You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters - Softcover

Chopra M.D., Deepak; Kafatos Ph.D., Menas C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804189927 ISBN 13: 9780804189927

Verlag: Harmony, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Deepak Chopra joins forces with leading physicist Menas Kafatos to explore some of the most important and baffling questions about our place in the world. 

"A riveting and absolutely fascinating adventure that will blow your mind wide open!" —Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi
 
What happens when modern science reaches a crucial turning point that challenges everything we know about reality? In this brilliant, timely, and practical work, Chopra and Kafatos tell us that we've reached just such a point. In the coming era, the universe will be completely redefined as a "human universe" radically unlike the cold, empty void where human life is barely a speck in the cosmos.
 
You Are the Universe literally means what it says--each of us is a co-creator of reality extending to the vastest reaches of time and space. This seemingly impossible proposition follows from the current state of science, where outside the public eye, some key mysteries cannot be solved, even though they are the very issues that define reality itself:
 
• What Came Before the Big Bang?
• Why Does the Universe Fit Together So Perfectly?
• Where Did Time Come From?
• What Is the Universe Made Of?
• Is the Quantum World Linked to Everyday Life?
• Do We Live in a Conscious Universe?
• How Did Life First Begin?
 
“The shift into a new paradigm is happening,” the authors write. “The answers offered in this book are not our invention or eccentric flights of fancy. All of us live in a participatory universe. Once you decide that you want to participate fully with mind, body, and soul, the paradigm shift becomes personal. The reality you inhabit will be yours either to embrace or to change.” What these two great minds offer is a bold, new understanding of who we are and how we can transform the world for the better while reaching our greatest potential.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of the Chopra Center for Wellbeing and Jiyo, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, Researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as "one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”

Menas Kafatos is The Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University, author of more than 320 refereed articles and fifteen books. He received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. He is the Founding Dean of the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University, serving as dean in 2009-2012. He directs the Center of Excellence in Earth Systems Modeling and Observations.

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chapter 1

What Came Before the Big Bang?

Though time and space had started to curve like a sagging clothesline, there wasn’t wholesale panic in physics, because the chance that the line might snap apart didn’t quite exist yet (black holes, which snap space and time, were brought into the picture later on). Brilliant equations are devised to keep reality intact, so the very fact that the mathematics was so arcane kept some very disturbing ideas away from the general public. But this all changed with the advent of the big bang theory. In one stroke, time snapped in two. There was time as we know it, which arrived on the scene with the big bang, and there was something else—­weird time, pre-­time, no time?—­that existed outside our universe.

Following Einstein’s lead, let’s see if we can visualize reality outside our universe. For the sake of convenience, we’ll put the riddle this way: “What came before the big bang?” There’s no better way to visualize the problem than stepping into an imaginary time machine that’s whisking us back some 13.7 billion years. As we get close to the unimaginable explosion that began this universe’s creation, our time machine is exposed to extreme danger. It took thousands of years for the infant universe, which was superheated, to cool down enough for the first atoms to coalesce. But since our time machine is imaginary to begin with, we can imagine it coasting through superheated space without melting or flying apart into subatomic particles.

Getting within a few seconds of the big bang, we feel we’re nearing the goal. “Seconds” means that time exists, and now the only challenge is to shave seconds down to millionths, billionths, and trillionths of a second. The human brain doesn’t operate at such fine scales, but let’s assume we have an onboard computer that can translate trillionths of a second into human terms. Eventually we arrive at the smallest unit of time (and space) that it is possible to imagine. William Blake’s famous lines of verse, “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour,” is coming true, although an hour is much, much too long. At this point, when the scale of the cosmos was infinitesimally tiny, our onboard computer goes haywire and unexpectedly, nothing can compute.

Our whole frame of reference has dissolved. There is no matter or energy, just a swirling chaos, and within this chaos there are no rules of the kind we call the laws of nature. Without rules, time itself falls apart. The captain of our time machine turns to the passengers to tell them how bad the situation is, but unfortunately, he can’t, for several reasons. As time collapses, so do concepts like “before” and “after.” To the captain, we no longer left earth at a certain time and arrived later at the big bang. Events are all gummed together in an unimaginable way. The passengers can’t cry, “Let me out of here,” either, because space has also dissolved, rendering “in” and “out” useless concepts.

This breakdown at the very threshold of creation is real, even if our time machine isn’t. No matter how hard you work at it, regardless of how fine the slivers of time you shave, the threshold cannot be crossed—­not by ordinary means, because, you see, the big bang “occurred everywhere,” so it was not somewhere to where we could travel.

We are left with two options. Either “What came before the big bang?” is an impossible question to answer, or else extraordinary means must be discovered that could possibly reveal an answer. One thing is certain, however: the origin of time and space didn’t happen in time and space. It happened somewhere extraordinary, which, luckily for us, means that extraordinary answers aren’t out of place—­they are demanded. With that in mind, let the cosmic riddling begin.

Grasping the mystery

“Before” and “after” are concepts that make sense only within the framework of space-­time. You were born before you could walk; you will reach old age after middle age. The same isn’t true of the birth of the universe. It has been widely theorized that time and space emerged with the big bang. If that’s true—­and it’s only one possibility, not a fixed assumption—­then the real question is “What came before time began?” Is that any better than the first way of putting it?

No. “Before time began” is a self-­contradiction, like saying “when sugar wasn’t sweet.” We are squarely in the realm of impossible questions, but that’s no reason to give up in advance. Quantum physics took to heart a conversation between Alice and the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-­Glass. After Alice announces that she is seven and a half years old, the Queen retorts that she is a hundred and one, five months, and a day.

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Quantum behavior forces us to be even more tolerant of impossible things. There is nothing ordinary about the conditions at the time of the big bang. To grasp them, some cherished beliefs must be challenged and then cast aside. First, one must realize that the big bang wasn’t the beginning of the universe but of the current universe. Ignoring for now whether the current universe was created from another universe, physics can’t actually trace the cosmos back to the absolute beginning. Taking measurements only works when you have something to measure, and in the very beginning there was an infinitesimal sliver of something, without order of any kind: no objects, no space-­time continuum, no laws of nature. In other words, pure chaos. In this unimaginable state, all the matter and energy harnessed in hundreds of billions of galaxies was compressed. Within a fraction of a second, expansion accelerated with inconceivable speed. Inflation lasted between 10-­36 (1/1 followed by 36 zeros) to about 10-­32 seconds. By the time inflation ended, the universe had increased its size by a staggering factor of 1026, while it cooled down by a factor of 100,000 times or so. A commonly accepted (but by no means definitive) scenario maps the birthing process as follows:

•10-­43 seconds—­The big bang.

•10-­36 seconds—­The universe undergoes a rapid expansion (known as cosmic inflation), under superheated conditions, enlarging from the size of an atom to the size of a grapefruit. There are no atoms in existence, however, or any light. In a state of near chaos, the constants and the laws of nature are thought to be in flux.

•10-­32 seconds—­Still unimaginably hot, the universe boils with electrons, quarks, and other particles. The previous rapid inflation decreases, or takes a pause, for reasons not fully understood.

•10-­6 seconds—­Having cooled dramatically, the infant universe now gives rise to protons and neutrons that are formed from groups of quarks.

•3 minutes—­Charged particles exist but no atoms yet, and light cannot escape the dark fog that the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harmony
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804189927
• ISBN 13: 9780804189927
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar