[video:  inside the  mine]  A pit has been excavated,  rigged with
 sensitive detectors, and then filled with 660 tons of pure water.
 If a proton in any one of the  billions of water molecules in the tank
 were to decay, it would send out a telltale flash of light.   Computers
 monitoring the flash of light would bring the news to waiting scientists.
 If the results are positive, the experiment will confirm an unsettling
 hypothesis:   that all  the matter  in the universe is a passing fancy,
 a stage in the ongoing dance of energy.

   If electromagnetism and the weak force unite at high energies, and
 the strong force joins with them at still higher energies, then might
 not all the four forces ultimately be one?  Some of the most inventive
 minds in physics  are at work trying to solve that riddle.

   Stephen Hawking  ranks  among the world's leading physicists, despite
 his having suffered, for more than 20 years, from a progressive disease
 of the central nervous  system that has  left him paralyzed and almost
 unable to speak.

   Hawking holds  Isaac   Newton's  old chair  as Lucasian  professor
 of mathematics at Cambridge University.   During a recent seminar at
 Cal Tech,  his words were interpreted by a former student, super-
 symmetry  physicist   Nick  Warner. Hawking's  subject, the  infancy
 of the universe.

                                   *****

    [video:  A  California  Institute of Technology classroom;   Hawking
 speaks, while Warner translates and draws equations and diagrams on the
 board.]

 NICK WARNER:  [translating Hawking] The boundary conditions are that the
 universe has no boundary.   (Sounds rather Zen,  doesn't it?) [laughter]
 What Stephen  means by this is that spacetime is some compact,  four-
 dimensional manifold... This is a general  four manifold--some compact
 four-manifold M with some metric on it, G Mu Nu,  on the surface,  and
 also some matter fields, Phi, on the surface.

 MURRAY GELL-MANN:  [later in the conference]  Do I understand, then,
 that you want the mass of effective unification of a Yang-Mills or super
 Yang-Mills theory to be this low, like  10 to the 14th?  Or can that M be
 something else?

 NICK WARNER:   [Translating Hawking]  It may be something else.

 MURRAYGELL-MANN   But in any case, the M is the mass characteristic of
 whatever physics  is responsible for  the transition?

 NICK WARNER:   [translating Hawking]  It is a mass.   It generates the
 the inflation cosmological  constant.  Stephen wants just to add that
 you can also explain-you  can also explain the arrow  of time from this.
 He thinks that  would take much more time than  we have. That's all.
 [applause]

                                    *****

 TIMOTHY FERRIS:   No laboratory on Earth can produce the energy at which
 the four forces would act as one.  Only the fires of Genesis  were hot
 enough for that.  The search  for simplicity in the realm of the atom
 draws us out into the realm of the  galaxies, and  back  toward  the
 beginning of time.

 (End of Part One)

 THE
 CREATION
 OF THE
 UNIVERSE

 TIMOTHY FERRIS:  [video:   computer animation of the Milky Way galaxy,
 wheeling in space.]   We live  in a  major spiral galaxy that we call
 the  Milky Way.  It's home to the sun and a few hundred billion other
 stars.

   The galaxy belongs, in turn,  to a cluster of galaxies.  Astronomers
 call it the local group.  And  the  local  group  is part of the Virgo
 supercluster, an archipelago of galaxies stretching across one hundred
 million light years of space.

   [video: animated expansion of the Virgo Supercluster]   The galaxies
 are marching  away  from  one another as the  universe  expands.  In a
 computer  simulation based upon astronomical observations,  we witness
 something never before seen by human eyes, the predicted scattering of
 the  Virgo  supercluster,  by the expansion of the universe,  over the
 course of the next fifty billion years.

    [video:  stills of Einstein; then, footage of Einstein and Hubble
 at Mt. Wilson  Observatory]   The  expansion  of  the  universe  was
 predicted  by  Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in
 1915.   But  the  idea  seemed  so  outlandish that Einstein himself
 rejected it.
   He introduced an extraneous  term into the field equations  to try
 to  make his theoretical universe stand still.  Later Einstein would
 call  this  modification of the theory,  "the worse  blunder  of  my
 career."  Then, in  1929,  the  American  astronomer   Edwin Hubble,
 without knowing of the relativity  prediction,  discovered that  the
 universe is indeed expanding.  Einstein and Hubble met in California
 in 1931,  and celebrated Hubble's  having found, at  the  telescope,
 what the mind of Einstein had conceived.

   Astronomer Allan Sandage,  once Hubble's pupil,  has devoted  much
  of  his career to studying the expansion  of the universe.
                                    *****

 ALLAN SANDAGE:  It is not as if these  galaxies  are  expanding into
 a  space  that's  already there.   The view is that space  itself is
 expanding,  carrying the galaxies with it. The expansion creates the
 space.  The crucial  analogy, first made by Eddington as long ago as
 1930,  just  one  year after Hubble had announced the expansion, was
 you can  conceptualize  the thing as the two dimensional  analog, by
 the surface of a balloon.

   You  paint  dots  on the surface  of a balloon and you blow it up.
 You put yourself on any dot.  You seem to be the center, and all the
 other dots move away from you. Now, take the air out of the balloon,
 and look what the dots do. All the dots come toward every other dot,
 and if  you  could take all of the air out of a perfect balloon, the
 surface itself would go to zero; all the dots  would be back at  one
 place  at one time.   Every place is the center of the expansion.

   When you talk about this,  the question that  always comes,  well,
 can you find the center of the expansion?  Every place is the center
 of the expansion. There is  no center  to  the beginning. Everything
 was back at one place, and every place and every time was identical,
 in the beginning.

                                   *****

 continued...

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