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    The Universe: A short history of everything we know
    The Universe: A short history of everything we know
    The Universe: A short history of everything we know
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    The Universe: A short history of everything we know

    By John Mac

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    About this ebook

    Part 1 of 4. Take a beautifully simplistic journey of fact and modern theory across the mysteries of our Universe in this first part of a quadrilogy of E-books. Discover the amazing you and the quantum certainty of another you, to the birth of a Universe in a Multi-verse, to the formation of a solar system, the Earth and our biblical legends. Discover our puzzling directionality of time to the realm of invisible dark matter, a brief visit to the world of particle physics and our mortality as a species. Learn about probability of extra terrestrial life, and our diminishing hopes of ever making an interstellar journey. In part 2 we retrace our steps using current theory and observation to discover Mother Nature's blueprint for the entirety of creation, and a bizarre parallel Universe, lost in an endless sea of other Universes. These two books form the scientific basis for our penultimate book, 'The Sixth Extinction Crisis' - only when do we look to the heavens and the very essence of creation, can we see why as a species we are in such imminent peril.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Mac
    Release dateNov 11, 2014
    ISBN9781311401588
    The Universe: A short history of everything we know

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      Book preview

      The Universe - John Mac

      Part 1

      The Universe: A short history of everything we know

      Copyright 2014 John Mac

      Smashwords Edition

      Author’s note

      Chapter 1: A short history of the very large

      Chapter 2: The world of the very small

      Chapter 3: The amazing you

      Chapter 4: The arrow of time

      Chapter 5: A Missing Universe

      Chapter 6 Time to think bigger?

      Chapter 7: Interstellar

      End Material

      Other Books in this series: (Due for release soon)

      Part 2: The Universe – A Parallel Universe and the double arrow of time

      Part 3: The Sixth Extinction srisis

      Part 4: Extra Terrestrial life – A certainty?

      (More information at end of book)

      Author’s note

      This is the first of a quadrilogy of E-books; designed as a simple, logical approach to modern sciences and natural history. We begin here with one of our greatest mysteries of all time; the Universe in which we live.

      We will examine in detail just what current science has to offer us in explaining this miracle of creation. From the birth of a Universe to the amazing you, and the quantum certainty of another you to the mystery of dark matter and energy, the expanding Universe to our puzzling directionality of time and the realm of Quantum enigma, and even our fading hopes and dreams of interstellar travel.

      In Part 2 we investigate further into Mother Nature’s blueprints for the creation of everything we see in a world of fractal geometry, and we discover the very real possibility of a parallel Universe; a bizarre conceptual place where time appears to run backwards, and we also visualize how we are most certain to be just one small lonely Universe lost in an endless sea of others.

      Most importantly, in our third instalment we recourse back to the content of these first two books to discover how these basic laws of physics could explain our world gripped by one of the biggest mass extinctions of life the Earth has ever witnessed, and our very ponderous position as a species right now.

      Thanks for downloading and reading; I hope you enjoy this series of books.

      John Mac.

      Chapter 1: A short history of the very large

      What do the stars mean> when we look up at our night sky? Pinpricks of light that have inspured humanity… waffle

      The Universe has intrigued our minds and inspired some of our most basic fundamental questions of our very existence since the beginning of intelligent thinking. I’ll go out on a limb here this once and say that I’m quite comfortably sure that this must have been the same case for other intelligent species across the entire Universe over history, maybe somewhere, they could even be pondering the same questions as us, right now, equally lost in the vast empty cosmos unable to take the next technological step, just like us. For a very long time as a species our own interpretation and appreciation of the Universe was confined to the realms of simple observation, philosophy, war and speculation, eventually leading us to the creation of metaphysical divine beings of creation to explain the unexplainable natural phenomena of existence and the almost impossible probability of why our Universe supports life in the first place.

      First of all, we need to take an imaginary journey across our Universe to remind ourselves briefly of the sheer magnitude of what it is we’re dealing with here; across the part we can see anyway, known as the ‘Observable Universe’ from one side right across to the other at the speed of light which, for reference here is around a mere 670 Million miles per hour. The very sobering general estimate for our aspirations of inter galactic space travel is that the entire journey would take us somewhere around 48 billion years to complete. Just before we even begin, just a quick note on such numbers which very easily become meaningless to us. A good analogy of just a billion for example could be imagining counting to such a number one number at a time. The process would take us around 95 years to complete. If we tried to count to a trillion, one number at a time, don’t expect to complete such a task any time before thirty one and a half thousand years. It would take us 180,000 years to count to the number of miles we could in theory travel at the speed of light, in just one year, or a ‘light-year’.

      In short, our Universe is built to astronomical scales that we as human beings often fail to find easy, if not completely impossible to understand or appreciate, just imagining such a place is pretty much impossible, often gives most of us a headache, and the bad news is we aren’t likely to be completing such a journey, anytime, ever.

      I cannot stress enough at this point, and this is really important to our initial duology of books, that this is likely to be only a small section of what is actually out there, The sad, end of the line truth is that we just simply cannot see far enough.

      To make a point about one of the biggest problems we have when we study such a vast structure such as a Universe, let’s further imagine an advanced form of extraterrestrial life, some 490 light years away, pretty similar to us in their quest to search for intelligent life in the Universe. (This is purely an example; 490 light years happens to be our closest known planet that in theory may be able to support life but we have actually zero evidence of any life at all). Imagine this race of beings eventually stumbling across our planet by scrutinizing their night skies just as we do, and they wouldn’t be seeing me and you as we are today, instead they would be viewing our planet as it was 490 years ago, as that is how long the light from our planet took to reach them. They wouldn’t be seeing our cutting edge technologies or even a world spiralling into an extinction event; instead they would see a time when Leonard Da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa, at a time when Henry VIII took the throne in England and Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel, while we all stumble about finding our way around in the dark by burning candles.

      This is one of the biggest problems we face in the study of cosmology; the very furthest visible structures that we can see are 13.7 Billion years old at the edge of our observable Universe (as it may turn out, there could be a perfectly simple reason for this limit but more on that later); we see these distant galaxies as they were all that time ago as the light from them has only just reached us. What they are in fact doing now is likely to be anyone’s guess, but

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