The Universe - A Biography

Title: The Universe – A Biography
Author: John Gribbin
Publisher: Allen Lane (Penguin) 2007 (First published 2006)
ISBN: 978-0-713-99857-3
Pages: 226

A biography of the Universe from one of the world famous popularizers of science is a natural best seller. His other books of which ‘In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat’, ‘Stardust’, ‘Science: A History’ and ‘Deep Simplicity’ are some, are icons of crowd pullers among the publishing industry. The author was trained as an astrophysicist, who soon turned to popular science and now works with his wife, Mary Gribbin, who has co-authored some of the works.

The Universe – A Biography, as the name indicates, is a biography of the universe from the start to finish. Unfortunately, or rather, naturally, the beginning and end are clouded in a lot of uncertaintly which the author has tried to blow away with some clever bits of intelligent speculation. The book starts with a refresher on sub-atomic particles and the status of research on the subject. Perching on this solid base, Gribbin then plunges head on into the question of how the Universe began in the Big Bang and its early development. The story of the origin of galaxies and stars comes next. The Big Bang theory itself can’t explain the development of stars as such. I had always felt that the reasoning of many scientists that the non-uniformity of the space-time caused local hotspots of gravity which caused the material to fall back and accumulate to form clusters is a little bit stretched. To prove their stand, they quote the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) result, which found that the radio hiss of the Big-Bang which is also known as Cosmic Microwave Background is not uniform in all respects. But, the radiation is so weak and near uniform that we’d be tempted to regard the COBE data as nothing more than white noise! This is only my personal opinion which hinges on the conviction that the scientists should come up with more convincing proof!

The author then systematically inspects the forces which bind the universe together, how the chemical elements were formed, how the solar system was formed, how life originated, and by the greatest stretch of speculation, how it will all come to an end. The organisation and presentation is superbly done and attest to the multifaceted experience of the author, he is quite a master of letters. However, as can be expected from an author who had produced several titles, he refers to many of his other books in foot notes. The avoidance of life sketches seemed to be a welcome change, as all popular science titles use these and historical anecdotes to streamline the flow. As I have read how Penzias and Wilson (who discovered the microwave background radiation) cleaned their antenna of bird droppings many times in the past, I found this book’s approach more to the point. Gribbin stood his ground firm, even when he ventured a bit into the territory of biology regarding the origins of life.

The book begins with an apt quote from Russell, “It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition”. The description of the Higgs field becomes essential when experiments at CERN are trying hard to verify or annul this important hypothesis. As he says, “The idea that Higgs came up with is that all particles are intrinsically massless, but that there is a previously unsuspected new field filling all of the universe, which interacts with particles to give them mass. This field is now known as the Higgs field. An easy way to get a picture of what is going on is to imagine the way the behaviour of a spacecraft would be altered if space was actually filled with an invisible gas, like air. In empty space, if the rocket motors of a space probe are used to provide a steady push of the probe, it will accelerate at a steady rate as long as the motor keeps firing. But if the probe were moving through a completely uniform sea of gas, when the motors were fired at the same steady rate, it would not accelerate so quickly, because of the drag caused by the gas. The effect would be the same as if the probe were heavier (more massive) that it really was. In an analogous way, massless particles moving through the Higgs field encounter a ‘drag’ which seems to given them mass, with the exact mass depending on the nature of the individual particle and the strength of the influence it feels from the Higgs field” (p.21). The descriptions of the gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO, TAMA, VIRGO and GEO600 are enlightening and the extent upto which scientists would go to ensure accuracy and sensitivity of their measuring instruments.

The travel of photons from the inner core of the sun presents a curious aspect of its journey. As the book states, “Below the surface of the Sun, where the temperatures exceed 6000 K, electrons are stripped from neutral atoms by energetic impacts and the matter is in the form of a plasma like the last stages of the fireball in which the Universe was born. A photon starting out from the heart of the Sun travels, on average, just one centimetre before it collides with a charged particle and bounces off in a random direction. So it moves in zig-zag steps each about a centimetre long, and typically takes 10 million years to get to the surface, even though it is travelling at the speed of light. If it could go in a straight line from the centre of the Sun to the surface, its journey would take just 2.5 seconds” (p.75).

The author also gives the five basic tenets of the ‘New Standard Cosmology’. They are,

1. The Universe we live in emerged from an early epoch of rapid expansion (inflation), then slowed its expansion rate.
   

2. The Universe today is flat and its acceleration is expanding.
   

3. The irregularities in the Universe today (galaxies, stars and all the rest, including ourselves) result from quantum fluctuations during inflation.
   

4. The Universe is made up of roughly 70% of dark energy, 30% matter.
   

5. The matter in the Universe is made up of roughly seven times more non-baryonic dark matter than baryonic matter, with only 10% of the baryonic matter (0.4% of the total mass-energy of the Universe) in the form of bright stars. Neutrinos contribute as much mass, overall, as bright stars.

Overall, the book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star