The Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking

Author:Stephen Hawking [Hawking, Stephen]
Format: epub
ISBN: 1597776114
Published: 2010-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe

Chapter 5 - FIFTH LECTURE - THE ORIGIN AND FATE OF THE...

T H E O R I G I N A N D F A T E O F T H E U N I V E R S EThroughout the 1970s I had been working mainly on black holes. However,n 1981 my interest in questions about the origin of the universe wasreawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology in the Vatican. TheCatholic church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to laydown the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went around theEarth. Now, centuries later, it had decided it would be better to invite a num-ber of experts to advise it on cosmology.

At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience withthe pope. He told us that it was okay to study the evolution of the universeafter the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself becausethat was the moment of creation and therefore the work of God.I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given atthe conference. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo; I have a lot of sym-pathy with Galileo, partly because I was born exactly three hundred years afterhis death.

THE HOT BIG BANG MODEL

In order to explain what my paper was about, I shall first describe the generallyaccepted history of the universe, according to what is known as the “hot bigbang model.” This assumes that the universe is described by a Friedmannmodel, right back to the big bang. In such models one finds that as the uni-verse expands, the temperature of the matter and radiation in it will go down.Since temperature is simply a measure of the average energy of the particles,this cooling of the universe will have a major effect on the matter in it. At veryhigh temperatures, particles will be moving around so fast that they can escapeany attraction toward each other caused by the nuclear or electromagneticforces. But as they cooled off, one would expect particles that attract eachother to start to clump together.

At the big bang itself, the universe had zero size and so must have been infi-nitely hot. But as the universe expanded, the temperature of the radiationwould have decreased. One second after the big bang it would have fallen toabout ten thousand million degrees. This is about a thousand times the tem-perature at the center of the sun, but temperatures as high as this are reachedin H-bomb explosions. At this time the universe would have contained mostlyphotons, electrons, and neutrinos and their antiparticles, together with someprotons and neutrons.

As the universe continued to expand and the temperature to drop, the rate atwhich electrons and the electron pairs were being produced in collisions wouldhave fallen below the rate at which they were being destroyed by annihilation.So most of the electrons and antielectrons would have annihilated each otherto produce more photons, leaving behind only a few electrons.

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