Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe - Rilegato

Seife, Charles

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670031798 ISBN 13: 9780670031795

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2003

Riassunto

Draws on new cosmological discoveries to reveal what today's scientists are learning about the beginning and fate of the universe, citing theories in dark matter, dark energy, and the particle zoo to make predictions on how the universe will end. first printing.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Charles Seife is the author of five previous books, including Proofiness and Zero, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction and was a New York Times notable book. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, Wired, New Scientist, Science, Scientific American, and The Economist. He is a professor of journalism at New York University and lives in New York City.

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Introduction

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
-Revelation 22:13

Ten billion light-years away, Nature screams. In a fraction of a second, a star explodes with more energy than ten billion billion billion hydrogen bombs. For a few weeks, the funeral pyre of the dying sun blazes and outshines the countless stars of its galaxy. When a star dies as a supernova, it is visible halfway across the universe.

The light from that supernova travels for ten billion years, attenuated and stretched along the way. By the time the light reaches Earth, it is far too dim to be spotted by the naked eye, but telescopes can see the supernova as a dim blotch in the sky. It is a message from the ends of the cosmos-a message whose receipt on Earth heralds the beginning of a revolution.

This revolution began in the late 1990s, when two teams of scientists began to decode the death throes of dying stars. Their observations showed that the universe was suffused with a mysterious "dark energy," an invisible substance that stretches the very fabric of space and time. The discovery of dark energy baffled and delighted astronomers, who scrambled to confirm the observations and understand the enigma. What's more, the stellar death rattles held the secret to the universe's death-scientists merely had to decrypt the message from the dying stars and they would understand how the cosmos would end.

That message has now been deciphered. On June 25, 2001, Time magazine devoted its cover to the end of the universe. "Peering deep into space and time, scientists have just solved the biggest mystery in the cosmos," it exclaimed. This is no overstatement. Cosmologists now know how the universe will end, and a new set of experiments, whose results have begun to trickle out, is removing the veil over the big bang, showing us how it began.

The revolution is being fought on many fronts, by astronomers, cosmologists, and physicists, high atop the Chilean mountains, deep underneath the Canadian soil, stranded in the middle of the Antarctic wasteland, and all across the globe. Alpha and Omega is the story of galaxy hunters and the microwave eavesdroppers, gravity theorists and particle physicists, quantum theorists and atom smashers, all of whom are on the brink of major discoveries. Each of their stories, taken alone, would be noteworthy. Together, they add up to a renaissance-a major shift in our understanding of the universe. This shift is happening right now, and it is far from finished.

Alpha and Omega is the story of the most exciting scientific discoveries in decades and the people behind them. It is also a guide to understanding the headlines that are erupting in Time, in the New York Times, in Science, and in newspapers and magazines all across the planet. This revolution in cosmology will be front-page news again and again over the next few years. Indeed, it will be one of the most important scientific stories of the twenty-first century. When it is over, we will have seen the moment of creation, and we will see the face of our own destruction.

Chapter 1
The First Cosmology
[The Golden Age of the Gods]

Then All-father took Night and her son, Day, and gave them two horses and two chariots and put them up in the sky, so that they should ride round the world every twenty-four hours. Night rides first on a horse called Hrimfaxi, and every morning he bedews the earth with the foam from his bit. Day's horse is called Skinfaxi, and the whole earth and sky are illumined by his mane.
-Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda

Perhaps it happened on a midwinter's night thirty thousand years ago. A tribe of cavemen huddled close to the embers of a dying flame. A single hairy face gazed upward, bewildered. Against the innumerable, immutable pinpricks of light in the heavens, a star had moved. A human looked into the cosmos and saw the trail of a wandering god.

Even before the dawn of civilization, people gazed skyward and wondered. Who created the stars in the sky? How was the universe born? Will it end? If so, how? These are the most ancient questions of humanity. Yet, for millennia upon millennia, the only way to answer these mysteries was through mythology. Even today, the remnants of that mythology can be seen in the heavens. The tiny lights that meander slowly through the sky, better known as planets, bear the names of gods. Red Mars is gorged with the blood of conquest; bright Venus glitters in the morning with the allure of the goddess of love. Each civilization invoked its own gods to explain the creation of the universe, the existence of stars in the night sky, and occasionally the ultimate destruction of the cosmos.

Three revolutions separate modern cosmologists from the shamans and storytellers of the age of mythology. The first, which took place in the 1500s, was the most dangerous. Its enemies tried to stifle it with all the weapons in their arsenal: accusations of heresy and witchcraft. The second revolution, which began in the 1920s, was the most unsettling; the comforting concept of a clockwork universe was shattered, and humanity was suddenly alone in a vast, empty cosmos. For the first time, scientists saw evidence of the act of creation. These two revolutions take us to the present day, where we are in the midst of a third revolution, a revolution that is finally answering the eternal questions, revealing our origins and our ultimate fate.

If you look upward on a sunny day and squint your eyes just right, you can imagine the vault of the heavens as an immaculate blue dome, arching high above the wispy clouds that float slowly across the sky. To ancient peoples, the dome of the sky was a real object; the Earth was enclosed by a beautiful sphere that shone blue in the daytime as the sun slowly traveled from east to west. In the evening, tiny, flickering points of light mocked the humans far below, and a faint shimmering ribbon stretched across the giant ball surrounding the Earth.

Who fashioned that sphere? Each culture had a different answer; every people had a story of creation, which told of how the gods came to be and how they created the universe. The Norse people, not surprisingly, thought that the universe was born from ice. As the frost encountered an enormous fire, it thawed and formed a giant named Ymir. Odin, chief of the gods, and his brothers slew Ymir and used his skull as the dome of heaven. They then fashioned the Earth from Ymir's flesh, the oceans from his blood, and the clouds from his brains. They set the planets in the sky and made the glowing chariots of the sun and moon chase each other in the vault of the heavens-each eternally pursued by a wolf.1 The Pawnee Indians of central North America saw corn as the mother of all things; Mother Corn gave life to humanity, which emerged from the ground like the crops that the Pawnee depended on. Some cultures thought the universe began as a vast ocean; others, as a shapeless chaos. There are dozens and dozens of vastly different tales of the creation of the universe, but most of them focus on the same events: the birth of the gods; the creation of the heavens, Earth, and stars; and the fashioning of man and woman. These elements are the foundation of any religion, as they answer the fundamental questions that humans have been asking since the dawn of time. Before the scientific revolution gave humanity another tool with which to examine the universe, people could only explore its history and nature by listening to the stories of shamans and the musings of philosophers. Religion and philosophy formed the cosmologies of the ancients.

Two of these numerous cosmologies dominated the Western world, from before the ascent of Rome until the time of William Shakespeare. Even though these two traditions are mutually contradictory, they fused, and fashioned a story of the universe that was almost unassailable until the advent of the scientific method. The combination of an Eastern, Semitic cosmology, encoded by the Bible, and a Western, Greco-Roman one, became a solid structure that stood for more than a millennium. It took a cosmological revolution to tear the edifice down.

The word cosmos is the Greek word for "order," and the cosmos-the universe as a whole-was the only order to be found in the chaos of Greek mythology. The sun traveled across the sky each day, guided by Helios, the solar charioteer.2 The moon waxed and waned each month, growing pregnant and barren in turn. And in the night sky, the stars remained fixed, except for five wanderers-the planets-that moved across the unchanging backdrop of the heavens.3 Even today, we know the planets by their Olympian names: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are the Roman names of the Greek gods Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus, and Cronus. The Greeks saw order in the clockwork motions of the heavenly bodies, and from early on in their civilization they began to work out the details of that clockwork. In 585 BC, the Greek mathematician Thales was the first to predict the coming of a solar eclipse. According to Herodotus, two warring peoples, the Medes and the Lydians, were astonished to see the day turn into night and decided that it would be a good time to put down their weapons.

By trying to understand how the heavens worked, Thales became the first starry-eyed cosmologist-to the amusement of his neighbors. "While he was studying the stars and looking upward, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him," Socrates reportedly said, several centuries later. But Thales put all his concentration and observation to good use. He created an entire cosmos from the sheer power of his mind.

Perhaps because the Greek stories of creation were fragmentary and contradictory, Thales ignored them when building his cosmology. Though he believed that gods were everywhere in the universe, Thales took the act of creation out of the gods' hands. In Thales' universe, water was the source of all things; earth floated upon the water lik...

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0670031798
• ISBN 13: 9780670031795
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 294
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile