The author is retired, since when he acted as househusband to his two sons whilst his wife continued her

career. Tony spent two years renovating a grade II

listed house and gardens in Kent, now the family
home.
Tony has a degree in Mechanical Engineering (2:1
Hons) and worked in the supply of aggregates,
concrete and tarmacadam to the construction industry.
The author is Yorkshire born, but has lived in the south
for the last 40 years.
He enjoys cooking, gardening, cars, but now thinks he
is too old to play competitive squash, once a much
loved activity. Tony is still active, but enjoys reading,
anything to do with science, mathematics, astronomy,
cosmology, astrophysics and the like.

To my daughter Louise, who caused me to sit down

and do some writing about subjects that have interested
me over many years. I write to be informative, not to
lecture.

To n y F e l l o w s

MY INTEREST IN OUR
UNIVERSE AND WHY
WE ARE SO LUCKY TO
BE HERE

Copyright Tony Fellows (2014)

The right of Tony Fellows to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims
for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British
Library.

ISBN 978 178455 082 0

www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2014)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LB

Printed and bound in Great Britain

An Introduction
I have long been interested in anything to do with our
Universe. Nobody ever pushed me to develop this interest, but
as I grew older, my wonder and amazement became fuelled by
many books which I read to do with astronomy, cosmology,
astrophysics and mathematics. No matter how much I knew, it
seemed that there was always so much more to know, and that
remains true today.
I was a young man when I watched Carl Sagan present his
wonderful television programme about the Cosmos. That was
in 1980, and by the way, the television had a 12 inch screen the
images were black and white, and the sound was a single
speaker. However, the programme was a revelation; it talked
about planets, galaxies and went to the furthest reaches of our
Universe. Nothing like it had been done before.
From this programme, I became aware of just how fragile
life is, and how lucky we are to be here. It was alarming to
realise just how insignificant we as human beings are in our
Universe.
I first began to jot down my musings about various things I
had read in books or journals not in an academic way, but in
an attempt to use my own words, which could be read and
understood and be of some interest to my daughter and
grandchildren, all girls and with little or no scientific
knowledge.
I was mighty pleased that my jottings gave rise to a
demand for more; we held some lovely conversations to
discuss and question so many wonders of our Universe.
Having reflected on my own education through Grammar
School and University, I remembered how boring and
uninspiring so many of my tutors and teachers had been. I
therefore attempted to present my stuff with a sense of

humour, which seems to have worked with my family, but at

the same time I have tried to maintain an interest in the subject
matter.
I hope the same can work to amuse, interest, inform and
inspire others who might find time to read these jottings of
mine. Above all else, enjoy.

Chapter One
A Quick Overview
I decided to have a go at jotting down some of the things
which have long given me interest in the Universe and our
place in it. For many years I have found comfort in reflecting
on such things, even when normal life has been difficult. This
is not a learned research paper, it is my personal musings on
much of the scientific work I have read, and which constantly
continues to amaze and excite me. Scientific brains well
beyond mine have generated such an enormous amount of
information, a lot of which is beyond most ordinary peoples
understanding, in particular the mathematics required, but
nonetheless the physics, I think, can be appreciated by many.
Indeed, some of the professional scientists currently
working on such things as particle physics and the realm of
quantum mechanics themselves have to suspend their disbelief
and simply crunch away with the theories and their
mathematics. It was Richard Feynman, one of my favourite
modern scientists, who when developing the early theories on
quantum particle behaviour said that anybody who says they
understand what is happening with these particles clearly does
not understand at all.
Quantum theory deals with the extraordinarily small sizes
of particles which are the composites of atoms and other
particles, things such as quarks, gluons and light particle/wave
behaviours. It deals with trying to work out and predict exactly
what happens at the tiniest of scales, so tiny that we have no
instruments at the present time which would allow us to see
them. The big thing with quantum behaviour appears to be that
it is not possible to predict things, such as it is not possible to
be certain of the location of, say, an electron in orbit around a
nucleus of an atom. Another big issue with quantum behaviour
is that the very act of trying to observe and measure the action

of a particle instantly causes things to change, such as the

particle might suddenly become a wave. This is not yet
understood, and some of the maths is worrying because it
appears to show communications which are faster than the
speed of light, in that they are truly instantaneous irrespective
of distance. As I said, suspension of disbelief becomes the
order of the day, especially for those scientists who work on
such things.
Very unlike the calculated behaviour of planets and
galaxies, quantum mechanics remains for the most part a very
theoretical aspect of science; some of the mathematics I have
looked at have given me a headache. There are some enormous
differences in our understanding of the Universe between the
very smallest and the very largest scale of things.
So, kicking off at the largest of scales that being our
Universe, and how it all began. Many high powered scientific
brains have tried to address the problem of where it all came
from and what could have caused it to come into being and
then spawn such a fantastic collection of particles, matter,
planets, suns, galaxies, and above all else what is the power
that continues to drive the Universe to become larger all the
time. I remember as a teenager, many years ago now, lying
awake at night trying to imagine something so huge as our
Universe and even more just what holds us up and where are
we expanding into. There are as yet no meaningful answers
and there are still strong debates about the origination of the
Universe; there are also scientific debates about how much
longer our Universe can last and just what is likely to happen
that will bring it to an end. To my mind, I have no leaning one
way or another, but I do find the issues very interesting and
mind testing. I think I am in good company, even Einstein
when he was doing his work in the early 1900s, most of which
was driven by his immense basic instinct and intellect, he
himself would often ponder and argue with the best scientists
of the day about such things. He gained world recognition as a
result of initially doing work on some of Maxwells theories of
Electromagnetism. Maxwell had connected electricity and

magnetism in a way that had not been done before, and he was
able to show how you can jump between the two, and create
the one from the other. We are of course eternally grateful to
Maxwell for his discoveries, because we now have electric
motors, mobile phones and the ubiquitous remote controllers,
all of which operate because of electromagnetism. It was as a
result of working on electromagnetism, and in particular his
work on the photoelectric effect of light particles, that Einstein
was given the Nobel Prize Award in 1921 for science. During
this work, Einstein used the fact that Maxwell had proven that
electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light. Further to
this, Einstein showed that light can be both a particle and an
electromagnetic wave.
Now, the speed of light is interesting: it is blindingly fast,
approximately 300,000 kilometres per second (186,000 miles
per second) and it is fascinating to think just how Einstein was
able to develop his thoughts to show us that the speed of light
is a constant in our Universe irrespective of who is looking and
measuring. He stated that nothing could travel faster than the
speed of light and no matter how fast anybody is going that
speed of light remains constant. It calls for a suspension of
disbelief; if you were travelling in a very fast spaceship trying
to follow a light beam, to you on the ship that beam is still
travelling at its speed and is irrespective of your speed. Also, if
you shone a laser torch out of the spaceship. That laser light
beam would travel at only the constant speed of light and it
would not be added to the speed of the torch.
While Einstein was working on such things, which of
course were his thoughts on relativity, he developed his theory
of Space-Time. Through some remarkable thoughts and
mathematics, and by the way he was given help on the detailed
mathematics by world renowned mathematicians, he was able
to show that space and time were very much interconnected,
and that, subject to where you might be observing from, time
and distance can be different in different places. This issue of
time not passing at the same rate for everybody is a difficult
one to come to terms with. His equations on the effect of time
dilation, as it is called, are remarkably simple and quite

straight forward when you really think about them, but up until
him, nobody did think about it. Einstein developed his work to
show that time is related to both speed and gravity or mass.
There is modern scientific proof that Einstein was correct.
For instance, if you put atomic clocks in a fast, high-flying jet
plane and fly them around for several hours, when they are
brought back to the ground and checked against a synchronised
matching atomic clock that was kept on the ground, it was
found that the clock from the aircraft had run for a reduced
amount of time. Sure, it was only a couple of billionths of a
second, but for atomic clocks that is quite some time
difference. Another proof comes from GPS satellites, which
are high above the earth in orbit and travelling at a high speed
in space, the accurate clocks on the satellite are found to run
slightly slower than earth bound clocks, only to the extent of a
few nanoseconds per day, but enough to require a special
control which jumps the satellite clock forward daily to ensure
it precisely matches earth bound time on the ground, otherwise
GPS ground information would be inaccurate. I recently read
that if a person were to spend their entire life in the air in a fast
jet they would age slower than if they were on the ground to
the extent of about a quarter of a second. Not long enough in a
lifetime to make it an attractive proposition, but it does serve
to prove a point. Clearly, on our earthbound scales of speed
and gravity, the effects of time dilation are extremely small,
but on a Universe scale where light speeds and massive
gravities are in action it is a different matter. It might not
bother you to know that if you were watching someone
travelling at the speed of light or falling into a black hole
(massive gravity) then to you that persons time would stand
still, whilst your time continued to tick along as normal.
Einsteins mind was so fruitful; it was just a small part of
his work on the conservation of energy that led to his E=mC
equation. He was in due course sad that his thoughts on the
way mass and energy can be interchangeable were used in a
diabolical and destructive manner through nuclear explosions.
He was only ever interested in the interchangeability of mass
and energy, in fact he actually wrote his equation as m=E/C.

Through his continuous work and thinking, he showed that

time had a relationship with mass and speed. He further
proposed that space-time could be thought of as some form of
fabric which can be moulded in the presence of mass. To try
and visualise this imagine a rubber sheet with a heavy ball
resting on it hey presto you would see the fabric of the
rubber sheet depressed by the mass of the ball. As a
consequence everything travelling through space, such as
photons of light or spaceships, would travel through such
depressions around a star or a planet and have their direction
of motion changed. Space with local curvature had thus been
presented to the world. This remained as speculation for a long
time, but was proven with a high degree of accuracy in recent
years. Einsteins opinions on how light, and even planets,
move around in this fabric of curved space enabled him to
calculate the exact motions and orbits of our solar system in
such a way that he showed that all of the (then existing) laws
of motion, previously invented by Newton in the late 1600s,
were not accurate enough for our planetary motions. Of course,
Newtons laws of motion remain perfectly acceptable for most
things in our earth existence, at the speeds we travel at, and
with the geometry of our earth and the distances involved; any
variations with Einsteins maths are so miniscule as to be
irrelevant.
Einstein believed that his curved space was what caused
gravity, because anything travelling through curved space will
feel the effect of something trying to change the direction of
motion. However, we know that Einstein had trouble with his
thoughts about the true nature of gravity, and he never came to
an acceptable conclusion. Einstein and others, such as Kepler,
before him proved that for planetary and galactic motions we
needed a refined form of maths. It was Kepler, in the early
1600s, which looked at the planets in our solar system and
showed that most orbits were elliptical and not pure circles. In
particular he observed the motion of the planet Mars, and using
the recently invented logarithms he calculated the orbit
accurately. Kepler went on to develop laws of motion for
planets, which are still used today for space rocket journeys in

ensuring that a rocket ship follows the correct trajectory

through space. Kepler also did a lot of work on the effects of
gravity, and it is believed that he was the first scientist to work
out that gravity gets weaker the further away from the mass
you go. For the planets with the huge distances between them,
he developed the Inverse Square Law of gravitational
attraction. This means that if Earth was twice as far away from,
for example, the Sun, we would feel a reduced effect of gravity
which would be one quarter the strength. If it was three times
as far away, the gravitational effect would be reduced to one
ninth, and so on, and that is how the inverse square law works.
Its simple when you know how, but what great minds these
people had to discover and explain such things in the first
place.

Chapter Two
A Bit More Overview
After Kepler, came Newton, perhaps the most brilliant scientist
we have ever known. He was born in 1642, Kepler was then
dead, and Newton in his developing years became interested
initially in astrology (not astronomy). History tells us that
when he was 20 years of age he visited a fair and bought a
book on astrology. When reading this book he came to an
illustration he could not understand because, at that age, he
was ignorant of trigonometry. So he bought a book on
trigonometry but got stuck because he could not understand the
geometrical arguments, so he found a book on Euclids
Elements of Geometry. Two years later, driven by his new
found interest in maths, he invented Differential Calculus.
When he was 23 years old, as an undergraduate at Cambridge
University, an outbreak of plague forced him to spend a year in
isolation, during which time he refined his calculus, invented
Integral Calculus and made fundamental discoveries on the
nature of light as well as developing a theory for universal
gravitation. I reflect that when I am in isolation, I have enough
trouble in deciding which TV sports channel to watch!
Our Moon fascinated Newton, and he considered that there
must be some force acting on the Moon to keep it moving in an
orbit around Earth instead of flying off at a tangent. He knew
there was nothing physical which connected the Earth to the
Moon, and he decreed that the invisible force which kept the
Moon in orbit was to be called gravity. He then used some of
Keplers laws on planetary motion to mathematically deduce
the nature of the gravitational force. He showed that the same
force that pulls an apple to the ground also keeps the Moon in
orbit and also accounted for the revolutions of the recently
discovered moons which orbit Jupiter, a very distant planet.
We think the same laws of gravity apply everywhere in the

Universe. I think it is a pity that Newton, undoubtedly a

genius, never gave his predecessor Kepler, who was also a
genius, the recognition he deserved because his work
undoubtedly helped Newton to progress with his own theories.
Newton went on and developed his own Laws of Motion and
we still use them to this day for most practical earthbound
calculations.
Then in the 1900s along came Einstein. For all of
Einsteins insights, I mentioned earlier that he died struggling
to understand the full nature of gravity, and still to this day we
do not truly understand it, it is known that Newtonian gravity
effects can be used on a galactic scale, but cannot be used at
Quantum or particle scale. Throughout his life, he like
everybody before and after him, never truly understood the
nature of gravity. It really frustrated him, and he played around
with some mathematics, but he knew that his mathematics
were not good enough to be used at the quantum or sub atomic
scale. However, his and Newtons mathematics for gravity are
still used at the galactic and universe scales.
Einstein struggled to come to terms with just what force
was compelling the Universe to expand, and what part did
gravity play in this. Einstein always felt cheated that he could
not resolve these discontinuities and spent his final years trying
to find a theory of everything, which would unite both large
and miniscule scales, but he failed and we still have no
answers. We now call it the GUT, the Grand Unified Theory.
We still do not really know how gravity is formed, there is
much talk of it being an exotic form of particle which has been
lovingly called a graviton (similar to an electron being the
force particle for electricity) but to date not even our most
sophisticated particle accelerators have found such a particle.
The thing that intrigues me about gravity is that it is instant
and all consuming, every sun, every galaxy, every particle in
our entire universe has a gravitational effect upon everything,
and it is not considered to be like a beam of light which has a
speed. Gravity is one of the weakest forces known, so why can
it have such an enormous effect upon us. Notwithstanding the
weakness of gravity it does require an enormous amount of

energy to first of all achieve an orbit around the Earth, and

even more energy to escape the Earth gravity for, say, a
spaceship journey to the moon. (We need to fly at about
22,000 miles per hour to get away into space from Earth). It is
thought provoking that if, for instance, our local sun was to be
suddenly withdrawn, we on earth would instantly feel the
change in gravity, probably there would be un-survivable
catastrophic tidal waves in the sea with the balance of gravity
between the earth, the moon and the sun having been changed,
but we would not be able to see the sky without its sun for
approximately 8 minutes, which is the time it takes light to
travel to earth, mind you we might be frozen stiff by then. Our
present travel through space on a nice comfortable elliptical
orbit would no doubt change dramatically, with our sun gone
we would have to find some other available source of gravity
to lock on to, goodbye to life as we know it!!
The effect of gravity is impressive just within our solar
system which is tiny when compared to our galaxy. However,
with the Inverse Square Law in mind, which is why, for
instance, a distant comet arrives from outer space at a
relatively low speed, but as it nears, say, the sun it speeds up
and swings off having been affected by the mass of the sun.
Were it not for gravity, it is likely that Earth would be
frequently bombarded by damaging meteorites or other such
large space material, but due also to the massive planet Jupiter,
which attracts a lot of space debris which could otherwise
threaten Earth. Only a few years ago we witnessed the breakup
of a comet into several chunks and all of which was duly
pulled into Jupiter by its very strong gravity. Although Jupiter
is a gas giant, it has an incredible mass which is 2.5 times the
mass of all the other planets. In fact the masses of the outer
planets: Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, are used by space
vehicles such as the Voyager vehicles which are controlled to
fly past in such a way and at a safe distance but to gain a
slingshot in speed, this control in speed then enables the
vehicles to be guided eventually out of our solar system and
into intergalactic space, never to return. Supreme engineering

and wonderful applied maths, all controlled by radio waves

from an office in Pasadena, California.
The 1900s, still in the time of Einstein, brought the
scientific world to the beginning of what we now call quantum
mechanics, which is the study of what goes on at subatomic
sizes; not only with the fundamental particles such as protons
and neutrons but also what makes them up, such as quarks,
muons, gluons. We have to understand the various types of
subatomic particles which carry the forces that we know of, the
forces for instance which hold electrons in orbit and the forces
which hold quarks together to make the protons and neutrons.
This idea of forces being created by particles is a difficult
concept, but there is a lot of research which seems to justify it.
Quantum mechanics is a huge subject and the maths behind it
is mind-blowing, a lot of mathematicians fail to understand the
maths but they use it to do the calculations. Some of the
behaviours of particles and waves defeat normal thought
process, but some aspects are experimentally proven. It is this
frequent suspension of disbelief based upon our normal
existence that fascinates me.
Going back to the beginning of the Universe, it was only in
the last century that scientific minds followed Einstein and
developed the theory of the Big Bang. One of the
mathematicians who used to help Einstein, Max Planck, got to
thinking about the very beginning, and came up with some
incredible thoughts and calculations as to the small size and
the small time for some of the early parts of the beginning of
the Big Bang. Of course we have yet to prove things, but for
instance the world scientists often use Planck Time and Planck
Length scales in their calculations.
I am fascinated by the numbers, for instance Planck Time
is one tenth of a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a
trillionth of a second. Planck Length is a millionth of a
billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre. Now we
might ask how would we know? But quantum mechanics
routinely works at distances and times which are supposed to
be less than these Planck constants. Amazing, but I do wonder,

for instance, if Planck had been wrong by a factor of 100 or

more, what effect there would be.
Anyway, from Einstein onwards a lot of work went on
trying to establish detail and information for the very
beginning of time, when popular science would have us
believe that everything we now see in our Universe originated
on the Planck scales and which gave rise to an enormous phase
of inflation, when the energy and temperature of the new
Universe was on a scale beyond our comprehension. Too hot
and dense for anything useful to have emerged and continued
in existence, certainly no particles or elements existed and
were not formed until much later when the new Universe had
expanded to such a size that temperatures and energy had
reduced to allow the formation of elementary particles. We
have a current Universe which is approximately 13.7 billion
years old, we live on Earth which is approximately 4.5 billion
years old, so things have had time to steady down a bit. Or
have they? We still do not know just how big our Universe is;
it is still expanding at an alarming rate. The Hubble telescope
in space has shown us light images of galaxies which are
approximately 13 billion light years away, and they are
travelling away from us at an alarming speed.
So at present, we think our Universe is going to carry on
expanding and the worrying thing is our scientists do not know
why. Their work shows that there must be some unknown form
of energy which overcomes the gravity we know to give
acceleration to space, remember even Einstein had this
problem and he did not reach a valid understanding of this
energy force. This energy is now variously called dark energy
or dark mass, so called because we believe something is out
there but we cannot see it. The clever thing about this energy is
that somehow or other it overcomes gravity and causes the
galaxies to move away rather than towards each other, Einstein
thought of it as a negative gravity. Whatever this energy is, it
seems that the scientific community do agree that we cannot
see enough mass in our Universe to satisfy the apparent
continued expansion, it is reckoned that our visible Universe is
about 70% short of mass, although it defies me just how we

know the mass of the Universe to any accuracy. It was Edwin

Hubble in the 1900s who finally proved to us that the distant
galaxies we can see are indeed moving away from each other,
except for within some local groups of galaxies where local
gravity is playing its part ( for instance one of our neighbours,
2.5 million light years away, the Andromeda Galaxy which is
about twice our size is approaching us, and in about 4.5 billion
years we will be close together), but by and large all galaxies
are floating away on the fabric of space-time, and he actually
calculated what is now taken to be the Hubble Constant, which
tells us that for every million light years of distance there is a
speed increase away from us of 50,000 miles per hour. Again,
such detail came from much less sophisticated equipment than
exists today and yet they got things so right, amazing.
It intrigues me to think that because every galaxy we look
at is generally moving away from every other galaxy that it is
not possible to know where the actual centre of the expansion
is. It further intrigues me to think of how long and into what
will our expansion take us, just what is the shape of our
Universe, is it flat, saddle, open or closed? This is important to
know because each of the shapes would influence the future
expansion. Scientific arguments prevail, and we as yet have no
definite proof for any of the shapes.
One of the mind blowing thoughts is that if our expansion
carries on for ever, then over such time and distance scales it is
suggested that every galaxy, every star, every element would
eventually expire and we would have a vast elementary
particle space with no light, no photons, no energy and no
temperature, we are told that even the terrifying black holes
will evaporate and shed all of their energy, that does not sound
like fun to me. Mind you, one of the other potential ends to our
Universe is that it could turn back in on itself and everything
we see comes rushing back to that point in space where it all
began, and hey presto a massive crunch when all matter gets
destroyed back to pure energy and pure temperature and
infinite density. Once again not a pleasant thought, but we are
talking about many trillions of years of time, so no great
pressure. Mind you, to avoid sleepless nights we should

remember that in about 2 billion years our lovely sun will have
burned off most of its useful hydrogen and it will expand to
become a red giant, it might expand to a size close to our Earth
orbit, eventually it is likely to explode some of the outer matter
into space and reduce itself back into a white dwarf star, it will
then carry on as a smaller sun for a few more billion years.
During this period of drama, our Earth would cease to exist in
its present form, all of our lovely water and atmosphere would
be simply boiled away and we go back to being a lifeless hot
rock. I do not know where the human race would be by then,
but eventually it is something that will need thinking about.
Also, we do not know what effect the close arrival of the
Andromeda Galaxy will have, it may be that Earth and the Sun
will be pushed or pulled by gravitational forces into new
positions in one or other of the two galaxies. I cant help
thinking just what a fantastic sight it would be to see the
approaching Andromeda Galaxy. We have images from deep
space which shows the effect of merging or close approach
galaxies, and we can see incredible distortion where gravity
has influenced both original galaxies.
Coming back to our Earth and our presently benign solar
system, as you know we float around the sun once a year and
we spin on our Earth axis once every 24 hours approximately.
I have always been in awe at the accumulation of motion that
we on Earth go through, without knowing it. We spin on our
Earth axis at about 1,000 miles per hour at the surface where
we stand, we spin around the sun at about 67,000 miles per
hour, our sun itself travels around the centre of our galaxy at
486,000 miles per hour and of course takes us with it (it takes
the sun 226 million years for each orbit of the galaxy) and our
galaxy is hurtling through space at about 1 million miles per
hour. As to what speed space is travelling at or which direction
it is going we do not know, it could be falling fast or spinning
around something, who knows and the mind can play tricks at
this point. Through the majesty of local gravity which keeps us
stuck on the ground, we do not feel any of the other speed
effects, unless you go on a Disney ride and then you get a few
more motion effects thrown at you.

Although our body has no sense of the earths motion it is

being subjected to, it is interesting to have a look at a wellknown phenomenon that indicates earth must be spinning.
There are some other phenomenon that tell us the same story,
such as some of the complex weather behaviours, clouds and
winds, but that is another whole load of science so we will not
go there.
Return to your sink, put the plug in, fill the bowl with
water, then open the plug and voila you should be able to see
how the water escapes down the plughole in a clockwise
vortex motion. That is what happens in the northern
hemisphere, and the water would go anticlockwise in the
southern hemisphere. Both are due to the water picking up on
the spin of earth, through a force called centripetal which is
linked to centrifugal force which is linked to spin. Do not
worry about the words, but do have a go at the sink. Of course
you can upset things if you stir the water, but to see the effect
simply let the water rest.
This phenomenon is known as the Coriolis Effect, named
after Mr Coriolis, an Italian chap, who observed the effect and
gave the scientific reasons for it.