John Gribbin - In Search of the Big Bang: The Life and Death of the Universe

by

JOHN GRIBBIN

Published by ReAnimus Press

Other books by John Gribbin:

Cosmic Coincidences

Ice Age

In Search of the Double Helix

Q is for Quantum

2014, 1998, 1986 by John and Mary Gribbin. All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

http://ReAnimus.com/authors/johngribbin

Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

~~~

I am always surprised when a young man tells me he wants to work at cosmology. I think of cosmology as something that happens to one, not something one can choose.

Sir William McCrea, FRS

~~~

The roots of this book go back a long way, to the birth of my fascination with science in the early 1950s. I cannot quite recall which author first introduced me to the mystery and wonder of the Universe, but I know that it must have been either Isaac Asimov or George Gamow, since I began reading the books of both of them so long ago that I literally cannot remember ever being without them. And it was not just science, but specifically the mystery of the origin of the Universe, that fascinated me from the outset. Thanks to Gamow and his fictitious Mr Tompkins I cut my intellectual teeth on the Big Bang model of the origin of the Universe and, although later on I learned of the Steady State hypothesis, it has always been the idea of the Big Bang, the idea that there was a definite moment of creation when the Universe came into being, that held my fascination. It never occurred to me that I might make a career out of studying such deep mysteries, or writing about them. Indeed, I scarcely appreciated that being an astronomer, let alone a cosmologist, was a viable job for anyone, let alone myself, until 1966. Then, just before taking my final undergraduate examinations at Sussex University, I discovered that Bill (now Sir William) McCrea was about to establish a research centre in astronomy on the campus.

That discovery changed my life. First, it led to a swift change of direction from a planned period of postgraduate research in particle physics to a year working for an MSc in astronomy in McCreas group. Then I moved on to Cambridge, becoming a very junior founder member of another new astronomy group, Fred (now Sir Fred) Hoyles Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, as it then was. For reasons which I have never quite fathomed myself, I somehow became sidetracked into working on problems involving very dense stars (white dwarfs, neutron stars, pulsars and X-ray sources) for my thesis, and never did do any real research in cosmology. But while in Cambridge I met Hoyle himself, Jayant Narlikar, Martin Rees, Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, Stephen Hawking, William Fowler and many other eminent astronomers who were deeply immersed in problems of literally cosmic significance. I learned from them what research at this level was really like, and I learned, too, that I could never hope to achieve anything of comparable significance myself. So I became a writer, reporting on new developments not just in cosmology and astronomy but across the sciences, keeping in touch with new developments even though I was not involved in making those new developments.

When cosmology made a great leap forward in the 1980s, it came about through a marriage with particle physics, the line of work I had abandoned so lightly in 1966. After initially struggling to cope with new developments that seemed to be appearing faster than I could write about them, I had an opportunity to catch up by attending as an observer a joint meeting organized by the European Southern Observatory and CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, in Geneva in November 1983. There, participants from both sides of the fence discussed the links between particle physics and cosmology. It was that meeting, and the fact that I convinced myself that I could understand most of what was going on there, that convinced me that I could tackle writing this book. Following the meeting, I was able to straighten out my ideas and improve my understanding of the new idea of inflation, the key to understanding the modern version of Big Bang cosmology, in correspondence with Dimitri Nanopoulos of CERN and with two of the founders of the inflationary hypothesis, Alan Guth of MIT and Andrei Linde in Moscow.

It looks as if science has achieved, in outline at least, a complete understanding of how the Universe as we know it came into being, and how it grew from a tiny seed, via the Big Bang, into the vastness we see about us. Martin Rees, of Cambridge University, has put the importance of the new work clearly in perspective. At that meeting in Geneva, in November 1983, he commented that, when asked if the Big Bang was a good model of the Universe we live in, he used to say that it is the best theory weve got. That was indeed a very cautious endorsement. But now, he said in Geneva, if asked the same question he would reply that the Big Bang model is more likely to be proved right than it is to be proved wrong. Coming from Rees, one of the most cautious of modern cosmologists, who makes no claim lightly, this is a much stronger endorsement of the Big Bang, and amply sufficient justification for me to proceed in writing this book!

The fact that I can understand the physics underlying these new ideas is a tribute to the skills of teachers going back to my schooldays, and to the universities of Sussex and Cambridge; to be alive at a time when such mysteries are resolved, and to be able to understand how they have been resolved, is the greatest stroke of fortune I can imagine. Maybe new mysteries will emerge to disturb the present picture, and the completeness of our understanding of the moment of creation will prove to be an illusion. But the picture today is satisfyingly complete, and I hope I can share with you, through this book, the wonder of its completeness, and of the search which led to a successful theory of the creation, less than sixty years after the discovery that the Universe is expanding and that, therefore, there must indeed have been a moment of creation.

If I succeed at all in holding your attention, that is largely because the story is so fascinating that only the most inept of storytellers could fail to make it interesting. It is also thanks to Asimov and Gamow, who first told an earlier version of the tale to me; to Bill McCrea who, by appearing on the campus at Sussex University, showed me that cosmologists were real people and that I might work alongside them; to Fred Hoyle, who established an Institute where briefly it was possible for me to mingle with cosmologists of the first rank; and to CERN, for inviting me to attend the first ESO-CERN symposium. Once the book was underway, I received direct help from Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, from Dimitri Nanopoulos, and from Martin Rees in Cambridge and Jayant Narlikar at the Tata Institute in Bombay. Bill McCrea found time in a busy life to read parts of the book in draft and to correct some of my historical misconceptions, while Martin Rees tactfully pointed out the places where my understanding of the new ideas in cosmology was still inadequate.

Many other people, listed below in no particular order, helped by providing copies of their papers and/or giving up time to discuss their ideas with me. Thanks to: John Huchra, Tom Kibble, Roger Tayler, Carlos Frenck, Vera Rubin, Frank Tipler, John Barrow, Michael Rowan-Robinson, Stephen Hawking, Jim Peebles, David Wilkinson, Marcus Chown, John Ellis, Tjeerd van Albada, Adrian Melott, Paul Davies and John Bahcall.