If you want to get down to real basics can you do any better than cosmology, the study of how the universe came to be? You could fiddle around with test tubes, explore human biochemistry or take a trip to the moon, but real scientists don't fool around with this namby-pamby stuff, they try to solve the ultimate riddle - Why is there something rather than nothing?
For centuries this effort had been left in the hands of philosophers who gazed at the stars, and decided the sun revolved around the earth, carried on the back of a giant turtle which bathed itself each evening in the far western ocean where the water ran off the edge of the flat earth.
We are better informed now. Now we know that everything in our solar system, the Milky Way, and all the billions of galaxies around us used to be condensed into a pea-sized lump of matter that for no particular reason blew up in the Big Bang, thus creating the universe. Yes...ahh, thank you...next patient please.
The cosmos as pea isn't so farfetched, however, and no less a person than Prof Stephen Hawking - reckoned to be the greatest mind since Albert Einstein - can prove mathematically on paper why this could be so. The Cambridge don and author of A Brief History of Time has proposed this latest schema for the creation of the universe - known as Open Inflation - with Prof Neil Turok, who holds the chair of mathematical physics at Cambridge.
The theory offers everything from the creation of matter from kinetic energy through the formation of planets, stars and galaxies and on to a universe that will most likely continue expanding forever, like a balloon that doesn't know when to quit.
This is exceedingly good news. Alternative theories held that in time gravity would force the universe to collapse in upon itself - like the balloon with a tragic leak - smashing all the stars and planets including our own back into a single lump of stuff. This of course would have snuffed us all out in a mere 15 or 20 billion years or so.
Cosmologists such as Hawking or Turok can have all sorts of fun producing theories about how the universe came to be and one might sound crazier than the next except for one key point - you have to be able to prove what you say. As was pointed out by Dr William Reville in Monday's Science Today column, theory after cosmological theory fell by the wayside as new astronomical proofs became available.
The view of Ptolemy, the ancient Greek geographer, that the other planets, sun and stars revolved around the earth, held sway for 1,400 years until Copernicus and later Kepler, Galileo and Brahe delivered observations and mathematical models that proved the theory wrong. The latest Hawking/ Turok salvo is a continuation of this ongoing scientific process. Often the pace of this evolution is quickened by the introduction of new technology - the telescope, for example. Other times, it is an intuitive leap forward, as in this case, with the two mathematicians attempting to make observations of the universe today gel with some theoretical suppositions of how things might have been 12 to 15 billion years ago.
Their view is based on what might have happened just before the cataclysm that marked the birth of the cosmos. Current theories suggest that space and time began with the Big Bang - a discharge of energy beyond human comprehension. While time has counted out the seconds ever since, space has continued to expand like that balloon. Einstein taught us matter cannot be created or destroyed, just changed back and forth between matter and energy. The stars, galaxies and all other matter condensed out of the Big Bang energy and began moving away from the starting point, carried forward by expanding space. We can observe this expansion today by looking for the change in wavelengths in infrared radiation from distant stars.
Hawking and Turok can show on paper, however, that the whole universe was started off by something that could be as small as a pea, suspended in a timeless void. Prof Mark Bailey, director of the Armagh Observatory, likened it to a ball-bearing sitting at the top of a curve. At some stage the bearing began rolling, converting its potential energy into kinetic energy and then, as abruptly - kapow, the Big Bang. "Hawking has a solution to a set of equations that starts from a finite amount of matter and creates an infinite universe," Prof Bailey explained. The equations are also predicated and made possible on the assumption that gravity will never be enough to pull all of the matter in the universe back into a pre-Big Bang configuration. In other words, the universe will continue expanding forever to infinity.
This all may sound like a hasty return to the turtle with the sun on its back, but no, experimental realities provide a demanding clockwork into which the new theory must integrate. The problem, Prof Bailey suggests, is that most people simply can't comprehend the scale of the observable universe and so disregard its reality.
"What we see with our telescopes in fact is a real world. It is vast and insofar as we understand the laws of physics, all of these things are real and not just high-tech images on a screen."
The mathematical models told us that we should still be able to detect remnants of the microwave radiation given off by the Big Bang, at the moment the clock hands began their first sweep. This radiation was detected first in 1965 and then confirmed by the COBE satellite this decade. Now an even more sensitive satellite, Planck, is to be launched in search of this radiation and similar satellites are on the way that will be able to scan backwards through time to the birth of the Cosmos. "It is remarkable that we now have at our fingertips the ability to come to conclusions about the creation of the universe," Prof Bailey stated. These satellites will deliver the latest and most comprehensive answer yet to the question, "What is the stars?", that is, at least until the next theory sends the pea on its way to join the turtle.