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The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materiahse out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called "negative energy." To help you get…
ABOUT 13.5 BILLION YEARS AGO, MATTER, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then…
We can measure the influence of this thing we call dark energy, which is forcing an acceleration of the expanding universe. We don't know what that is, we don't know anything about it, other than what it's doing to the universe. Then 85 percent of the gravity of the universe has a point of origin about which we know…
Banks may have displayed a lack of anger at his diagnosis, but that does not mean that his righteous ire is extinguished. As we chat, he frequently loops off into hilarious denunciations. "I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow…
I am afraid all we can do is to accept the paradox and try to accommodate ourselves to it, as we have done to so many paradoxes lately in modern physical theories. We shall have to get accustomed to the idea that the change of the quantity R, commonly called the 'radius of the universe', and the evolutionary changes…
There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be…
When they [radio astronomers] grew weary at their electronic listening posts. When their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing…
When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented…
...imagine holding an electron in your left hand and another electron in your right hand and bringing these two identical electrically charged particles close together. Their mutual gravitational attraction will favor their getting closer while their electromagnetic repulsion will try to drive them apart. Which is…
The next obvious feature of the universe in which we live is that it is old, very old. It took intelligent life about 3.5 billion years to develop on Earth. Hence, our existence requires a universe that accommodated our arrival by lasting billions of years. The current best estimate for the age of our universe is…
The idea of an indivisible, ultimate atom is inconceivable by the lay mind. If we can conceive of an idea of the atom at all, we can conceive it as capable of being cut in half; indeed, we cannot conceive it at all unless we so conceive it. The only true atom, the only thing which we cannot subdivide and cut in half…
It may seem rash indeed to draw conclusions valid for the whole universe from what we can see from the small corner to which we are confined. Who knows that the whole visible universe is not like a drop of water at the surface of the earth? Inhabitants of that drop of water, as small relative to it as we are relative…
In fact, our own universe is very likely itself a vast black hole. We have no knowledge of what lies outside our universe. This is true by definition, but also because of the properties of black holes. Objects that reside in them cannot ordinarily leave them. In a strange sense, our universe may be filled with objects…
We conclude that there cannot be a strongly cohesive network of communicating, unifying intelligences through the whole universe if (1) such galactic civilizations evolve upward from individual planetary societies and if (2) the velocity of light is indeed a fixed limit on the speed of information transmission, as…
If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing. That is why there must be a law like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative: One has to do work to separate a gravitationally bound…
Let me suggest a new axiom: juxtaposition is the spice of life. Humanity’s biggest talent, unique to us, is juxtaposing, finding and operating novel relationships between things or ideas... Recent ideas on neural activity suggest that the brain operates in a very associative way, with small neuron clusters containing…
To discover that the Universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to 12 thousand years old improves our appreciation of its sweep and grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a particularly complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity, at the very least enhances our respect for atoms; to discover…