• Now the big question remains: Is cosmology on the precipice of another reversal? Another revolution? If history is any guide, the answer is: Maybe.

By Nazarul Islam | USA

My interest in the science of astronomy was largely influenced by my elementary school teachers in Dhaka. In classrooms, we learned about planetary motion, revolutions and the stark reality of our universe that blinked in the shape of stars, on a clear sky at night. It was the Universe which connected us to faraway galaxies.

A race was on in the late fifties between the US and the Soviet Union. Both powers had focused to land men on the moon, and the neighboring planets. Cosmological things then, had included weather, earthquakes, and sharp changes in our environment. Over the years we learned more about Cosmology studies, how the history of the universe led to the stars, galaxies, and other features we can observe today.

Today we recognize Cosmology as the study of the origin, development, structure, history, and future of the entire universe. Nothing fascinates our minds more than the theory of the Big Bang, the event that created our universe. It was interesting to know —what was like a hot soup of particles (i.e. protons, neutrons, and electrons). Later on our universe started cooling, the protons and neutrons began combining into ionized atoms of hydrogen

Eventually, the observational evidence emerging most notably from radio source counts, began to favor the Big Bang which has dominated today as the best theory of the origin, and evolution of the universe.

Astronomers in the 1990s had accepted three facts quite happily, that were self-evident: The universe is expanding; all the matter in the universe is gravitationally attracting all the other matter in the universe; therefore, the expansion of the universe is slowing. Two scientific collaborations assigned themselves the task of determining the rate of that deceleration. Find that rate, they assumed, and the astronomers would know nothing less than the fate of the universe. Is the expansion slowing just enough that it will eventually come to a halt? Or is it slowing so much that it will eventually stop, reverse itself and result in a kind of big bang reversal—similar to a boomerang?

The answer, which the two teams reached independently in 1998, was precisely the opposite of what they had expected. Cosmology has often lent itself to unthinking assumptions that turned out to be exactly wrong. The earliest and original belief had laid down the concept of ‘geocentrism’.

Over the couple of millennia before the invention of the telescope in the early 1600s, the occasional philosopher suggested Earth orbits the sun and not the other way around. But the vast majority of astronomers could simply look up and see for themselves. The sun orbits Earth. The evidence was, well, self-evident.

But then, most of the history of astronomy had relied on an unthinking assumption: The heavens would always be out of reach. Like the prisoners in Plato’s parable, we would forever be at the mercy of our perceptual limitations, trying to make sense of the motions in a two-dimensional celestial realm that was the cosmic equivalent of a cave wall.

The invention of the telescope in the first decade of the 17th century overturned both those assumptions: Earth orbits the sun; the heavens are at our fingertips. More telescopic discoveries followed that, to varying extents, contradicted one self-evident “fact” after another: mountains on the moon, moons around Jupiter, new stars, new planets. Some assumptions turned out to have been not just unthinking but unthinkable.

How could anyone in the history of civilization ever have looked at Saturn and thought, “I’m assuming it doesn’t have rings”? That our universe is always expanding—the major premise leading to the 1990s search for the deceleration rate—was a revelation that nobody saw coming, including the two theorists who made the discovery not only conceivable but inevitable.

The first, Isaac Newton, would have had to make two counterintuitive leaps of logic to reach such a shocking conclusion. He would have needed to imagine that the universe was capable of doing what it self-evidently was not doing: collapsing. Then he would have needed to conceive of it as doing the opposite: getting bigger. Albert Einstein, the second theorist who paved the way for the expansion discovery, did conceive of it.

In November 1915 he presented the equations underlying his general theory of relativity; fifteen months later he applied those equations to, as he phrased the topic in the paper’s title, “cosmological considerations.” According to his math, the universe should be volatile over time, either expanding or contracting. To avoid that unsettling implication, he introduced a variable, L, the Greek symbol for lambda, to balance his equation. The value of lambda would be whatever it needed to be to satisfy Einstein’s preference for a universe in perfect balance.

Each theorist’s “blunder,” as Einstein characterized his own refusal to trust his math, was understandable. Newton and Einstein, however intellectually exceptional, were still only human. The universe was static. If evidence to the contrary existed, it certainly wasn’t obvious. And then it was. In the early 1920s American astronomer Edwin Hubble deployed the new 100-inch telescope atop Mount Wilson in California to observe some of the nebulous smudges at the farthest reaches of previous telescopes.

Using Cepheid variables (stars that brighten and dim with clockwork regularity) as a measure of distance, he inferred that at least some of those nebulae were actually “island universes”—galaxies—beyond our own Milky Way. Next he used the redshifts of those galaxies to infer not only that the galaxies are moving away from us and from one another—itself a science-redefining discovery—but also their rate.

When Hubble plotted those distances against those velocities on an x/y graph, he found a direct correlation: the more distant the galaxies, the faster they were moving away from us. Thus, the universe must be expanding. Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître independently reached the same conclusion, working not from his own data but from Einstein’s equations. Trace the expansion backward, he argued, and you would arrive at a “primeval atom.”

Evidence supporting the existence of such a “big bang” didn’t come until 1964, in the form of a background of microwave radiation that seems to pervade all of space. Theorists had predicted the existence of such a background as the relic of an explosive origin, although the two Bell Labs astronomers who first detected the radiation initially dismissed it as noise, possibly the result of pigeon droppings lining the giant horn of their radio antenna.

Four physicists at nearby Princeton University, however, recognized that the observation matched the key prediction of the big bang theory. Six years later American astronomer Allan Sandage cast cosmology as “the search for two numbers.” One number was the “rate of expansion” now. The other, however, harbored the unthinking assumption that would motivate two teams of researchers a quarter of a century later: “the deceleration in the expansion” over time.

Both teams trying to measure cosmic deceleration followed Hubble’s methodology of plotting velocity versus distance on a graph (using the magnitudes of a type of exploding star, or supernova, rather than Cepheid variables). The dual collaborations expected to find the same direct correlation that Hubble did—at least at first.

At some distance, though, they assumed that the line would depart from its 45-degree trajectory and dip, indicating that the apparent magnitudes of the supernovae were brighter, and therefore nearer, than they would be in a universe expanding at a constant rate. And depart from its 45-degree trajectory the line did. Only it didn’t dip. It rose. The supernovae were dimmer, and thus farther away, than they would be in a universe expanding at a constant rate. The expansion of the universe, the rival teams concluded, isn’t slowing down. It’s somehow speeding up.

Dark energy—as cosmologists came to call whatever was causing the acceleration—soon became part of the standard cosmological model, along with dark matter and “regular” matter, the stuff of us. Observations of the same cosmic microwave background that, back in the 1960s, helped to validate the big bang interpretation of cosmology have revealed the universe’s ingredients. By studying the patterns in the radiation, scientists have refined the contributions to the mass-energy density of the universe to an exquisite level of precision: 4.9 percent of it must be ordinary matter, 26.8 percent dark matter, 68.3 percent dark energy.

The model, cosmologists believe, is solid. But it wasn’t flawless. Not even complete. What is dark energy? What is dark matter? Indeed, even after all these years: What is the fate of the universe? Just this year the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument in Arizona provided evidence that dark energy may have changed over the course of the evolution of the universe.

Cosmologists have found the evidence compelling, though its meaning—let alone its implications for the standard model of cosmology—remains elusive.

Now the big question remains: Is cosmology on the precipice of another reversal? Another revolution? If history is any guide, the answer is: Maybe. For all today’s cosmologists know, they might be laboring under a seemingly unassailable, self-evident, yet incorrect assumption. Perhaps even an unthinking one.

Scientists confirm this has happened before.

Read: The truth behind retrospective laws

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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.

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Davlatova Shodiyona | Uzbekistan

Gender equality and feminism are topics that cause a lot of debate and controversy in today’s society. Issues related to women’s rights, their role in society, and the struggle for equality are becoming increasingly relevant. The consideration of the issue of women as a social problem is associated with feminism. In scientific literature, this ontological genesis and epistemological essence of feminism are interpreted primarily in connection with the struggle for human rights and freedoms. Various socio-political movements that emerged in the 19th century, the widespread spread of views on human rights, create the basis for feminism. Therefore, by the middle of the 19th century, the existence of the women’s issue was recognized not only in books, but also in state policies. In 1779, the French philosopher J. Condorcet, with his “Declaration of the Rights of the Citizen and of Women“, and Olympia de Gouges, with his “Declaration of the Rights of the Citizen and of Women”, laid the foundation for the movement for women’s social and political rights in Europe and later in the United States. From this period, the concepts of “feminism” and “feminist” emerged. In fact, the concept of “feminism” is French Feminist is derived from the word. “Femina” means woman. Gender comes from the Latin word genus (in English gender), which means sex in Uzbek. The concept of gender studies began to enter science in the middle of the 20th century. The term gender was first used in his scientific research by New Zealand psychologist John Mani in 1952. Later, in 1963, at the International Conference of Psychologists in Stockholm, American scientist Robert Stoller introduced the term gender to science through his report on the concepts of self-awareness of social gender in society, and proposed to study gender into biological and cultural types. R. Stoller considered it appropriate to study biological sex (sex) as an object of research in biology and physiology, and cultural sex (gender), that is, gender as an object of research in psychology and social science. The term was also coined by English sociologist Anne Oakley in 1972 in her scientific work “Sex, Gender, and Society.”

According to A.A. Huseynova, feminism is considered a movement that protects the socio-political equality of women. Feminism promotes the struggle for women to have equal rights with men in the economic, socio-political and cultural spheres, as well as active participation in socio-political life… Therefore, it has become a women’s ideology, which sets the main goal of equality of people (or rather, genders). If feminism as an idea expresses the equal rights and opportunities of women with men in the socio-political and economic spheres of society, then as an ideology it is a cultural movement aimed at ensuring that women have equal rights and opportunities with men and against all forms of discrimination against women. In a narrow sense, feminism is a movement aimed at transforming the “first enslaved woman” in the history of mankind into an equal subject of society. A.A. Huseynova expresses the right view when she says that “feminism is a movement against the domination of one sex over the other.” She also says that “feminism is not a mono-gender movement consisting only of women. It also includes all humane men who have made the protection of democratic ideas and human rights the meaning of their lives”.

“Feminism is a movement against all social phenomena that contradict the bio-sociological nature of man, including inhuman realities such as gender reassignment, lesbianism, homosexuality, prostitution, and “human trafficking.” In recent years, such inhuman phenomena that contradict the bio-sociological nature of man have escalated, and the media and even some countries are paving the way for this. The most tragic thing is that some international organizations support such situations, and some politicians, with their indifference and irresponsibility, are paving the way for their escalation.

“Gender philosophy” primarily covers the socio-psychological and pedagogical aspects of the relationship between men and women, boys and girls. This concept develops depending on new social views and culture. The concepts of matriarchy or patriarchy in history are a vivid example of this. In the field of education, the concept of gender does not apply only to girls, because by its nature it describes and describes the relationship between boys and girls, that is, it studies the division of social roles, forms of activity, the presence of specific features in the behavior and psychological characteristics of individuals. Gender equality is a state in which men and women have equal rights, opportunities and access to resources. This is not only a matter of human rights, but also an important factor in the sustainable development of society.

Gender equality means that every person, regardless of gender, should have the opportunity to realize their potential, to receive education, to work and to participate in decision-making. It is no coincidence that the responsibility for drafting such an important document as the Universal Declaration was entrusted to the Committee headed by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt as an honorable task. It was from this time that the issue of women and girls began to gain international importance. Achieving equal access to the same opportunities, rights and responsibilities in all areas of society for women and men was considered the general goal of the principle of gender equality.

Gender equality is a systematic approach and a long-term process. It cannot be instilled only in a certain part of education or only through the institution of the family. Therefore, ensuring the mutual cooperation of the family-community-education system in the formation of a healthy worldview related to gender in the social consciousness is of urgent importance.

The main connection between feminism and gender equality is that both strive to ensure equality between the sexes in society. While feminism is aimed at protecting women and expanding their rights, gender equality is an expanded form of this general approach and means equality between all sexes.

Feminism is a movement that seeks to bring about social change, primarily by empowering women, while gender equality seeks to bring about these changes in all segments of society.

Feminism can be used as a means to achieve the goals of gender equality. Both concepts aim to bring about social change, justice, and gender equality, but their paths may differ.

In conclusion, it can be said that while feminism is a social movement that expresses the struggle of women for their rights and freedoms, “gender” is a concept that refers to the relationship between men and women. Gender equality and feminism are closely related to human rights, justice and democratic values in today’s world. The main idea of feminism is that every person, regardless of gender, has the right to fully realize their potential. Ensuring gender equality brings beneficial results not only for women, but also for society as a whole. . In this regard, the joint and coordinated activities of all sectors of society – state structures, public organizations, business entities, trade unions and the general population – are of great importance.

Read: Question of Balanced Parenting

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Davlatova Shodiyona is 2nd year student of the “International Relations” department of the “Foreign Policy and International Economic Relations” faculty of Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies, Uzbekistan. She is amateur poetess. Her poems and stories have been published in several magazines and newspapers.

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