 2009

1
 Preface
Most religions have a sacred book which tells how the world was created and what our place is in it. Mother
Nature did not leave us a book, but She provides many clues to allow us to discover its contents and to write the
book ourselves. Perceptive individuals (like Newton) have picked up on these clues, and we now have detailed
answers to the questions that people have asked for millennia:
How was the Universe formed?
What is it made of?
How did life start?
Why are we here?
Brief answers are given below. More detail is given in the "Introduction" along with explanations of why we
believe the answers are correct. The Introduction ends my contribution. It is followed by references to those
parts of Nature's Book that have been discovered so far -- you can read them for the detailed answers and to
learn how the discoveries were made.

How was the Universe formed?

The Universe is 13.7 billion years old. It started as a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum and quickly expanded
to cosmic size. This phase is called Inflation, and it provided the "bang" for the Big Bang, which describes how
various particles formed as the Universe expanded (more slowly) and cooled. Nature has provided us with a
detailed record of these events inscribed in the microwave background radiation that covers the sky.
Subsequent expansion and cooling allowed galaxies and stars to form, and this process can be studied in
telescopes like Hubble, which can see some of the earliest galaxies (because farther in distance means earlier in
time.)

What is the Universe Made Of?

"Atoms" you say. Yes, that's a good start. Everything that we can see and feel is made of atoms, but the answer
is more complicated than that in two directions. Going smaller, atoms are composite structures, with a central
nucleus surrounded by electrons. The nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons, which in turn are
composed of quarks. Going from the small to the large, measurements made by astronomers and cosmologists
have recently shown that the visible part of the Universe is less than 1% of what is actually there. The Universe
is composed of about 5% atoms (mostly cold and dark), 22% non-atomic "Dark Matter", a tiny bit of radiation,
and 73% "Dark Energy" (which appears to be a property of space itself.) Note that we are adding together both
matter and energy -- as far as gravity is concerned, they are equivalent.

How did life start?

Laboratory experiments starting with the raw materials that were present on the new-born Earth have generated
hundreds of organic compounds by means of heat, electric sparks, pressure and mineral catalysts. These
compounds have been shown to self-assemble into complex organic molecules like RNA (similar to DNA)
which can then reproduce to a certain extent. Cell walls have been shown to self-assemble. However, there are
still numerous steps which need to be demonstrated before it can be claimed that life has been constructed from
scratch in the laboratory. Many experimenters are working on this. Stay tuned.

Why are we here?

There is no purpose evident in Nature's work. As Steven Weinberg said, "The more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." However Primack & Abrams make a strong case that
humans are central to the Universe in a number of ways, such as being the only thinking organisms around. So
just because our appearance was not planned, does not mean that we have no purpose.

2
 Introduction
The Scientific Method
Isaac Newton saw an apple fall and supposed that same force might also hold the moon in its orbit. Of all the
people who had observed apples and the moon, he was the first to make a connection. This may seem obvious
to us now, but back then, the movements of the "heavenly bodies" were prescribed by the Church. Newton had
made a daring move. But he did not stop there -- he did some calculations to check his idea that a single
universal force law could account for the motions of both the apple and the moon. He found that the force
would have to decrease as the square of the distance and to be proportional to mass. This "Law of Gravitation"
is now in every introductory physics text, and was one of the early sections in the Book of Nature. This
illustrates the scientific method: observe, form a theory, test the theory, publish results. The reason we believe
Newton was correct is that we can repeat his observations and analysis to check his results.

There is no room in this scheme for anything supernatural. Many processes are monitored closely all the time
and any discrepancy would not only be noticed, but possibly disastrous:
• Aircraft landings based on GPS readings.
• Automated factories, nuclear reactors, oil refineries.
• Pharmaceutical production, DNA analysis, MRIs.
• Movements of the planets and of spacecraft navigating to them.

Leon Ledermann's book The God Particle starts with an entertaining account of how scientific discoveries were
made, then moves to particle physics. This popular level book contains complex ideas but is not mathematical.
(The lurid title refers to the Higgs particle, which gives masses to particles like the electron.)

Observations and Measurements

So what observations can we make to base our theories of the universe on? Start with the night sky (preferably
away from city lights), where we can see some galaxies as well as stars and planets. The "Milky Way" is the
central part of our galaxy, and the Andromeda galaxy is easy to see if you know where to look and what to
expect. (It is as big as the Moon, but fuzzy and dim.) Early telescopes expanded this vista tremendously,
showing hundreds of fuzzy blobs, which were named "nebulae." In 1923 Edwin Hubble found that many of
these nebulae were made up of stars and therefore were galaxies similar to our own Milky Way. Then in the late
1920s Hubble found that most of the galaxies were moving away from us, the more distant ones moving faster.
This became known as "Hubble's Law." More recently, this expansion was found to be accelerating. [Primack
& Abrams, p90-93; Guth, p46-51; Weinberg, p19-27, Riess & Turner]

Astronomers have come up with several ways to measure the distances of stars and galaxies. Nearby stars shift
their positions slightly as they are viewed by the Earth from opposite sides of its orbit. This is called parallax,
and allows calculation of their distance from the known distance from Earth to the Sun. For greater distances
what is needed is a "standard candle"; i.e., an object of known brightness. For example if we know that two
stars have the same brightness but one is 100 times dimmer than the other, then the dim one must be 10 times
farther. It has been determined that Type Ia supernovae all have the same brightness; these can be seen in very
distant galaxies and have become our standard candles. [Weinberg, p19-27, Riess & Turner]

The velocity and composition of a star are determined by looking at its spectrum, just like Newton used a prism
to make a rainbow from sunlight. The spectral lines allow a chemical analysis of stars, since each element has a
distinctive pattern of lines and their intensity measures their relative amount. An 18th century philosopher
claimed that we could never know what the stars were made of. Actually, once scientists had measured and
cataloged the spectral lines of many elements in the laboratory, it turned out to be quite routine to do that -- each
chemical element produces and absorbs a pattern of colors that acts as its unique fingerprint. The composition
3
of glowing gas clouds can also be measured, and in this way it was determined that the visible matter was about
25% helium and 75% hydrogen, with only tiny amounts of heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. The
spectrum of a star moving away from us is shifted toward the red end, like the sound of a passing siren drops in
pitch as it heads away from you. (Red light is lower in "pitch" than blue.) The velocity is calculated from the
amount of shift (just like a traffic cop with his radar gun.) [Guth, p46-49; Weinberg, p20-21]

The more distant galaxies are dimmer, so larger telescopes were made to collect more light. As these powerful
telescopes search for the most distant galaxies, they are also looking back in time. (We see the Sun as it was
eight minutes ago, and the Andromeda galaxy as it was two million years ago.) We can now see galaxies (and
quasars, which are just extremely bright galaxies) at such early times that their light shifts beyond red and into
the infrared, and telescopes must be specially designed to detect these wavelengths. (The James Webb Space
Telescope, to be launched about 2015, will be able to see the formation of the first stars and galaxies.) Several
telescopic surveys have recorded the redshift (and hence approximate distance) of thousands of galaxies. These
show that at early times galaxies were evenly distributed but they are now clustered into filaments and walls,
with nearly empty voids in between. [Strauss]

To see even earlier times requires "telescopes" sensitive to microwaves since the original light waves have
stretched (cooled) to only 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. This thermal radiation is called the Cosmic
Microwave Background (CMB) and gives us a look at the universe when it was only 380,000 years old. [Hu
and White] The Universe was opaque to light before this, but neutrino and gravity wave telescopes now under
development could let us see even farther back.

The Big Bang

Edwin Hubble's 1929 discovery that galaxies are receding from us at a speed proportional to distance implied
that the universe had once been highly compressed and that we are seeing the explosion of that dense state.
Such a state is well-understood from laboratory experiments; it is entirely specified by the temperature and
particle content. Friedmann's solution to Einstein's general relativity equations for a homogeneous universe
provided a description of the expansion using only Hubble's proportionality constant and the particle density.
But it took a long time for these ideas to form into a proper theory that could make predictions.

In 1948, Gamov, Alpher and Herman published an expansion theory that, when adjusted to match the observed
abundances of chemical elements in the universe, predicted that there would be a residual microwave
background of about 5K (5 degrees Celsius above absolute zero.) Nobody looked for this, probably because
there were other theories that tried to explain Hubble's measurements without expansion. Fred Hoyle, England's
Astronomer Royal, sneeringly dubbed the expansion idea the "Big Bang", and the name stuck. In 1965, Penzias
and Wilson, working at Bell Laboratories, were puzzled at the "excess noise temperature" they were picking up
in their microwave antenna. At the same time, Dicke, Peebles, Roll and Wilkinson at Princeton were preparing
to look for radiation their theory had predicted. Neither group knew of the other, but a common friend made the
connection, and their findings were quickly published. Many scientists then picked up on this, and
measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) soon showed that the radiation was close to the
"black body" form predicted by the theory. The competing theories could not account for this and fell into
disfavor. By 1977, the Big Bang theory had become so well established it was called the "Standard Model of
Cosmology", and scientists concentrated on improving the accuracy of Hubble's constant and other
measurements to refine the model. Steven Weinberg's book The First Three Minutes is a classic description.

Weinberg describes the expansion starting at a temperature of 10 billion degrees (about 1000 times hotter than
the center of the Sun), at a time about 0.01 second after the beginning. (See Riordan & Zajc for earlier times.)
At that time the only particles around were electrons, neutrinos and their antiparticles, and photons, plus a tiny
(one part per billion) sprinkling of protons and neutrons. Friedmann's formula gave the expansion rate
4
proportional to the square root of the energy density, and as the Universe expanded, it cooled. Weinberg's book
follows this cooling through the time electrons combined with their antiparticles to the temperature where the
protons and neutrons could stick together to form atomic nuclei without being blasted apart again by all the
photons. The billion-to-one ratio of photons to protons & neutrons determined which atomic nuclei were able
to form in this brief period. The predictions from the theory were 25% helium, 75% hydrogen, and 0.003%
deuterium; these agreed very well with the amounts measured by astronomers. Further cooling to about 3000K
allowed the nuclei to hold on to electrons to form atoms, and this caused the Universe to become transparent to
photons for the first time. The result, after billions of years of cooling, is now observed as the 2.7K CMB.

Although these checks proved that the Big Bang theory accurately described the Universe, there were some
things the theory did not explain. The obvious one is what caused the "Bang." Another problem was that a
perfectly smooth CMB was predicted, and this did not provide any irregularities from which the stars and
galaxies could form by gravitational collapse. The fact that the CMB on opposite sides of the sky has the same
temperature even though those parts of the Universe were never in contact is called the "Horizon Problem."
And there is the "Flatness Problem", where the measured density happens to be so close to the razor edge of
stability (like a pencil balanced on its point) that some explanation is required. And finally, the age of the
Universe was predicted to be about 12 billion years, but some star clusters were thought to be more like 15
billion years old (the "Age Problem".)

Inflation To The Rescue!

Fortunately, a clever fellow named Alan Guth came up with a pre-bang theory called "Inflation" that solved all
but the Age Problem and also provided a way to pop the entire universe out of the vacuum! The idea was that a
fluctuation in a previously unknown quantum field (named the "Inflaton") acted like anti-gravity and had started
an exponential expansion at rate much faster than light. (Relativity is OK with this because space itself is
expanding; nothing is moving faster than light within space.) The original quantum fluctuations were then
magnified to cosmic dimensions by the subsequent expansion and became the seeds for galaxy formation. The
universe expanded about 10 billion trillion times in a tiny fraction of a second; this stretched out any curvature,
thus solving the flatness problem. Also, the stretching moved neighboring points to far distant parts of the
universe: no more Horizon problem. When the Inflaton field died away, it released the huge energy that had
been built up; hence the Bang. (This did not violate conservation of energy since the energy released was
balanced by the negative gravitational energy.) Alan Guth's book The Inflationary Universe explains all this in
much more detail, and gives a personal account of how the Inflation theory developed from his original idea
(which didn't work) with help from people like Steven Hawking. The new particle accelerator (LHC) near
Geneva, will search for particles like the Inflaton starting in 2009. (The Inflaton may be a version of the Higgs
particle.) In the coming decades, gravity wave telescopes may provide measurements to support (or refute) this
theory by examining the beginnings of our Universe.

In 1970, Vera Rubin measured the orbital velocities of stars in nearby galaxies and determined that the visible
matter in them did not provide enough gravity to hold them together. An unknown kind of matter, named "Dark
Matter", was postulated to account for this. Dark matter also turned out to be necessary for galaxy formation
since it isn't blown around by all the photons [Primack & Abrams, p144]. (It is dark because it doesn't interact
with anything except gravity.) Including Dark Matter brought the total matter density of the universe up to 30%
of the value predicted by the Friedmann formula for a flat geometry. [Primack & Abrams, p100-105]

The ongoing "Hubble Program" to measure speed versus distance of the most distant galaxies using our best
telescopes showed that the expansion is accelerating. This was attributed to "Dark Energy", which can easily be
incorporated into Friedmann's formula since Einstein had once added such a term but had later removed it.
(Interesting story there.) The Dark Energy brought the total energy density of the universe up very close to the
(unstable) value for a flat geometry, just as predicted by Inflation. Dark Energy also eliminates the Age
5
Problem by increasing the calculated age to about 14 billion years. (And it turned out that the oldest stars were
not as old as previously thought. [see Chaboyer])

Since Earth's atmosphere is mostly opaque to the CMB, satellites were put up to get a better look. COBE
measured the CMB temperature to be 2.725K and showed that it had an exact (to 5 decimals) blackbody
spectrum, just as predicted. COBE detected tiny variations in the CMB temperature, and these were the right
magnitude to start galaxy formation in the known time frame. WMAP spent five years getting a high-resolution
measurement of CMB temperature variations. Subsequent analysis, combined with astronomical measurements
of things like the Hubble constant and element abundances, gave us accurate and consistent values for the major
cosmological parameters. The Universe is 13.7 billion years old, is composed of 4.6% atomic matter, 22%
Dark Matter, 73% Dark Energy and 0.008% photons. The Hubble constant is 70.5 km/sec/Mpc and there are
1640 million photons for every proton or neutron. The statistical characteristics of the CMB fluctuations
matched predictions, thus providing strong support for Inflation theory. These values are uncertain by a few
percent, but more accurate values are on the way: the Planck satellite is now up there and just starting its
measurement program. [Hu & White, Turner]

Stars and Galaxies Form

It was known to Newton that a gas cloud in space was gravitationally unstable: any region that was slightly
denser than its surroundings would contract and become even more dense. WMAP's analysis of the CMB
polarization showed that it took 430 million years for the first stars to light up. During this time, small density
variations were magnified by the force of gravity, causing the gases to condense into proto-galaxies. Dark
matter was the leader in this condensation since it was only affected by gravity -- the hydrogen and helium
atoms were pushed around a lot by the photons, which were still a billion times more numerous. The stars then
formed within this dark matter "halo" as the atoms radiated away the energy of their motion and sank to the
center.

Many of the first stars were huge, over 100 times the mass of our Sun. This caused them to burn out very
quickly (for a star), in a million years or so. (Our Sun's lifetime is 10 billion years, but half of that is gone
already.) Because they were large, they ended their lives in powerful supernova explosions, which created all
the higher elements and scattered them widely. The dark matter was not affected by this and it remained in
place to attract the debris back to the galaxy to form a second generation of stars. Since there was much more
than just hydrogen and helium available this time, solid planets were able to form around the new stars. The
early galaxies collided and merged to form the galaxies we see today. Primack & Abrams give a detailed and
very readable account of galaxy formation, p141-152.

The Sun, Earth and planets formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Earth must have had a very violent birth, since
it was assembled from rocks of all sizes -- sort of a continuous meteor bombardment. It is thought that the
Moon was formed when a planet the size of Mars smacked into the young Earth. The Sun was 20% cooler
compared to today, but Earth must have experienced many episodes of impact heating that would likely have
cooked any life that had started. Somehow it managed to hold onto its water and atmosphere through all that.
Wills & Bada include a good description of the formation of Earth in Chapter 3 of their book.

The Origin of Life

Life appears to have begun 3.7 billion years ago, which was only a couple of hundred million years after Earth
cooled below the boiling point of water. In cosmology various theories fell by the wayside as a clear path was
gradually discovered and verified. The origin of life is still in the "various theories" stage. Many partial paths
to life are under investigation and being verified as they are proposed, but a complete end-to-end creation of life
has not yet been discovered. Even then, we cannot exclude the possibility of other pathways to create life.
Since the original life almost certainly devoured its precursors, it may never be possible to determine exactly
6
how life originated on Earth.

Wills & Bada and Hazen discuss the many theories being pursued. The most promising approach is "RNA
First" (as opposed to "Metabolism First" and "Cell Walls First", which also have their proponents.) RNA is
similar to DNA and can carry the same genetic information. It consists of long strands of "nucleotides", each
containing one of the four "bases" adenine, cytosine, guanine and uracil (A, C, G and U). (DNA uses thymine
instead of uracil.) Much of the reproductive machinery in a modern cell is made of RNA, so it seems
reasonable that early organisms used RNA to store its genetic information and to perform many other functions
such as catalysing chemical reactions. RNA is less stable than DNA, and its replication is less accurate, thus
generating lots of random mutations.

RNA first is the most difficult path because of the many complex molecules that must be created from the
available materials. A promising sequence of partial paths is as follows:

1) Geological research has identified the raw materials that life had to start with, including the
atmosphere, deep ocean, volcanic vents, various mineral surfaces, etc. These are water, carbon dioxide,
nitrogen, phosphate, mineral salts, hydrogen sulphide, cyanide, and various organic compounds from meteors.
There was no free oxygen.

2) Laboratory experiments starting with the raw materials have generated hundreds of organic
compounds by means of heat, electric sparks, pressure and mineral catalysts.

3) A major step was recently accomplished when John Sutherland's team created the RNA nucleotides C
and U from available chemicals [Ricardo & Szostak]. To have the complete RNA alphabet available, the A and
G nucleotides must also be created.

4) Connect the individual nucleotides together into long strands. [Hazen, p158] This has been
demonstrated to occur on the surfaces of certain minerals, but the longer the strand, the more tightly it adhered
to the mineral. It was recently discovered that the RNA strands could be released by a concentrated salt
solution. Many random RNA sequences could be generated in this way.

5) "Test Tube Evolution" has been demonstrated to create RNA strands with desired characteristics from
a random mixture. (In a series of cycles, only the desirable RNA is selected by the experimenter for the next
cycle. Similar to selective breeding of animals.) What is desired is self-replication, and so far an RNA
sequence has been found that can copy small parts of itself. Self-replicating RNA would be considered living
by most scientists.

6) Once some self-replicating RNA appeared on the Early Earth, Darwinian evolution would take over
to select for useful characteristics, such as cell walls (which have been shown to self-assemble from lipids in
water), protein enzymes, and new energy sources. RNA does not reproduce very accurately, so there would be
plenty of variation for natural selection to work on. Eventually DNA would replace RNA for more reliable
storage of the organism's genetic instructions. [Dawkins, Carroll]

Conclusion
Many important discoveries are so recent that they are not yet in books, hence the Scientific American
references. (At the professional level, preprints serve this function; see http://arXiv.org/abs/) That it all fits
together in a unified self-consistent whole shows these are pages from the same book.

Portions of Nature's Book

7
In a normal book, this would be the Bibliography. Instead, the following should be considered as some of the
actual chapters of Nature's Book.

Popular: Books in this section explain important concepts without requiring much scientific knowledge. In
particular, they are careful to avoid math! (Many authors believe that each equation in a book cuts the
readership in half.)
Carroll, S. (2005) Endless Forms Most Beautiful.
Chaboyer, B., "Rip Van Twinkle"; Scientific American, May, 2001, p44-53.
Dawkins, R. (1987) The Blind Watchmaker.
Guth, A. (1997) The Inflationary Universe.
Hawking, S. (1988), A Brief History of Time.
Hazen, R. (2005) Genesis, The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin.
Hogan, Kirshner & Suntzeff, "Surveying Space-time with Supernovae"; Scientific American, Jan 1999, p46-51.
Hu & White, "The Cosmic Symphony"; Scientific American, Feb, 2004, p44-53.
Lederman, L. (1993), The God Particle.
Primack & Abrams (2006), The View From the Center of the Universe.
Ricardo & Szostak, "Life On Earth"; Scientific American, Sept, 2009, p54-61.
Riess & Turner, "From Slowdown to Speedup"; Scientific American, Feb, 2004, p62-67.
Riordan & Zajc, "The First Few Microseconds"; Scientific American, May, 2006, p34A-41.
Strauss, M., "Reading the Blueprints of Creation"; Scientific American, Feb, 2004, p54-61.
Turner, M., "The Universe"; Scientific American, Sept, 2009, p36-43.
Weinberg, S. (1993), The First Three Minutes.
Wilczek, F. (2008), The Lightness of Being.
Wills & Bada (2000), The Spark of Life.
(Large libraries have collections of Scientific American. Back issues can be ordered at www.sciam.com for
$10.95 each, including S&H.)

Professional: The following are highly technical books, included in case you want to explore a subject in
depth. They are the closest you can get to the actual Book of Nature.
Clayton, D. (1983), Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis.
Gilbert, S. (2006), Developmental Biology.
Peacock, J. (1999), Cosmological Physics.
Ridley, M. (2004), Evolution.
Stryer, L. (1995), Biochemistry.
Weinberg, S. (1972), Gravitation and Cosmology.

Beware of False Prophets!

There are some popular books that were written by "scientists" to promote creationism and deny evolution. Just
like in Galileo's time, the religious establishment is fighting to hold on to authority. About half the people in
the USA believe that the world was created 6000 years ago in essentially its present form; these people will
fight any new idea that threatens their beliefs, and they are frightened by evolution, fossils, and cosmology.
There are also people with some scientific credentials who write books just for the money; they make a big
thing of long-settled "paradoxes" like Schrodinger's cat and Bell's Theorem and generally just rehash outworn
ideas. It is often hard to recognize trash like this because it is well-written and contains a lot of correct material.