Ferrie Chris - Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions

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Books . Change . Lives .

Copyright 2021 by Chris Ferrie and Geraint F. Lewis

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Cover design by Pete Garceau

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Internal images Chris Ferrie

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systemsexcept in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviewswithout permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ferrie, Chris, author. | Lewis, Geraint F., author.

Title: Where did the universe come from? and other cosmic questions : our universe, from the quantum to the cosmos / Chris Ferrie, Geraint F. Lewis.

Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021003815 (print) | LCCN 2021003816 (ebook) | (hardcover) | (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Cosmology--Popular works.

Classification: LCC QB982 .F47 2021 (print) | LCC QB982 (ebook) | DDC 523.1--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003815

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003816

ALSO BY CHRIS FERRIE

Quantum Physics for Babies and many other
books in the bestselling Baby University series
The Cat in the Box

ALSO BY GERAINT F. LEWIS

A Fortune Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos
The Cosmic Revolutionarys Handbook
(Or: How to Beat the Big Bang)

The Quantum and the Cosmos

They say that the most incredible thing about the universe is that we can understand it. But of course, we dont completely understand itnot yet anyway.

There are many things about the universe that remain dark and mysterious. But for a slightly evolved ape whose civilization is measured in thousands of years rather than the billions of years that have marked the passage of cosmic time, humans have done quite well!

Over the last few centuries, weve successfully unraveled much of the language of the universe. Weve discovered that the rules that govern how things change and interact are not written in words but in mathematical equations. From the first steps of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton four hundred years ago, the universe has steadily given up its mathematical secrets. Seemingly mysterious phenomenasuch as electricity and magnetism, matter and light, heat and energywere explored, defined, explained, and finally articulated in the beauty of mathematical equations.

By the end of the nineteenth century, it looked like the end might be in sight. The great Lord Kelvin is rumored to have said that there was nothing new to be learned in science, and all that was left to do was to make measurements at higher and higher precision.

But this cozy view of the scientific universe was about to come tumbling down. The start of what became a series of revolutions in science can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century, when a forty-two-year-old German physicist was trying to make sense of the world.

Max Planck was trying to understand why things glowed when you heated them. Of course, many things simply burna chemical reaction that turns one substance into another. But if you have ever seen a blacksmith shoe a horse or seen a poker in a hot fire, you know that heated metal glows. At first, it glows with a rosy red, but as it gets hotter, metal can become white hot. What is the source of the color of heated metal?

Planck was not trying to explain the colors of heated metal in some general wishy-washy terms. No, he wanted to describe the observed color of hot metal preciselywhy so much red compared to blue? Remember, when you heat up something, it turns red and then white hot. The question your inner child is yearning to answer is why?

Planck was not the first to try answering this question, but everyone who came before him had failed. They derived their mathematical relationship for the color of hot metal using the laws of the universe as they understood them. They knew the light was emitted when tiny electrical chargeswhich we now know are electronsinside the metal jiggled around, oscillating back and forth. These jiggling charges emit light. Heating the metal gave these little charges more energy, so they jiggled more furiously, emitting more light. Scientists realized that the emitted color is implicitly tied to jiggling charges, so determining how the energies from the heat made the charges oscillate was key to their calculations.

Unfortunately, their mathematics failed. Scientists could correctly account for the amount of red lightlight with lower energy and longer wavelengths. Blue light, however, has more energy than red light, and their mathematics predicted there should be more blue light than red light. But they also predicted there should be even higher energy radiations, such as ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays, than blue light, and this was simply not seen in experiments. This ultraviolet catastrophe marked a failure of our understanding of the physical world.

Planck, too, was on the brink of failure when he tried something radical. This was surprising because Planckas described in his obituary by fellow physicist Max Bornwas a conservative man, skeptical of speculation. Being radical was not in his nature, but he felt that he had no option. He concluded that the laws of physics, as he understood them, could not solve the problem of the color of heated metal.

The Quantum Hypothesis

Plancks revelation was to consider the jiggling of the charges as being discretecoming in indivisible chunks. Discrete might seem like a strange word to use, but its easy to think about in terms of money. Imagine that you have a stack of one-dollar bills. If I ask you count out an amount of money using this stack, you are always going to get a whole number of dollars: $0, $1, $2 With just a stack of one-dollar bills, you are never going to count out $1.23, unless you start tearing up the bills, which is a bad idea!