The Origins of the Universe for Dummies

by Pincock, Stephen; Frary, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780470516065
• ISBN10: 0470516062
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-01-24
• Publisher: For Dummies

Summary

Do you want to learn about the physical origin of the Universe, but don't have the rest of eternity to read up on it? Do you want to know what scientists know about where you and your planet came from, but without the science blinding you? 'Course you do - and who better than For Dummies to tackle the biggest, strangest and most wonderful question there is! The Origins of the Universe For Dummies covers: Early ideas about our universe Modern cosmology Big Bang theory Dark matter and gravity Galaxies and solar systems Life on earth Finding life elsewhere The Universe's forecast

Author Biography

Stephen Pincock has been writing about science for the past 15 years, after finishing a degree in Microbiology at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and realising that while the whole science thing is utterly fascinating, he was less than eager to spend the rest of his life peering down a microscope.
Stephen’s currently a regular science contributor to The Financial Times and The Lancet among many other publications, and is the international correspondent for The Scientist. For quite a while he was an editor at Reuters Health.

Mark Frary is a science and technology writer. He studied astronomy and physics at University College London, writing a dissertation on the production of positronium. While there, he worked at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory on atmospheric plasma physics. After completing his degree, he moved to Geneva and worked on the OPAL experiment at the European particle physics laboratory CERN.
Mark co-wrote the book You Call This The Future?, a look at the 50 best sciencefiction gadgets ever conceived and how they have become reality. He lives in Ampthill in Bedfordshire with his wife and two children.
Mark and Stephen are the authors of Codebreaker: The History of Secret Communication.

Table of Contents

Cheat Sheet.Introduction.About this book.Conventions used in this book.What you're not to read.Foolish assumptions.How this book is organized.Icons used in this book.Where to go from here.Part I: In the beginning-early ideas about our universe.Chapter 1: Exploring the universe.Overview of the whole book, beginning with the ideas of ancient civilizations and moving right through to our modern understanding of an expanding universe.Overview.Ancients.Newton and gravity.Einstein.Hubble's view of the universe.Big Bang and other theories.What you need to make a universe.Time.The end of the Universe.Did the Universe start just like that?Why do we think there is an origin at all?Science v religion.Why science doesn't have all the answers. Chapter 2: Looking up at the stars.The main purpose of this book is to explain what modern science has taught us about the evolution of our universe. But it's important to remember that for most of human history, people came up with explanations based only on what they could see in the sky at night and during the day. So in this chapter we'll take a side-trip through history to chart how the modern view of the world developed from those early beliefs.Making a home for the GodsThe earliest explanations for the movements of the sun and stars were religious and spiritual: Ancient Egypt and Babylon; India and China.Taking a scientific approach.Roughly 2000 years ago, the early Greeks produced the first cosmology based on science.Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (moon shines reflected sunlight; lunar eclipses).Thales' prediction of a solar eclipse in 585 BC. Pythagoras and the mathematical universe.4 th C BC, fixed stars and wandering stars. Aristarchus of Samos heliocentric model explained this, but was rejected by Aristotle.Aristotle's On the Heavens, the basis of a system accepted until Copernican revolution 1800 years later.Ptolemy's Almagest popularized and perfected Aristotle's views; epicycles etc.Launching a revolution.Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium turned things on their head.although his results were no better than Ptolemy's because they were still based on the idea that planets orbit in circles, not ellipses.Shaded box on his life Chapter 3: The apple drops: Newton, gravity and the rotation of the planets.How the observations of astronomers were finally linked with an overarching theory of gravity and the consequences for the human view of the Universe.Ditching perfection.Tcho Brahe and observations of planetary motion.How Johannes Kepler threw away the concept of circular orbits and came up with ellipses (by trial and error).Kepler's laws explained.Explaining Gravity.Shaded box on the life of Isaac Newton.The Universal Law of Gravitation.How Newton formulated his law.Newton's refusal to speculate on the cause of gravity.Why escaping gravity is impossible.The perihelion of mercury problem.Inertial and gravitation mass: are they really the same?Part II: Modern cosmology goes off with a bang.Chapter 4: How to build an expanding universe.#60