Galfard - The universe in your hand : a journey through space, time and beyond

To Marius & Honor

Foreword

Before we start, there are two things I would like to share with you.

The first is a promise, the second is an ambition.

The promise is that the book contains only one equation.

Here it is:

E=mc2

The ambition, my ambition, is that in this book I will not leave any readers behind.

You are about to start a journey through the universe as it is understood by science today. It is my deepest belief that we can all understand this stuff.

And that journey begins a very long way from home, on the other side of the world.

1 | A Silent Boom

Picture yourself on a faraway volcanic island on a warm, cloudless summer night. The surrounding ocean is as still as a lake. Only the tiniest of waves wash against the white sand. All is quiet. You are lying on the beach. Your eyes are closed. The warm, sun-baked sand heats up air saturated with sweet, exotic scents. There is peace all around.

A wild shriek in the distance makes you jump and stare into the darkness.

Then: nothing.

Whatever shrieked is now quiet. There is nothing to be afraid of after all. This island may be dangerous for some creatures, but not for you. You are a human, the mightiest of predators. Your friends will soon be joining you for a drink and you are on holiday, so you lie back on the sand to focus on thoughts worthy of your species.

A myriad of tiny lights flickers throughout the vast night sky. Stars. Even with the naked eye you see them everywhere. And you remember questions you had as a child: what are they, these stars? Why do they flicker? How far away are they? And now you wonder: will we ever really know? With a sigh, you relax back on the warm sand and put these silly questions aside, thinking why should we care?

A tiny shooting star gently streaks across the sky overhead and, just as you are about to make a wish, the most extraordinary thing happens: as if to answer your last question, 5 billion years suddenly pass and the next thing you know, you are no longer on a beach, but in outer space, floating through emptiness. You can see and hear and feel, but your body is gone. You are ethereal. Pure mind. And you dont even have the time to wonder what just happened or to shout and call for help, for you are in the most peculiar of situations.

In front of you, a few hundred thousand miles ahead, a ball is flying against a background of tiny distant stars. It glows with a dark orange light, moves towards you, spins. It doesnt take you long to figure out that its surface is covered with molten rocks and that what you are facing is a planet. A liquefied planet.

Shocked, a question comes to your mind: what monstrous source of heat could liquefy an entire world like this?

But then a star, immense, appears to your right. Its sheer size, compared to that of the planet, is just astounding. And it spins too. And it also moves through space. And it seems to be growing.

The planet, although much closer, now looks like a childs tiny orange marble facing a gigantic ball that continues to grow at an astonishing rate. It is already twice the size it was a minute ago. Presently, it has a red hue, and it angrily ejects huge filaments of million-degree-hot plasma that blast through space at what seems to be very close to the speed of light.

Everything you see is of a monstrous beauty. In fact, you are living through one of the most violent events the universe can provide. And yet there is no sound. All is silence, for sound does not spread in the vacuum of space.

Surely the star wont be able to keep growing at this rate; and yet it does. It is now beyond any size you could have imagined and the liquefied planet, pounded by energies beyond its strength, is blown to nothingness. The star did not even notice. It keeps growing, reaches about a hundred times its initial size and then, quite suddenly, it explodes, firing all the matter it was made of into outer space.

A shock wave passes through your ghostly form, and then only dust remains, blown in all directions. The star is no more. It has become a spectacular and colourful cloud that now spreads into the interstellar void at a velocity worthy of gods.

Slowly, very slowly, you come back to your senses and, as you realize what just happened, a strange lucidity fills your mind with a fearsome truth. The star that died was not a random star. It was the Sun. Our Sun. And the molten planet that vanished within its brightness was the Earth.

Our planet. Your home. Gone.

What you witnessed was the end of our world. Not a speculative end, not a far-fetched fantasy of supposedly Mayan origin. The real one. One that mankind has known would happen since some time before you were born, 5 billion years before what you just saw.

As you try to pull these thoughts together, your mind is instantly sent back to the present, inside your body, on the beach again.

Your heart races and you sit up and look around, as if waking from a strange dream. The trees, the sand, the sea and the wind are there. Your friends are on their way. You can see them in the distance. What happened? Did you fall asleep? Did you dream what you saw? An uncanny feeling spreads throughout your body as your queries start to shift: could it have been real? Will the Sun really explode one day? And if so, what will happen to humanity? Can anyone survive such an apocalypse? Will everything up to the very memory of our own existence vanish into cosmic oblivion?

Gazing once more up at the starlit skyscape above, you desperately try to make sense of what happened. Deep down, you know that you did not just dream it all. Although your mind is back on your beach, reunited with your body, you know you really did travel beyond your time, into a faraway future, to see something no one should ever see.

Slowly breathing in and out to calm down, you start hearing strange noises, as if the wind, the waves, the birds and the stars are all whispering a song that only you can hear, and you suddenly understand what they are all singing about. It is both a warning and an invitation. Of all possible futures available, they murmur, only one path will allow humanity to survive the inevitable death of the Sun and most other catastrophes.

The path of knowledge, of science.

A journey open to humans only.

A journey that you are about to take.

Another wild shriek pierces the night, but you hardly hear it this time. As if a seed just planted in your mind was already starting to sprout, you feel the urge to find out what is known about this universe of yours.

Humbly lifting your sight again, you now gaze at the stars with the eyes of a child.

What is the universe made of? What lies in the vicinity of the Earth? And beyond? How far can one look? Is anything known about the universes history? Does it even have one?

As the waves gently wash over the shore, as you wonder if one will ever be able to probe these cosmic mysteries, the twinkling of the stars seems to lull your body into a half-conscious state. You can hear your approaching friends conversations but, strangely, you already feel the world differently than you did a few minutes ago. Everything seems somehow richer, more profound, as if your mind and body were both part of something much, much bigger than anything you had ever thought of before. Your hands, your legs, your skin... Matter... Time... Space... Intertwined fields of forces all around you...