UNIVERSAL: A Guide to the Cosmos

Nonfiction

Before and beyond the Big Bang

UNIVERSAL
A Guide to the Cosmos
By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
280 pp. Da Capo

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D.

This is the story of our universe with cosmological events laid out in clear, fantastic detail. For example, before the Big Bang all the matter in our universe was compressed in an area smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

For those readers who don’t use mathematics and physics in their daily lives, I recommend beginning with the Appendix for a quick review of the powers of ten, units such as light years, ångstrom units, femtometres and mega-electron volt, and elementary particles. Then savor the abundant helpful illustrations in the rest of the book.

The authors write, “Cosmology is surely the most audacious branch of science. The idea that the Milky Way, our home galaxy of 400 billion stars, was once compressed in a region so vanishingly small is outlandish enough. That the entire visible congregation of billions of galaxies once occupied a subatomic-sized patch sounds like insanity. But to many cosmologists this claim isn’t even mildly controversial.”

They ask us to consider the Universe before the Big Bang: “It was cold, devoid of particles and expanding rapidly.” The distance between two particles one centimeter apart at one instance were separated by 10 billion meters only 4x10^-36 seconds later (it makes my head ache.) That is more than twenty times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. This phase of rapid expansion is known as the epoch of inflation. The authors write, “As time passed, the energy driving the inflationary expansion diminished until it became too small to generate any further inflation. In that way, inflation came to an end.

Then a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the hot plasma had cooled to a mere 10 trillion degrees Celsius, the quarks and gluons had cooled into protons and neutrons, the building blocks of the atomic nuclei. One minute later, the Universe was cool enough to form deuterium and then helium and lithium, and the epoch of nucleosynthesis began.

Then as the most massive stars ran out of fuel they formed the heavier elements – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and iron. Then 4.6 billion years ago, stellar debris collapsed to form our Sun.  Six hundred million years later, life began – “Obviously, we’ve skipped a lot of biology,” Cox and Forshaw wryly note.

They believe most of what we are learning about the fundamental nature of the Universe comes from experiments performed at the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer ring on the border of France and Switzerland. Currently, matter is made of a fundamental Higgs field, an electromagnetic field, six quark fields, six lepton fields, a gluon field and a weak interaction field. All of these can be described by the single mathematical framework called the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

Next, they launch into a long discussion about a proof of the unevenness of the universe and how that keeps the particles safe from uncertainty. They invoke the Heisenberg Principle, but that it didn’t help me understand the Universe at all.

“Figure 8.9,” the authors write, “is possibly the most astonishing graph in all of physics.” I love how excited the authors get about their field of work. The data points derived directly from the Planck measurement of the CMB (cosmic microwave background). They are the mathematical models of what our universe looked 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Finally they describe string theory, where everything vibrates in ten-dimensional space, and the multiverse where universes are created out of nothing – there are 10⁵⁰⁰ low-energy bubbles, of which our universe is one. They conclude, “When you work with the mathematics behind the physics, it is impossible not to be impressed by its elegance.”

A careful read of this beautiful, slender volume will enlighten the reader and stretch the brain.