DECODING COSMOS
Its not 101010.
TUSHAR GOYAL
Copyright 2019
This book is dedicated to all the universe lovers.
Contents
Chapter 1 -
Chapter 2 -
Chapter 3 -
Chapter 4 -
Chapter 5 -
Chapter 6 -
Chapter 7 -
Chapter 8 -
Chapter 9 -
Chapter 10 -
Foreword
T he journey of our life begins at the moment we are born. We perform our act on the stage of the universe and one day get off it, forever. During it we experience and try exploring a small part of it. Busy in our lives, we never appreciate the beauty of the surrounding things. Questions like 'Why things exist?' or 'Why even we exist to ask such questions?' have always put humanity in wonder. Most of us in our lives ponder upon these questions but do not get the proper answers. Many of us believe that we still have to rely on philosophy. But it can no longer handle such questions.
With the recent breakthroughs across many disciplines, science has finally taken over these fundamental questions about reality and existence of our universe and can put forward credible answers with a bigger picture. However, we still know just about a drop in the ocean. We do not even know how vast this ocean is, maybe its never-ending. So get ready with your life-jackets to ride the boat sailing into the sea of unknown.
Tushar Goyal
Chapter 1
Wake me up!
Y ou left a glass on the corner of a table, locked up the house, and went on an international trip for a month. When you return you see that pieces of glass are lying around the table which gets you to think I locked the house so there is no way someone can get inside, then how come it fell? After some days, you discovered that there was an earthquake in the area. The broken glass mystery is solved. Vibrations from the earthquake caused the glass to fall and break. From this scenario, we can note that any act in the past affects the present and future or say any event is followed by a series of events before it. This simple idea of the cause & effect chain completely changed our notions of perceiving things and events around us.
We can understand the universes workings in a better way as we can frame its timeline right from the beginning (if it had one) to this instant and also predict its future by discovering the root cause of the events and predicting the events that might take place.
Everything you see around from the smallest to the largest scale is all a part of the cosmos. Entities like space and time that we somehow take for granted are intrinsic parts of it. The universe is all the existing matter, energy, and space considered as a whole. You are not living in the universe but you are the universe. You are the universes way of experiencing itself. Isnt it amazing!
Our address in the universe is big. We live on a tini-tiny moist rock, the Earth, which revolves around a burning sphere of gases, the Sun. Together the Sun and the eight planets form the Solar System. Like the Sun, hundred thousand million stars revolve around a center forming a galaxy, the Milky Way. Fifty-four galaxies like ours collectively form a group known as the Local Group. Many of these groups form a supercluster of galaxies namely the Virgo Super Cluster. These superclusters are the largest structures in the universe. Over one hundred billion galaxies exist in the observable universe. And you complain your room isnt big enough!
We need to put emphasis on the word observable here. Since ages, we believed that sound and light travelled instantaneously. Afterwards, we noticed that the sound takes time to travel a large enough distance, but the light was still thought to travel at an infinite speed. Only about 400 years ago, scientists discovered it didnt travel instantaneously but at a rapid speed of about 300,000 kilometers per second. You might not realize the delay of light received from the objects lying around, but on large distances it takes a noteworthy time to travel. The light we receive from the Sun is about 8 minutes & 17 seconds old or say you are seeing the Sun as it was 8 minutes & 17 seconds before. If the Sun was to disappear this instant from its position, we here on Earth would know that its gone after exactly 8 minutes & 17 seconds!
Here are more mind blowing facts owed to the finite speed of light; If at this instant you were to view the Earth from nine trillion five hundred billion kilometers away, you would see how it was a year before from now and from about one sextillion five hundred quintillion kilometers away, you would see dinosaurs playing around, as the light produced then would have been able to travel that much distance only. So, there can be some aliens in a galaxy far, far away watching you go to school on your first day and crying!
Some people may seem bright until you hear them speak because you know, light travels faster than sound.
As the speed of light is finite therefore from distant galaxies and stars, light hasnt reached us yet, so we cannot see them. The part we can see in the universe is the observable universe. The size of the observable universe is well, ENORMOUS! (880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers to be exact) but this says nothing about the actual size of the actual universe which lies beyond our boundaries of observance, and might be infinitely spread out.
It was also believed that the universe was static (never changing) and has existed since like forever and will continue to do so, for some mystical reasons. About 100 years ago, astronomers discovered that the galaxies were moving apart from each other. It turned out that the space itself between galaxies is expanding & new space is being created everywhere.
The universe is more like a rubber sheet. Take a rubber sheet. Mark two points on it. Now stretch the rubber sheet equally from every direction. We see that the points did not move from their original positions on the sheet, but the rubber between them got stretched. After this discovery, our picture of the universe changed forever. Now, if galaxies are moving away from each other, logically, we can deduce that the galaxies were closer in the past times. Calculations show that about 13.8 billion years ago all the matter (galaxies, stars, etc.) in the observable universe was concentrated in a tiny region of space, which is sometimes referred to as a singularity. A region of space with infinite density and a very high-temperature state expanded into the size of the universe we observe today. The Big Bang Theory is the popular cosmological model that describes the universes expansion from its earliest stages.
It was the time when time itself was created because time had no meaning before it. We term the quick expansion of space of the baby universe as cosmic inflation. As the name suggests that there was a kind of explosion (Bang!) which many people believe is wrong. It didnt explode but expanded. Scientists are just bad at naming things!
If the universe was created a finite time ago and is everything that has ever existed than what was before it? How something as big as the universe made from nowhere? Maybe its God? Hmm.
