“If it isn’t true in the extreme, it cannot be true in the mean.”
That, at least, was an argument I heard in an undergrad philosophy class. As we’ll learn, what happens in extreme environments are quite different from the confines of the conditions the human body has evolved in. The conditions we live in are not typical of the universe, one which is mostly hostile to life. And just like the physical sciences, the social sciences can present some extreme conditions that provide counter-intuitive results.
I’ll start with absolute zero. At this temperature all atomic motion ceases. On the Kelvin scale it is 0 degrees, on the more familiar scales it is – 459.67 F or – 273.15 C. You can’t actually reach absolute zero. Heat transfers from a warmer to a cooler object. So ambient heat will always try to warm an object that cold. However, you can get awfully close to absolute zero. In fact, we’ve gotten as close as a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. And this is close enough to see matter behave in strange ways.
At these temperatures, some fluids become superfluids. That is, they have zero viscosity. Liquid helium becomes a superfluid as it is cooled towards absolute zero and having zero viscosity means no frictional effects inside the fluid. If you stirred a cup of superfluid liquid helium and let it sit for a million years, it would continue to stir throughout that time. The complete lack of viscosity means a superfluid can flow through microscopic cracks in a glass (video below). Good thing coffee isn’t a superfluid.
Is there an opposite of absolute zero, a maximum temperature? You’d have to take all the mass and energy (really, one and the same, remember Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence E = mc2) and compress it to the smallest volume possible. These were the conditions found just after the Big Bang formed the universe. The smallest distance we can model is Planck length equal to 1.62 × 10-35 m. How small is this? A hydrogen atom is about 10 trillion trillion Planck lengths. Any length smaller than this general relativity, which describes gravity, breaks down and we are unable to model the universe.
What was the universe like when it was only a Planck length in radius?
For starters, it was very hot at 1032 K, and very young at 10–43 seconds. This unit of time is referred to as Planck time and is how long a photon of light takes to transverse a Planck length. At this point in the young universe, the four fundamental forces of nature, gravity, electromagnetic, electroweak, and electrostrong, were unified into a single force. By the time the universe was 10-10 seconds old, all four forces branched apart. It would take another 380,000 years before the universe became cool enough to be transparent and light could travel unabated. Needless to say, the early universe was very different than the one we live in today.
How will the universe look at the opposite end of the time spectrum?
One possibility is a Big Rip. Here, the universe expands to the point where even atomic particles, and time itself, are shredded apart. In the current epoch, the universe is expanding, but the fundamental forces of nature are strong enough to hold atoms, planets, stars, and galaxies together. Life obviously could not survive a Big Rip scenario unless, as Michio Kaku has postulated, we can find a way to migrate to another universe. That would be many, many billions of years in the future and humanity would need a way to migrate to another star system before then. It is not known with complete certainty how the universe will end. For starters, a greater understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, is required to ascertain that.
Other extremes that we do not experience, but we know the effects are include relativity, where time slows as you approach the speed of light or venture near a large gravity well such as a black hole. In the quantum world, particles can pop in and out of existence unlike anything we experience in our daily lives. The key point is as we approach extreme boundaries, we simply cannot extrapolate what occurs away from those boundaries. Often what we find at the extreme ends of the spectrum is counter-intuitive.
One might ask if this is the case beyond the hard physical sciences. Recent experience indicates that at least in economics, the answer is yes.
Under most scenarios, a growth in currency base greater than the demand for currency will result in inflation. A massive increase in the currency base will end with hyperinflation. The classic case was in post World War I Germany. In the early 1920’s, to make payments on war reparations, Germany cranked up the printing press. In 1923, this was combined with a general strike so you had a simultaneous increase in currency and decrease of available goods to buy. At one point, a dollar was worth 4.2 trillion marks. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve embarked on quantitative easing which greatly expanded the United States currency base. Many predicted this expansion would result in inflation. It didn’t happen.
What gives?
In the aftermath of a banking crisis, demand for cash increases. If that demand is not met, spending falls, unemployment increases, bank loan defaults increase, leading to bank failures and a further fall in money supply. This was the feedback loop in play during 1932, which was a very deflationary environment. The expansion of the currency base simply offsets deflationary pressure rather than starting inflation. The extreme limit being faced here is the zero percent Fed Funds rate making bonds and cash pretty much interchangeable.
Unlike the physical sciences, ideology can muddy the waters in economic thinking. However, the evidence is quite clear on this. The same phenomena was observed both in Sweden in the mid-1990’s and Japan over the past decade. It also happened in the United States during the late 1930’s. In that case, Europeans shipped gold holdings to America in anticipation of war. During that era, central banks sterilized imported gold by selling securities to stabilize the currency base. Facing the deflation of the Great Depression, the U.S. Treasury opted not to sterilize the flood of gold from Europe. The result was the currency base increased 366% but inflation only rose 27% (an average of 3% annually) from 1937-45.
The lesson here is, if you find yourself examining the most extreme conditions or up against a boundary, whether it is the speed of light, the infinite gravity of a black hole, the coldest temperature or lowest interest rate possible, it’s not sufficient to extrapolate the mean into the extreme. You have to look into how these extreme environments alter the manner how systems operate. In many cases, your intuition from living in conditions not in the extreme can lead you astray. However, if you let observations, rather than preconceptions, guide you, some interesting discoveries may be in store.
*Image atop post is the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate as temperature approaches absolute zero. Predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924, as temperatures approach absolute zero, many individual atoms begin to act as one giant atom. Per the uncertainty principle, as an atom’s motion is specified as close to zero, our ability to specify a location of that atom is lost. The atoms are smeared into similar probability waves that share identical quantum states (right). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.