Arsalan Adil had been on the road for three months. Starting in Pakistan’s Hindu Kush mountains, he motorcycled along the Karakoram Highway, an 810-mile road that traces an ancient trade route of the Silk Road and ascends nearly 16,000 feet at its highest point. Adil veered off the highway, barreling towards his destination of Shimshaal. 

When Adil was about 10 miles from his destination, the road stopped. A bridge that had once connected the road’s two sides had been swept away by a rising river. As darkness fell across the landscape, Adil pushed forward. The river didn’t look too treacherous. 

But as the adage goes, looks can be deceiving. 

When Adil crossed the street-sized flow, his motorcycle got stuck. The situation looked dire until locals noticed Adil struggling.

“All these people, they just dropped everything to help me,” recalled Adil, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. “I said, ‘I feel so bad that you guys are taking out all this time from your day just to help me.’ They said, ‘This is the way we live. Today, we are helping you. Tomorrow we may be in trouble and someone will help us.’”  

A technician from a nearby power plant fixed Adil’s motorcycle. The next day, he was back on the road. 

From March to June 2024, Adil traversed the northern region of his home country of Pakistan on an adventure that was peppered with science outreach efforts. During the road trip, he stopped at a handful of rural schools dotting the region, giving lectures on astronomy and physics. 

“We often have discussions about diversity, equity and inclusion in physics, but often missing from these discussions are considerations about global inequities. There are so many people who are passionate about science, who want to study science, but they don’t have the resources for it.” — Arsalan Adil 

Finding a place in the cosmos

Growing up, Adil didn’t know anyone with a Ph.D. degree, but he was fascinated by physics, specifically astrophysics and cosmology. The questions researchers asked in these fields spoke to the very essence of existence. How did the universe come to be? What was humanity’s place in the cosmos? 

As an undergraduate at the University of Richmond in Virginia, where he earned a full-tuition scholarship, Adil found the opportunity to start studying those questions himself. During his second semester, Adil approached Professor of Physics Ted Bunn and inquired about an upper-level cosmology course. 

“I didn’t have any of the prerequisites for it, but he gave me a book on mathematical methods to study before the class started, so that I could catch up to the course requirements,” Adil said. “Then I took the course and that changed the course of my life.” 

Today, Adil works with Distinguished Professor Andreas Albrecht, a theoretical cosmologist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Davis. Adil’s research interests concern the fundamental nature of the universe. How did the quantum physics of the early universe lead to the classical physics we experience and observe in the cosmos? 

“The universe is expanding today, which means that if you go back, at some point the universe was really small, so that quantum effects played an important role,” Adil said. “In fact, all structure in the universe — galaxies, planets, us — originates as quantum fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime at the earliest epoch. These then get stretched out due to the cosmic inflation which causes the entire universe to undergo a rapid expansion.”

To better understand this emergent moment, Adil and his colleagues look to the stars for signatures of these quantum effects. Specifically, they look to data from a cosmological relic of the Big Bang known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). 

“One hallmark feature of quantum mechanics is quantum entanglement, which describes special correlations between different quantum mechanical objects like electrons and protons,” Adil said. “If cosmic inflation was caused by a quantum field, then we should see these signs of entanglement in the CMB.” 

But a statistical uncertainty called cosmic variance hinders the ability of researchers to find signatures of quantum entanglement in observational data from the CMB.  

“Cosmic variance is something that plagues most cosmological data and the problem in cosmology is that, unlike most other sciences, we can’t rerun the cosmic experiment,” Adil said. “You only get to live in this one universe; you can’t just keep recreating it over and over again.” 

Further compounding the problem is the fact that we can only observe the CMB at the present time and from our current location in the universe. 

But Adil and colleagues recently proposed a method to circumvent this problem. By looking at how light particles from the CMB interact with galaxy clusters, they can infer what the light would look like for a hypothetical observer at the location of that galaxy cluster in the past. 

“The information is akin to if I had intergalactic friends spread out over the universe who could send me letters telling me what their view of the CMB is like, essentially allowing us to probe the CMB at different times and locations in the universe,” Adil said. 

Back on the road

While Adil’s research dives into the complexities of cosmology and quantum physics, his science communication work aims to unravel those complexities for the public. 

“Physics is about understanding the world that we see around us,” he said. “I want to share my enthusiasm with students and tell them that they can go on and become physics researchers too.”

During his SciComm mission in Pakistan, he lectured on planet formation, solar flares and the physics of rainbows, among other topics. At the Langlands School and College in Chitral, he helped install a six-inch Dobsonian telescope.

“That was probably one of the highlights of the trip,” Adil said. “We set it up and I trained some of the teachers on it, so that was very memorable.” 

For Adil, part of the thrill of sharing his passion for science is exploring the often-untrodden avenues, illuminating how science touches our lives, whether we realize it or not. 

“One of the things I talked about with the students is the physics of music,” he said. “And it turns out that you can use those same principles that are in the physics of music to explain cosmology.” 

Those cosmic fluctuations that led to the Big Bang, the universe’s expansion and the CMB are in essence soundwaves. As Adil said, it’s a “cosmic symphony.” 

Adil wants to share that symphony with the world.   

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