David Bercovici - The Origins of Everything in 100 Pages

the origins of everything

in 100 Pages (more or less)

David Bercovici

Copyright 2016 by David Bercovici. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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Selected images by Casey Reed (frontispiece and illustrations by the openings of is courtesy of Denis Finnin, American Museum of Natural History.

Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz. Set in Quadraat type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938149

ISBN 978-0-300-21513-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

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T he history of the Universe is perhaps best written backward. Not actually typed that way, but told in reverse chronological order. Our fascination with the moment of creation, whether religious or scientific, comes from our curiosity about how we arrived at where we are now. If we start from the present moment and rewind through 7,000 years of recorded human history, we then find ourselves staring across 7 million more years to the dawn of humanity. As daunting as that seems, its another 600 million years to the rise of animals, another 3 billion years to the origin of life, and a scant billion more to the birth of our planet and solar system. But from there its 9 billion more to the dawn of time. If we could play the history of the Universe backward over a 24-hour day, like a brutally long avant-garde movie, then human history would whip by in 4/100 of a second, before the credits had even rolled off the screen; the first animals would appear just 1 bearable hour later; wed then wait 7 more hours to see the origin of Earth and the solar system, and an agonizing 16 more to reach the beginning of the Universe.

However, as tempting as it is to tell the history of the Universe backward, chronology helps, especially since were used to thinking and living forward in time. In this brief book, I will, in effect, tell that history in accelerated form, not in 24 hours (though thats up to you, Reader), but in a quick and dirty form, with vignettes of major events. This book covers the Universes greatest hits, recounting when and most importantly how its various pieces emerged. The concept of origins is deeply ingrained in science itself: these are not myths or just-so stories but the major scientific origin hypotheses of how things came into existence. And the difference between the just-so story and a hypothesis is critical; researchers can disprove or falsify a hypothesis with experiments or observations because a hypothesis makes a measurable prediction. The testable hypothesis is perhaps the most fundamental precept of science, and although it might sound a little dry, I hope to relay a flavor of this through these origin stories. Dont worry; I wont flavor it too much.

Ill note that this book arose from a class, an undergraduate seminar at Yale with the modest title Origins of Everything, whose goal was to teach science through these big testable hypotheses. While the books material is geared toward a general audience, I dont believe in going too fluffy on the science. However, I will also do my best to avoid bamboozling the reader with jargon, and Ill try to explain it if and when a little jargon is necessary.

Although Im offering vignettes of origin stories, theyre not random or disconnected; each one depends on the last and flows into the next. The building blocks of life are drawn from the air, sea, and rocks of our planet, which itself grew from interstellar dust. The elements in that dust were forged in giant stars, which were themselves born from gas created in the Big Bang. Where the planet is, how its oceans, atmosphere, and deep interior formed and change are all responsible for sustaining complex life for hundreds of millions of years.

Of course, as a scientist who has researched a number (though certainly not all) of the topics covered here, Ill invariably emphasize themes and connections between the origin stories from a uniquely geophysicists perspectiveor, more honestly, bias. As my students eventually figure out, plate tectonics plays a formidable role in this narrative, and if I could figure out how to make it responsible for the Big Bang, I would (but theres an annoying problem with timing). There are other excellent books, far more comprehensive than this one, on the history of the Universe and life, and I list and recommend them all at the end. The goal of this book is not to be deep and comprehensive but instead to be boldly (or baldly) shallow and superficial, in the best sense of these words if there is one. My aim is to give a quick and, I hope, readable overview that provides a taste of our Universes story (and to some extent humanitys place in this story) and more importantly to give you, the reader, an appetite to learn more.

Disclaimer: Given the scope of this short book, one might be misled into thinking that Im an expert on all of its subjects. While that would be wonderful if true, frankly, its not. My own knowledge comes from covering all these subjects at some level over nearly 30 years of university teaching, but I am certainly not an astronomer or a biologist or an anthropologist. In the same regard, subjects that come closer to my own field of geophysics and planetary science surely receive more detail. Therefore, the reader should not rely on this book as the definitive word on the wide number of subjects that well skim through. This book is more like a sampler plate at a fusion restaurant whose chef is best known for linguini.

the origins of everything

T ime begins with an unfathomably colossal explosion, which is always a good way to start a story. However, whether that first moment marked the creation of the Universe or the creation of Earth was unknown until fairly recently, within the last century. Indeed, the first words in the Judeo-Christian Bible are In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, a single event that was dated by the seventeenth-century Irish bishop James Ussher to have occurred exactly on October 23, 4004, BCE.

But not so long before Usshers work, various prominent Renaissance philosophers held the radical view that time had no beginning. One of the most famous of them, largely because of his martyrdom, was Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian Dominican monk and scholar. Bruno supported Copernicuss then controversial theory that the Earth was not the center of the Universe but instead orbited the Sun. He went further to propose that the Sun itself was just a star like many others in the night sky, all with planets of their own. But most significantly (for our story, anyway), Bruno believed that the Universe was unchanging and of infinite age and extent. Although Bruno was not the first scholar in Europe to hold such views, the Catholic Church declared them heresy (along with his more religiously offensive notions, for example, about the divinity of Jesus Christ and the validity of transubstantiation). He was eventually captured in Venice, tried, extradited to Rome, and tried again. Bruno was hotheaded and sarcastic, and in true form, he refused to recant his writings unless the pope or God himself told him he was wrong. Neither consented, and Bruno was burned at the stake on Ash Wednesday 1600 in Romes Campo de Fiori, where today a statue of him glowers at the cheerful tourists in the plazas many cafs.