Cosmic Mysteries

Michael Lemonick’s new book tells the story, with surprising revelations, of how the universe was formed.

By: Daniel Shearer

"Princeton

TimeOFF/Frank Wojciechowski
Princeton resident Michael Lemonick explains the findings of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe in his book, Echo of the Big Bang.


   Hovering in the cold of deep space a million miles from Earth, a one-ton satellite began sending information scientists hoped would answer some of life’s biggest questions. How old is the universe? How big is it? What is it made of, and how did it evolve into its present state?
   The results, announced in February by a team at NASA, provided some of the strongest evidence to date that most of the matter and energy in the universe is comprised of something completely unknown to science.
   "We’re kind of an impurity," says Princeton resident Michael Lemonick, a senior writer for Time magazine and the author of Echo of the Big Bang (Princeton University Press, $24.95), which chronicles the development and launch of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
   Designed by a team of scientists at Princeton University, the sensitive instruments aboard WMAP measured the barely perceptible microwave background pervading the universe, looking for the hot and cold spots they hoped would provide a glimpse of the beginning of time. After months of analysis, the data sent by the probe confirmed what some cosmologists had been saying for years, that the universe was nearly 14 billion years old. Previous estimates had put the age of the universe anywhere between 12 and 15 billion years. WMAP data established a precise age — 13.7 billion years.
   But the probe also provided enough information for scientists to conclude that ordinary atoms, the kind of matter that makes life possible on Earth, comprise only 4.4 percent of the universe.
   "We, and the Earth and the sun, all the stars, everything you can see in the universe is kind of this impurity," Mr. Lemonick says. "That’s a thin layer on top of the real stuff, and we have no idea what the real stuff is. And now, in the past few years, we’ve learned that there’s this huge amount of mysterious energy filling the universe as well. They call it dark energy, and that’s crazy, too. So, the universe is mostly stuff we don’t understand at all."
   Mr. Lemonick wraps up a two-week book tour May 15 with a lecture at Barnes & Noble in West Windsor.
   As recently as 20 years ago, the idea of dark matter and dark energy were little more than theories. Then, in the early 1990s, the forerunner to the WMAP project, the Cosmic Background Explorer, made crude measurements of the radiation thought to have been left over from the big bang.
   As Mr. Lemonick writes in his book, some of this radiation, in fact, could be seen on television sets back in the days when programs were broadcast over the airwaves, instead of cable. At the time, though, few people knew where the static was coming from. That changed in 1964, when two radio astronomers at Bell Labs in Holmdel accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background using a large, horn-shaped antenna designed to detect signals bounced from a satellite.
   After painstakingly eliminating all conceivable sources for the microwave emissions — including the "white dielectric" material left behind by pigeons nesting in the antenna — the researchers concluded a small portion of the noise was coming from some source in the sky. Mr. Lemonick notes this noise came from "a source not localized to our galaxy, but appearing from all directions at once." Princeton University researchers David Wilkinson and Peter Roll confirmed the observation later that year with an apparatus built atop Guyot Hall, laying the groundwork for the Cosmic Background Explorer, which produced a rough map of the microwave background in the early ’90s.
   Hoping to generate a clearer picture, NASA launched WMAP in 2001, which has since allowed scientists to make precise observations about the geometry of the universe. While no one knows what dark matter or dark energy is actually made of, scientists believe they can now confirm the existence of these strange forces by measuring their effects.

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   "What the scientists involved (with the reporting of WMAP findings) said is it’s almost shocking how neatly this set of observations ties together hints that we’ve had over the past few years of what the universe is like," Mr. Lemonick says. "It wouldn’t have been surprising if we found that these hints were all wrong. It turns out, most of them were right."
   Mr. Lemonick began research on the WMAP project several years ago, after an astronomer at Princeton mentioned a probe that would hopefully answer many of cosmology’s open-ended questions. Mr. Lemonick then approached David Wilkinson and David Spergel, who were helping to design and build instruments for the spacecraft in a clean room at the university’s physics department.
   "It’s still very unusual for a major NASA space probe to be constructed, or to even have the instruments constructed, at a university," Mr. Lemonick says. "At that point, the thing had not been launched yet. It had just gone down to the Goddard Space Flight Center to be put together and tested, so I started researching the book, researching the history of the project, how the group of people came together and how they convinced NASA to let them do this project.
   "They were competing with other groups, and it was clearly going to be really important if it worked. The question was, would it work? Would it launch without exploding? I did go down to the launch and have been following it pretty closely since then."
   A Princeton native, Mr. Lemonick is the son of Aaron Lemonick, who spent 17 years as the dean of the Princeton University physics faculty before retiring in the early ’90s. Michael moved away briefly during his college years — he earned a bachelor’s in economics from Harvard University, followed by a master’s from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism — but says he hasn’t ever seriously considered living anywhere else. His wife, Eileen Hohmuth-Lemonick, teaches photography at Princeton Day School.
   After earning his master’s, Mr. Lemonick accepted a job as an assistant editor at Science Digest magazine. He joined Time in 1986 as staff writer, producing his first cover story — on the great supernova of 1987 — in April of that year. He is now a senior writer at Time and has been working for the magazine since the mid-’80s, with the exception of seven months in 1988 when he took a job as executive editor of Discover magazine. He returned to Time as an associate editor.
   As the author of two previous science books written for the laity, The Light at the Edge of the Universe and Other Worlds, Mr. Lemonick is well aware of the fact that formulas and equations greatly impair readability.
   "I believe Stephen Hawking was told, when he came out with his first popular book, that for every extra equation you include, you lose some number, thousands of readers," Mr. Lemonick says. "It’s not really a temptation for me to include equations because I’m not a scientist, and I don’t think in terms of equations. In fact, that’s why I became a science writer, rather than a scientist."
   Mr. Lemonick enjoys tackling abstract concepts, although he does admit that attempts to understand the four-dimensional curvature of spacetime can prove fruitless, even given the best possible explanation without mathematics.
   "It’s difficult because not really understanding the mathematics really does limit your ability to grasp what’s going on," he says. "There’s no way you or I are going to learn the math, it’s just not gonna happen. So you do the best you can to give people a sense of what it’s like.
   "I think the real problem that people have with these ideas is they instinctively think you should be able to visualize it, and you can’t because your brain just isn’t wired that way, and mine isn’t either. What I tried to do is to tell people, to have a warning, your brain won’t really grasp this, so just stick with me on the analogies and trust that if you could do the math it would prove to you that this was correct."
   Other discoveries from WMAP may be just around the corner. If that happens, there’s a good chance Mr. Lemonick will be writing about them for Time.
   "There are hints, at least of the possibility, that the universe is finite," Mr. Lemonick says, "that it’s not infinite, and it’s not that much bigger than we can see. That if you traveled far enough in one direction, you kind of reappear coming from the other direction, which is also the stuff of science fiction.
   "There are hints in the WMAP data that this could be true, but they’re certainly not strong enough hints for these guys to make any claims. It’s possible that after the satellite runs for another three years, those hints will become strong enough to make a claim, but they’re not predicting that. It’s just sort of a tantalizing possibility."
   If the universe is finite, what could possibly lie beyond?
   "Well, now you’re getting into terminology that does take some work to talk about," says Mr. Lemonick, grinning. "But, in fact, beyond the universe is something that most cosmologists says is not a meaningful expression."
Michael Lemonick will present a lecture at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, MarketFair, 3535 Route 1, West Windsor, May 15, 7 p.m. For information, call (609) 716-1570.