Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions: Our Universe, from the Quantum to the Cosmos

By Chris Ferrie and Geraint Lewis

Do you ever look up to the stars and wonder about what is out there?

Over the last few centuries, humans have successfully unraveled much of the language of the universe, exploring and defining formerly mysterious phenomena such as electricity, magnetism, and matter through the beauty of mathematics. But some secrets remain beyond our realm of understanding—and seemingly beyond the very laws and theories we have relied on to make sense of the universe we inhabit. It is clear that the quantum, the world of atoms and electrons, is entwined with the cosmos, a universe of trillions of stars and galaxies…but exactly how these two extremes of human understanding interact remains a mystery. Where Did the Universe Come From? And Other Cosmic Questions allows readers to eavesdrop on a conversation between award-winning physicists Chris Ferrie and Geraint F. Lewis as they examine the universe through the two unifying and yet often contradictory lenses of classical physics and quantum mechanics, tackling questions such as:

• Where did the universe come from?
• Why do dying stars rip themselves apart
• Do black holes last forever?
• What is left for humans to discover?

A brief but fascinating exploration of the vastness of the universe, this book will have armchair physicists turning the pages until their biggest and smallest questions about the cosmos have been answered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781728238821

Chris Ferrie

Chris Ferrie is an award-winning physicist and Senior Lecturer for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a Masters in applied mathematics, BMath in mathematical physics and a PhD in applied mathematics. He lives in Australia with his wife and children.

Book preview

PART 1

The

QUANTUM

of COSMOS

PAST

Where did the

universe come from?

When the night is dark, the sky is lit with thousands of stars. As we gaze upon its glory, it is easy to imagine that the universe has always been this way. But we know this is an illusion. In the life span of the universe, human lives and civilizations pass in the blink of an eye. If we were around for long enough, over millions and billions of years rather than the mere thousands that have passed since humans planted the first crops and built the first cities, we would see that we live in an evolving and changing universe.

Cosmology is the study of the evolution of the universe. While people have looked into the skies for meaning from the earliest beginnings of humanity, cosmology has only become a true science over the last century. Advances in telescopes have opened up the heavens, revealing a universe much larger and richer than we could have ever imagined. Our Sun is one star of hundreds of billions in the Milky Way galaxy, whose light shines across the sky from horizon to horizon. And the Milky Way is just one of possibly trillions of galaxies visible to our most powerful telescopes.¹

As the universe came into sharper view through our telescopes, another revolution was underway. In the early part of the twentieth century, Einstein put the finishing touches to his general theory of relativity, pushing aside Newton’s mathematics of gravity, which had reigned for three hundred years. This new view of the universe, where gravity is encoded in the warping and bending of space and time, is starkly different from the rigid space and time of Newton but completely subsumed the predictive power of his picture of gravity and gave so much more. Within the mathematics of relativity lay explanations of supercondensed stars, black holes, wormholes, and the rippling and waving of space and time