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

Seife, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142004464 ISBN 13: 9780142004463

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Humankind has grappled for millennia with the fundamental questions of the origin and end of the universe--it was a focus of ancient religions and myths and of the inquiries of Aristotle, Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. Today we are at the brink of discoveries that should soon reveal the deepest secrets of the universe.

Alpha and Omega is a dispatch from the front lines of the cosmological revolution that is being waged at observatories and laboratories around the world-in Europe, in America, and even in Antarctica--where scientists are actually peering into both the cradle of the universe and its grave. Scientists--including galaxy hunters and microwave eavesdroppers, gravity theorists and atom smashers, all of whom are on the trail of dark matter, dark energy, and the growing inhabitants of the particle zoo-now know how the universe will end and are on the brink of understanding its beginning. Their findings will be among the greatest triumphs of science, even towering above the deciphering of the human genome.

This is the book you need to help understand the frequent front-page headlines heralding dramatic cosmological discoveries. It makes cutting-edge science both crystal clear and wonderfully exciting.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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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Alpha and Omega

The Search for the Beginning and End of the UniverseBy Charles Seife

Penguin Books

Copyright © 2004 Charles Seife
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0142004464

Chapter One

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. 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. 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. 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 like a cork. Not everyone agreed with Thales that water was the primordial material from which the universe was made. Others, like Anaxagoras and Diogenes, argued that air came before water. (After all, water destroys fire, so water could hardly have given birth to fire.) Yet others argued that fire was prime. Empedocles, who lived at around 450 BC, refused to pick a single primal essence and instead argued that earth, air, fire, and water were the four elements. In different combinations, he declared, these four essences made up everything in the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0142004464
• ISBN 13: 9780142004463
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland