1–11 of 11
Humanity is fortunate in having such a variety of energy resources at its disposal. In the very long run we shall need energy that is unpolluting; we shall have sunlight. In the fairly long run we shall need energy that is inexhaustible and moderately clean; we shall have deuterium. In the short run we shall need…
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…
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…
The discoveries of recent decades in particle physics have led us to place great emphasis on the concept of broken symmetry. The development of the universe from its earliest beginnings is regarded as a succession of symmetry-breakings. As it emerges from the moment of creation in the Big Bang, the universe is…
Ordinary people can help create new money by making promises. You constrain the future by making a plan, and a promise to keep to it. Money is created in response, because in making that promise you have created value. New money is created to represent that value. This is why it is possible for banks to fall apart…
Georges Lemaitre was a pudgy, pinkish Belgian Jesuit abbe—a Catholic priest—who also happened to be a skilled astronomer. Lemaitre had noticed that Einstein's general theory of relativity would have implied that the universe was expanding but for a troublesome little mathematical term called the cosmological constant…
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for…
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about—yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries…
The weak anthropic principle is not very controversial. But there is a stronger form that we will argue for here, although it is regarded with disdain among some physicists. The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints not just on our environment but on the possible form and…
Our very existence imposes rules determining from where and at what time it is possible for us to observe the universe. That is, the fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. That principle is called the weak anthropic principle. (We'll see shortly why the…
That the universe is expanding was news to Einstein. But the possibility that the galaxies are moving away from each other had been proposed a few years before Hubble's papers on theoretical grounds arising from Einstein's own equations. In 1922, Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann investigated…