Athar Shareef - The Story of Our Amazing Universe

For Aleph and Zhaleh

With the hope that they become as fascinated by
science as their grandfather.

I owe a debt of gratitude to many in bringing this project to a successful conclusion. Firstly, I owe it to my wife, Zuju, for graciously putting up with my endless rhetorical questions and the seemingly never-ending task of putting the book together. I am grateful to her for being at the sharp end of my excited explanations, as I tried to describe a concept, perhaps of quantum mechanics, or explained how we are made of star dust, and for getting excited herself.

I am obliged to members of my globally dispersed family and to my friends who read what I had written, offered suggestions, helped in other ways, or importantly, just encouraged me to continue.

I am particularly grateful to Juliet Amer who so professionally and diligently proof-read the manuscript. My thanks go to Bryn Reade, a photojournalist, who created artwork for use as illustrations in the book. Bryn is also my son-in-law. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with my daughter Juhi, a sustainability executive, and their two children, Aleph and Zhaleh.

I am thankful to the reviewers of my early draft: my Indian brothers-in-law, fellow scientist, Sanjar Ali Khan and science enthusiast, Narendra Reddy, and my astronomy-keen Pakistani great-niece, Kulsum Hassan who lives in Melbourne, Australia. They were amongst the first to urge me to publish.

Finally, I must mention two of my good friends in the UK: Robert Pick, whose family has been close to mine for a long time, and Patrick Mannix, in whose company I passed many an enjoyable hour putting the world to right, over pub lunches and walks in the woods. They made me want to write a book they will choose to read end-to-end. I hope I have succeeded!

I am deeply grateful to my alma maters: The University of Manchester, for opening the door to my career, and, as far as this book is concerned, to the Open University.

This book has been achieved because of the OU. They enabled me to study the subjects of my choice - astrophysics, the science of what makes the Universe tick, and cosmology, the science of the formation, evolution, and the likely future of the Universe - at my own pace after I retired. The freedom to choose topics of personal interest on the course was invaluable. Another one of my objectives was to keep my grey cells active after retirement; the OU enabled me to do so in spades. Thanks to the OU I was able to stretch my study over almost 10 years. The flexibility of the OU process, together with the many interesting tutors and students I met on the course, and the quality of the study material and course work provided, produced an environment that we simply must ensure is preserved for the future.

To question is good. That is how we learn. We question, we search, we find. Never be afraid to ask. Find out why things are the way they are. That is how we progress. I am going to tell you a story that shows the power of questions. It is an amazing story, a story about everything. And the best thing is that it is not make-believe.

Our story came about because lots of people asked questions. They were not satisfied simply being told, It is so because it is so. They wanted to know why. They thought about it and came up with a likely explanation, called a hypothesis. But they did not say the hypothesis was true. They said it maybe true.

They then did experiments to test their hypothesis, to see if the explanation always worked. Sometimes it did, sometimes it did not, and sometimes it worked only partly. Where it did not work, they thought some more and tweaked it or changed it for a better explanation. They told others about it. Many of these other people also thought about it and tested it. Some also suggested improvements. Slowly the story came together and was now called a theory.

But the story is never complete. The more we learn, the more we need to find out. The theory continues to be tested. We are always on the look-out for improvements that can be made to it. This is called the scientific method. This is how science works. The people who search for the answers are called scientists.