Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    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

    ()

    Read preview

    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

    Related to The Universe

    Related ebooks

    Astronomy & Space Sciences For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Multiple Multiverses May Be One and the Same

      Jan 26, 2017

      The name of the image—the “Flammarion engraving”—may not ring a bell, but you’ve seen it many times. It depicts a traveler wearing a cloak and clutching a walking-stick; behind him is a varied landscape of towns and trees; surrounding all is a crysta

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Universe Has Made Almost All the Stars It Will Ever Make

      Aug 19, 2020

      Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing here from the outer envelope of a natural giant thermonuclear reactor we

      5 min read

    • Article

      The End of Time

      Sep 6, 2018

      Carlo Rovelli, physicist and author of “The Order of Time,” writes: In the fundamental physics of the world, there is neither space nor time.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Dancing To A Galactic Death

      Dec 1, 2022

      Dancing To A Galactic Death
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Discovery Of The Century May Be Just Around The Corner, As PHYSICISTS SEARCH FOR A NEW FORCE OF NATURE

      Jul 6, 2022

      Mysterious forces are in play 100 metres below the ground in Switzerland. Scientists from the European nuclear research institute of CERN cannot get their results to fit basic physics theories. For 14 years CERN scientists have made particles collide

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Bridge From Nowhere: How is it possible to get something from nothing?

      Aug 7, 2014

      The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question infuriates, James realized, because it demands an explanation while de

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Multiverse As Muse

      May 11, 2017

      In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a present that can, at any moment, bifurcate into different futures—an endless labyrinth of worlds. Taken together they form, he writes, “an infinite

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Brief History of the Grand Unified Theory of Physics

      Mar 16, 2017

      Particle physicists had two nightmares before the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012. The first was that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator would see precisely nothing. For if it did, it would likely be the last large accelerator

      18 min read

    • Article

      Dark Energy?

      Dec 29, 2022

      Dark Energy?
      7 min read

    • Article

      New View Of The Cone Nebula

      Dec 29, 2022

      New View Of The Cone Nebula
      1 min read

    • Article

      Is Quantum Physics Linked To Consciousness?

      Jan 16, 2021

      WHILE most of us have only heard about quantum physics by watching the Big Bang Theory, a week doing nuclear physics in matric led to a fascination for quantum physics – and whether it plays a role in the workings of the brain – for UKZN PhD student

      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘Virtual Reality Is Genuine Reality’ So Embrace It, Says US Philosopher

      Jan 17, 2022

      It is hard to imagine humans spending their lives in virtual reality when the experience amounts to waving your arms about in the middle of the lounge with a device the size of a house brick strapped to your face. But this is where humanity is headin

      3 min read

    • Article

      Evil Triumphs in These Multiverses, and God Is Powerless

      Mar 2, 2017

      The challenge that the multiverse poses for the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God is often focused on fine-tuning. If there are infinite universes, then we don’t need a fine tuner to explain why the conditions of our universe are perfect for life

      7 min read

    • Article

      Actually, There Is a Time Like the Present

      Nov 30, 2017

      We’ve all heard it before: There’s no time like the present. Broadly speaking, of course, it means to “seize the opportunity right now,” or maybe in my case, to avoid procrastinating. From a psychological perspective, this makes a lot of sense. As hu

      4 min read

    • Article

      Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon: A Nobel laureate maps his path to discovery.

      Jan 14, 2016

      We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks we can. And sho

      13 min read

    • Article

      Life Is a Braid in Spacetime: How to See Yourself in a World Where Only Math Is Real.: How to see yourself in a world where only math is real.

      Jan 9, 2014

      “Excuse me, but what’s the time?” I’m guessing that you, like me, are guilty of having asked this question, as if it were obvious that there is such a thing as the time. Yet you’ve probably never approached a stranger and asked “Excuse me, but what’s

      7 min read

    • Article

      Why Physics Can’t Tell Us What Life Is

      Oct 21, 2020

      There is just something obviously reasonable about the following notion: If all life is built from atoms that obey precise equations we know—which seems to be true—then the existence of life might just be some downstream consequence of these laws tha

      11 min read

    • Article

      How the Universe Remembers Information

      Feb 28, 2019

      It was one of the great missed connections of physics. In 1965 a particle theorist derived a formula for the collision of elementary particles. Twenty years later two gravitation theorists, using completely different techniques, derived a formula for

      6 min read

    • Article

      Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute

      May 4, 2017

      Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory about the quantum origins of consciousness

      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Universe

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      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

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1