The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time and Beyond by Christophe Galfard

Author:Christophe Galfard [Galfard, Christophe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, General
ISBN: 9781447284079
Google: tCR4BwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pan MacMillan
Published: 2015-08-27T21:09:45+00:00

Part Five

To the Origin of Space and Time

1 | To be Confident

When I started to be interested in what some might call hardcore theoretical physics, I was about twenty-two. I had studied pure mathematics for some years before and was very fond of its beauty. As the Greek philosopher Plato said – about twenty-five centuries ago, when no one had a clue what the heavens were about – mathematics is the language in which gods speak to people.

When my application to study advanced mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University, England, was accepted, I immediately thought: Great! Time for some deep thinking about the real world!

Little did I know what was about to happen to me, just as you possibly don’t have a clue what is about to happen to you in the coming chapters.

During the summer that preceded my first year at Cambridge, I read a few textbooks as well as works by the masters of the past and present, to get a clearer feeling for what science might have to say about the world around us. I concentrated especially on the quantum world. After all, as we found out in Part Four, the world of the very small lies at the root of everything we are. It is there that we find the building blocks of all that our universe contains – indeed to even use Einstein’s general theory of relativity one needs an understanding of what our universe contains, or its equations won’t tell us what our universe looks like at large scales.

Many Nobel Prizes in Physics have been awarded to scientists for breakthroughs regarding the very small.

Needless to say, I was very excited about the journey I was about to go on, and as I began to get to grips with the theories of these intellectual pioneers, I started to write down some of their incredible thoughts, to make sure I was getting it right:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize laureate for Physics in 1965

The Lord God is subtle, but he is not malicious.

Albert Einstein, Nobel Prize laureate for Physics in 1921

No language which lends itself to visualizability can describe quantum jumps.

Max Born, Nobel Prize laureate for Physics in 1954

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize laureate for Physics in 1922

I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.

Albert Einstein

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