Universal by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw

Author:Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2017-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

And from my pillow, looking forth by light

Of moon or favouring stars. I could behold

The Antechapel where the Statue stood

Of Newton, with his prism and his silent face,

The marble index of a Mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Nevertheless, the romantic deficit is not total. It is still open to us to understand, or even to participate in, the large experimental collaborations that have replaced the individual in gathering precise data about the Universe. If we spend some time understanding how the data were acquired, and satisfy ourselves that we understand the measurements, there is no reason why we shouldn’t use the data to voyage alone through strange seas of thought and to convince ourselves of the veracity of the remarkable picture of reality that modern science delivers. So, from now on, we will rely heavily on the data collected by modern-day teams of astronomers as we head rapidly towards the frontiers of current understanding.

We are still quite some way from establishing the existence of the Big Bang. That’s because, although we have managed to confirm that the Universe has been expanding at the same rate for at least the last 300 million years, such a confirmation only rules out scenario (iv) from Robertson’s list (p. 142): the static, eternal Universe initially favoured by Einstein himself. It’s time now to turn to the evidence that the Universe has been expanding for nearly 14 billion years.

We are going to do this by supposing there actually was a Big Bang and then exploring what the consequences of that supposition might be. Of course, it is pretty well known that there is a good deal of evidence in support of the Big Bang–but the process of making a guess and seeing where the guess takes us is something that underpins how cutting-edge science is often done. As the iconic theoretical physicist Richard Feynman put it, when describing the search for new laws of Nature:

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