Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe

349 Pages·2004·1.7 MB·English

by  Charles Seife

Praise for
Alpha & Omega
“A wonderfully clear and concise introduction to terms often too loosely bandied
about. Seife’s armchair approach…eschews formal mathematics and welcomes
readers unversed in advanced physics. Read this and you can pepper your
conversation with terms like ‘flavored neutrino,’ ‘hubble constant,’ ‘exotic dark
matter’…with much greater confidence than before. Guaranteed.”
—Los Angeles Times
“The sort of stuff that makes cosmology fun to read. It’s not science fiction. It is
the culmination of the best thinking of the best minds in science.”
—Wisconsin State Journal
“A ripped-from-the-headlines guide to cosmology that puts all manner of bizarre
phenomena…into a coherent picture of the cosmos.”
—Astronomy
“Reads like a great mystery…Seife takes readers on a fascinating journey
through history…they will be rewarded with some of the most fascinating
insights and discoveries garnered in centuries.”
—Deseret Morning News
“Accessible, elegant.”
—Yale Alumni Magazine
“Seife gives a comprehensive survey of ‘theories of everything’ from the
ancients to the latest discoveries…[and] provides lucid explanations of very
complicated topics.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Seife’s narrative about the fundamentals of cosmology will appeal to both
readers basically oblivious to the subject and those that keep up with it—from
the grandstands of popular science literature, at least. This dual appeal stems
from the author’s exceptional clarity and the convulsions shaking cosmology in
recent years. Seife’s news about conjectures on the space-time frontier and his
solid presentation of established phenomena will fulfill any…need for a readable
introduction to scientific knowledge of the universe’s origin and destiny.”
—Booklist
“Up-to-date and enthusiastic tour of the new cosmology…. Seife presents
simple, non-mathematical summaries of critical experiments and observations
and the sometimes wild-seeming theories that arise from them. A good summary
for the lay reader.”
—Kirkus Reviews
PENGUIN BOOKS
ALPHA & OMEGA
Charles Seife, a journalist who holds a master’s degree in mathematics from
Yale University, writes for Science magazine and has also written for New
Scientist, Scientific American, The Economist, Wired, The Sciences, and many
other publications. His previous book, Zero, won the PEN/Martha Albrand
Award for first nonfiction book and was named a New York Times Notable
Book. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Alpha & Omega
The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe
[CHARLES SEIFE]
Penguin Books
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking 2003 Published in
Penguin Books 2004
Copyright © Charles Seife, 2003
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the
following copyrighted works:
“Cosmic Gall” from Collected Poems 1953–1993 by John Updike. Copyright ©
1993 by John Updike. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of
Random House, Inc. “The End of the World” from Collected Poems 1917–1982
by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright © 1985 by The Estate of Archibald
MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights
reserved.
Drawings by Matt Zimet
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Seife, Charles.
Alpha and omega: the search for the beginning and end of the universe / Charles
Seife.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-2148-8
1. Cosmology. 2. Astronomy. I. Title.
QB981.S446 2003523.1—dc21 2002044853
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Contents
Preface
Chapter1 The First Cosmology The Golden Age of the Gods
Chapter2 The First Cosmological Revolution The Copernican Theory
Chapter3 The Second Cosmological Revolution Hubble and the Big Bang
Chapter4 The Third Revolution Begins The Universe Amok
Chapter5 The Music of the Spheres The Cosmic Microwave Background
Chapter6 The Dark Universe What’s the Matter with Matter?
Chapter7 Darker Still The Enigma of Exotic Dark Matter
Chapter8 The Big Bang in Our Backyard The Birth of Baryons
Chapter9 The Good Nus The Exotic Neutrino
Chapter10 Supersymmetry Fearlessly Framing the Laws of Matter
Chapter11 Seeing the Invisible MACHOs, WIMPs, and Illuminating the
Darkest Regions of the Universe
Chapter12 The Deepest Mystery in Physics Λ, the Vacuum, and Inflation
Chapter13 Wrinkles in Spacetime Gravitational Waves and the Early Universe
Chapter14 Beyond the Third Revolution Voyage to the Ends of Time
AppendixA Tired Light Retired
AppendixB Where Does Matter Come From?
AppendixC Nobel Prizes in Physics—Past and Future
AppendixD Some Experiments to Watch
Glossary
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Preface
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the
last.
—REVELATION 22:13
T
en billion light-years away, Nature screams. In a fraction of a second, a star
explodes with more energy than ten billion billion billion hydrogen bombs. For a
few weeks, the funeral pyre of the dying sun blazes and outshines the countless
stars of its galaxy. When a star dies as a supernova, it is visible halfway across
the universe.
The light from that supernova travels for ten billion years, attenuated and
stretched along the way. By the time the light reaches Earth, it is far too dim to
be spotted by the naked eye, but telescopes can see the supernova as a dim
blotch in the sky. It is a message from the ends of the cosmos—a message whose
receipt on Earth heralds the beginning of a revolution.
This revolution began in the late 1990s, when two teams of scientists began
to decode the death throes of dying stars. Their observations showed that the
universe was suffused with a mysterious “dark energy,” an invisible substance
that stretches the very fabric of space and time. The discovery of dark energy
baffled and delighted astronomers, who scrambled to confirm the observations
and understand the enigma. What’s more, the stellar death rattles held the secret
to the universe’s death—scientists merely had to decrypt the message from the
dying stars and they would understand how the cosmos would end.
That message has now been deciphered. On June 25, 2001, Time magazine