Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution Neil Degrasse Tyson & Donald Goldsmith

863 Pages·4.644 MB·English

by  Neil Degrasse Tyson ,Donald,Trump , Goldsmith

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ORIGINS
FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS
OF COSMIC EVOLUTION
REVISED AND UPDATED
NEIL GRASSE TYSON DONALD
DE AND
GOLDSMITH
To all those who look up,
And to all those who do not yet know
why they should
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTIONA Meditation on the Origins of Science and the Science
of Origins
PART I: THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE
1In the Beginning
2Antimatter Matters
3Let the Light Shine
4Let There Be Dark
5Let There Be More Dark
6Tension in the Cosmos!
7One Universe or Many?
PART II: THE ORIGIN OF GALAXIES AND COSMIC
STRUCTURE
8Discovering Galaxies
9The Origin of Structure
PART III: THE ORIGIN OF STARS AND PLANETS
10Dust to Dust
11When Worlds Were Young
12Planets beyond the Solar System
PART IV: THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
13Life in the Universe
14The Origin of Life on Earth
15Searching for Life in the Solar System
16Searching for Life in the Milky Way Galaxy
The Search for Ourselves in the Cosmos
CODA
Illustrations Insert
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Selected Terms
Further Reading
Image Credits
Index
ORIGINS
INTRODUCTION
A MEDITATION ON THE ORIGINS OF SCIENCE AND
THE SCIENCE OF ORIGINS
A
new synthesis of scientific knowledge has emerged and continues to
flourish. In recent years, the answers to questions about our cosmic origins
have not come solely from the domain of astrophysics. Working under the
umbrella of emergent fields with names such as astrochemistry,
astrobiology, and astro-particle physics, astrophysicists have recognized
that they can benefit greatly from the collaborative infusion of other
sciences. To invoke multiple branches of science when answering the
question “Where did we come from?” empowers investigators with a
previously unimagined breadth and depth of insight into how the universe
works.
In this second edition of Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic
Evolution, we introduce the reader to this new synthesis of knowledge,
incorporating new discoveries in biology, astronomy, and astrophysics,
including startling results such as these:
• Five thousand newly detected “exoplanets” embody an enormously rich
variety of surface conditions and orbital characteristics. Some of their
environments strongly favor the origin and existence of life, pointing
the way to estimating the abundance of life in the cosmos.
• Astrophysicists now deploy an entirely new class of detectors, capable of
responding to the gravitational radiation from violent events, billions of
light-years from Earth, that Einstein’s theories had predicted but had
never been directly recorded until 2017. Observations from three
worldwide facilities have revealed, among other marvels, the merger of
black holes dozens of times more massive than our Sun.
• Once regarded as far too cold or too small to offer the possibility of
harboring life, five celestial bodies other than Mars now qualify as well
worth investigating. These include Ceres, the largest asteroid; Jupiter’s
moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, with extensive oceans
beneath a worldwide ice cover; and Saturn’s giant moon Titan, where
lakes of liquid nitrogen could play the role that water does on Earth.
• A profusion of new ground-based and spaceborne observatories have
sharpened our views of the distant universe, not only in visible light but
also in radio, infrared, and other domains. Their improved capabilities
have brought forth a discrepancy between two key methods for
determining how rapidly the universe is expanding. The currently
unknown resolution of this “crisis in cosmology” may lead to new
understanding of the physics laws that govern the cosmos.
These and other significant discoveries allow us to address not only the
origin of the universe but also the origin of the largest structures that matter
has formed, the origin of the stars that light the cosmos, the origin of
planets that offer the likeliest sites for life, and the origin of life itself on at
least one of those planets and potentially elsewhere in the solar system and
throughout the universe.
Humans remain fascinated with the topic of origins for reasons both
logical and emotional. We can hardly comprehend the essence of anything
without knowing where it came from. And of all the stories that we hear,
those that recount our own origins engender the deepest resonance within
us.
The self-centeredness bred into our bones by our evolution and
experience on Earth has led us naturally to focus on local events and
phenomena in the retelling of most origin stories. However, every advance
in our knowledge of the cosmos has revealed that we live on a cosmic speck
of dust, orbiting a representative star in the far suburbs of a common sort of
galaxy, among at least a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The news
of our cosmic unimportance triggers powerful defense mechanisms in the
human psyche. Many of us unwittingly resemble the man in the cartoon
who gazes at the starry heavens and remarks to his companion, “When I
look at all those stars, I’m struck by how insignificant they are.”
Throughout history, different cultures have produced creation myths
that explain our origins as the result of cosmic forces shaping our destiny.
These histories have helped us to ward off feelings of insignificance.
Although origin stories typically begin with the big picture, they get down
to Earth with impressive speed, zipping past the creation of the universe, of
all its contents, and of life on Earth, to arrive at long explanations of
complex details of human history and its social conflicts, as if we somehow
formed the center of creation.
Almost all the disparate answers to the quest for origins accept as their
underlying premise that the cosmos behaves in accordance with general
rules that reveal themselves, at least in principle, to our careful examination
of the world around us. Ancient Greek philosophers raised this premise to
exalted heights, insisting that we humans possess the power to perceive
how nature operates, as well as the underlying reality beneath what we
observe: the fundamental truths that govern all else. Quite understandably,
they insisted that uncovering those truths would be difficult. Twenty-four
centuries ago, in his most famous reflection on our ignorance, the
philosopher Plato compared those who strive for knowledge to prisoners
chained in a cave, unable to see objects behind them, who must therefore
attempt to deduce from the shadows of these objects an accurate description
of reality.
With this simile, Plato not only summarized humanity’s attempts to
understand the cosmos but also emphasized that we have a natural tendency
to believe that mysterious, dimly sensed entities govern the universe, privy
to knowledge that we can, at best, glimpse only in part. From Plato to
Buddha, from Moses to Muhammad, from a hypothesized cosmic creator to
modern films about “the matrix,” humans in every culture have concluded
that higher powers rule the cosmos, gifted with an understanding of the gulf
between reality and superficial appearance.