The Frontiers of Science, The Edge of the Universe

I was skeptical about Frontiers of Science when I came to Columbia.

How could a class divided into four four-week modules teach me anything about science? In high school, I found science classes dreary and repetitive. All the memorization of names and formulae seemed pointless to me. I took a year of chemistry in high school, and the only thing I remember from that class is that a student at my school once stole a huge brick of sodium from the supply closet, tossed it into a urinal, and blew the urinal off the wall. But Frontiers isn’t about teaching students binomial nomenclature or the formula for the acceleration of gravity. It’s about letting people like me experience a glimpse of the beauty that science can illuminate.

The other day in class, someone asked the professor if the universe is spherical. “No, we don’t think it’s spherical,” she replied. “We think it might be flat. In four dimensions.” Think about that. How can something be flat in four dimensions? I don’t even know how something can be flat in three dimensions.

And what was there before the universe? It’s infinite, yet it had a beginning. It existed, they say, as a point. Was it a point floating in space? No, for “space” as we conceive of it would not have existed.

I wish I were eloquent enough to describe my reaction to this concept, but I’m not. The universe is flat, in four dimensions. Do I know what this means? No. But I do now know that the form of the universe is something I will literally never be able to grasp.

When I wander through the stacks at Butler, I cannot help but be humbled by the fact that there is so much I do not know, so much I do not understand. It’s unlikely I’ve read more than a few hundred of the millions of volumes there. There are books in the library about stamp collecting, the history of Botswana, and Hinduism. I know literally nothing about these topics. But I do know that they exist. Stamp collecting is a popular hobby. Botswana is a country. Hinduism is a religion. Those are all categories I recognize.

The shape of the universe, though—that’s a different story. Because the shape of the universe isn’t just another fact in a book I haven’t read. It’s not something I could hunt down with a few hours and a reasonable understanding of the Dewey Decimal System. The shape of the universe is something written in a book on the shelves of a library I did not know existed. The shape and formation of the universe—these notions boggle the mind. But my education cannot be described as the sum of what I know I know. I don’t just want to grind through every volume on every shelf of Butler. I want to find those volumes of whose existence I am absolutely ignorant.

It is not often that a course sheds light on a concept you’ve never even considered. But when it does, it reaches the ideal of an education—the point where schooling meets learning. In challenging my skepticism, Frontiers of Science has performed no mean feat. It has opened a window into a cavernous abyss of the unknown—perhaps the unknowable. I can stare now, into the darkness. Before, little did I wonder that this darkness was even there.