In his own work, he has focused on getting people excited about astrophysics and cosmology. How exactly did he find these five books and what made him choose them?
Most of these are somewhat older books that contributed to my own education. A Brief History of Time, for example, is a book I read when I was in high school, or maybe even before that, and it was one of the books that really got me excited about cosmology. it’s held up pretty well – we’ve discovered a lot about how the universe works since then – but it still gives you a pretty good overview of what we do know. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to, my generation, or even a little younger, who basically became interested in astrophysics and cosmology because of that book. so it’s very central.
You are reading: Best books on cosmology
another one that has to be on any list like this is the first three minutes of nobel prize winner steven weinberg. it is a relatively thin volume, in which he describes what happened in the first three minutes of the big bang, as it was known and understood at the time [1977]. we’ve learned quite a bit since then and some of the details in its original version are a bit off, but the basic image is still incredibly accurate. It’s just an excellent description of the beginning of the universe, and almost every book on cosmology will include some variant of Weinberg’s description because he describes it so clearly.
The other three are books that I read much later in my life, mainly because they were written much later, but I think they are really interesting resources. the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy trilogy – they always call it a trilogy even though there were four and then five books – they’re obviously classics, especially the first four, everyone loves them. The casual way in which Adams treats the universe as a whole, as something you can race in, conveys a sense of excitement about the universe that really draws a lot of people.
I’ve seen the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie and it offers a comical, not serious, view of the universe, so I was wondering why you chose it.
Unfortunately, I think they did a pretty bad job with the movie. but it is not a serious vision, that is the point. They are novels, not textbooks. good books on cosmology, astrophysics, or outside my field, get people excited about the subject. there is much in this trilogy that is subtle and buried. for example, there is a lot of talk about the greatness of space which really gives you an idea of the actual size of space in a way that a textbook normally doesn’t. the books play a lot with things like the big bang or the end times in a fun way. obviously I wouldn’t even remotely suggest this as a textbook, but it goes hand in hand with the more serious side of physics. if you look at my own book, a user’s guide to the universe, the title is very similar, you could call it an homage
i noticed that both stephen hawking and bill bryson wrote a “history”, and i was wondering, judging by these titles, do cosmologists see themselves as historians, in a way, of space and time ?
Stephen Hawking’s book came first, and I’m sure Bill Bryson intentionally named his book to look like it, but they are very different books. bill bryson is not a physicist, and that makes him very important: most of his books are about travel, but he has also written about the history of the english language, the british isles, things like that.
What I really liked about A Brief History of Almost Everything is that it provides an excellent description of many of the personalities and interconnectedness of important discoveries, in cosmology and elsewhere. he does a great job of bringing together our understanding of cosmology, evolution, paleontology, and geology in a very, very seamless way. he talks a lot about our understanding of the age of the earth, and the relationship of that to the age of the sun or the universe as a whole, and those are cosmological questions. The age of the earth is important if you want to know if there has been enough time for humans to evolve or if you want to understand when and how the dinosaurs became extinct, everything is interrelated. he tells a really nice story, weaving together seemingly disparate areas, putting our cosmological understanding into context.
I can’t help but think of the ‘theory of everything’, meant to connect all the laws of physics, a theory that so many physicists are looking for, when I look at the way it seems to tie all these different fields together, and also at the title: a brief history of almost everything.
I think you’re right, because it’s definitely an important goal in many areas of human thought to try to merge seemingly disparate ideas. it can be boring to focus on your own little problem, and it’s important to see that our understanding of the world around us isn’t just cosmology and geology as totally separate fields. there is an important way in which one influences the other. physicists today are still constantly searching for a theory of everything: this is one of the main goals of physics, because the idea of solving things the same way is a really powerful driving force. For example, we have a very good understanding of electricity and magnetism, a great triumph of 19th-century physics for the most part, although today we have begun to understand it even better as far as relativity and quantum mechanics are concerned. but we are still working on how to merge them with the other fundamental forces. today, we think we understand very, very well – the theory makes some excellent predictions – how electricity and magnetism combine with the weak nuclear force. one big prediction that came out of that model is that there should be a particle called a higgs boson, one of the things they’re looking for in the large hadron collider. however, this idea that all science is one, or all physics is one, and that there are deep underlying unities, is a very consistent theme.
would you like to say a few words about time travel in einstein’s universe now?
This is a book I really enjoyed, written by a friend of mine who influenced my education. it’s not primarily about cosmology, but it does have a very interesting part about how the universe might have started. rich presents some really fascinating ideas, knows a lot about time travel and relativity, and is a great beginner’s book to understand a lot of concepts in general relativity. in particular, he talks about a really interesting theory about the big bang that he and a guy named li-xin li (who graduated from princeton at the same time as me) came up with. that’s why it belongs on a cosmology list.
one of the problems with the big bang theory is when you think about it, forget about physics, there’s always the question of what happened before the big bang, right? and a direct understanding of how the universe works is basically that there is no before the big bang. time does not exist outside the universe; time is part of space-time and therefore no universe means no time. but then how do you create a universe in the first place? usually a leads to b: things are supposed to have causes. then there is a real problem: either the universe has always existed, in which case how could it really be eternal, or the universe had a definite beginning, but then how did it start? this is something for which we don’t have a definitive answer, it’s something that baffles physicists and laymen alike.
rich and li-xin li came up with a really interesting model: a solution that is fully consistent with general relativity. it essentially amounts to a time machine through a mini-universe, if you will. basically, it’s just a loop that goes round and round and round indefinitely, and it’s consistent. it’s hard for me to describe it, so I’ll just say that your book cover illustrates it very well. the basic idea is that instead of the big bang being a moment in time, it sprang from a continuous cycle. in other words, there was never a single point: everything branched off from a loop, from a beginning of finite size. again, sounds like a sleight of hand, except for the fact that it ends up being a valid solution to the equations of the universe as we understand them.
I was very intrigued when I realized that one of the issues your book addresses is the duration of current conditions. for example, assuming that we are neither in the first 2.5 percent nor in the last 2.5 percent of our existence, we can provide with 95 percent accuracy a range of the possible lengths of time humanity will endure , or perhaps in this case the universe . do you often use this logic in cosmology?
That’s the Copernican argument. I don’t know if we use that particular argument in cosmology, but it relates to something else that we do talk about. the basic idea of this argument is that you are not in a special moment. rich uses the example that if you look at a list of all human beings who ever lived and will live, and sort them chronologically by date of birth, and then look at where your name is on the list, it is extremely unlikely that your name is on top 2.5 percent or bottom 2.5 percent. Now if you want to say what is the upper limit for how many people will live, you can say, if I’m not in the top 2.5 percent, a maximum of 39 times more people will live after me than before me. . that argument has many interesting applications: he discusses them extensively both in his book and in his 1993 article.
The reason that argument is also relevant to cosmology is that there has to be an assumption when we make observations of the universe that our observations are not special. that is, there is nothing special neither in the moment in time in which we are looking, nor in the space that we are looking at. So when we do galaxy surveys and look north, east, south, and west, and we get various specific descriptions of everything that’s out there, we have to assume that what we see is basically a good sample of what’s inside. the universe as a whole. again, the assumption is that we are not in a special place in the universe, that the galaxies we can see are not just some kind of wallpaper around us beyond which everything becomes different. There is a historical lesson here, because a long time ago, we thought we were in a special place in the universe. we thought that the earth was in the center of the solar system, and then we thought that the sun was in the center of the galaxy, but it turned out that we were actually in one of the many spiral arms of a large galaxy.
but aren’t we still close to the edge of the galaxy? isn’t that special?
Well, you can always find a way to make us special. clearly we are special in some way: it is true that ours is the only planet with intelligent life in the solar system, and perhaps our sun is the only star with intelligent life by a long way. and anyway, one could argue that it’s more special to be near the middle than near the edge because there’s so much more edge than middle. besides, we are not even on the edge; we are a little close to that. we are not particularly special in that sense; we have to be somewhere! anyway, we have learned a great deal about the world by simply demanding that there be nothing special about us in particular. there is a history lesson there.
How does cosmology affect our future as human beings?
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wow, that’s a great question. there are two ways to interpret that. one is that an important part of being human is wondering where we come from. cosmology is key to understanding this: how we have developed from elements, the creation of galaxies, stars and all that. For humanity, where are we in the universe, what is the nature of the universe and where do we come from, are very important questions. the second way to interpret the question is that perhaps understanding cosmology will help us go to other planets or develop some source of technology. that is much more speculative: exploiting cosmology for such purposes is arbitrarily far off. there are elements of cosmology that touch on particle physics, high energy physics, they are all interrelated. the universe is essentially a laboratory for understanding physical phenomena. this is useful if you are looking to develop energy sources or understand how nuclear processes work. you can actually learn quite a bit: dark matter is an obvious case. people are looking for dark matter particles at the large hadron collider, for example, but they’re also looking for evidence of dark matter in rotating galaxies, a historical way of doing it, as well as dark matter particle collision signatures. each other and creating high-energy particles in the galaxy or in dwarf galaxies. we’re looking out into the universe to discover single-particle interactions that we couldn’t really establish here on earth.
In what order would you recommend reading these books?
well, it depends on who you are. I’d start with a short history of just about everything, which puts you in context but doesn’t go into too much detail, and then I’d read the first three minutes, a short history of time, and then time travel in Einstein’s universe. you don’t want to read it too soon – it talks about a lot of interesting topics, but you need to understand where it all fits. would read a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy on the side. you can put that last, because that’s your dessert.
Would you like to say a few words about your own work?
Our book deals with a lot of the same topics, but we cover a lot of disparate things: the big bang, time travel, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, quantum mechanics. we do it in a very cheerful way; there are jokes, cartoons and all that other stuff. basically, a lot of what you’d find in these older books is up to date.
Do you think we still have a lot to learn from old books on cosmology?
Actually, some of these books have been updated. for example, any copy of the hawking book you would buy will now include dark matter and dark energy. what is surprising is that although today we are in many ways closer to understanding the fundamental nature of the universe, we are not much closer than we were 20 or 30 years ago, as one might think.
Weinberg’s book is a good example. You’d think we would have made much more progress, but we really haven’t, with the exception of dark energy and some concepts that are much clearer today. most discoveries in the last 30 years have consisted of, say, finding a particle whose existence had been previously predicted. we have discovered the bottom quark (1977), the gluon (1979) – the fact that it was not known when weinberg was writing about the big bang and the creation of the first elements is actually a big problem, because it is the mediator of strong nuclear force – the top quark (1995) and the tau neutrino (2000). back then, we were way ahead of experiments, but right now we have all these experimental numbers with no theory to describe them. For example, dark energy, when we try to calculate the amount, we get something 10^100 times bigger than it really is. this is one of the biggest problems in physics. there are a lot of theories, like string theory or loop quantum gravity theory, but there is not one theory that all scientists agree on. we’re not shooting in the dark, but we’re trying a lot of different things so we can find the theory of it all.
eric bolton interview
eric is a student at the lycée français in new york. she hopes to study astrophysics at university.
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