From very early in human civilization, humans have tried to explain the universe. An early Babylonian idea was that Earth was a flat stationary plate, and the sky above was like a moving dome, or a roof enclosing earth as a half-circle. Later, the ancient Greeks figured out that Earth could not be flat. As travelers, the Greeks were navigating using the stars for orientation. One orientation point was the North Star. They noticed that starting out from Athens, the North star would hover just above the horizon, but the farther they traveled north, the further it would raise above the horizon. This could only be explained if the Earth was round and not flat. They also experimented with sticks of equal length placed on different locations on earth, for example, one in Athens and one in Alexandria. They would place them standing in right angles to the Earth, and measure the shadows they were throwing at one particular date and time. They now noticed that when one stick at one date and time threw no shadow in Alexandria, the stick in Athens at the same date and time would have a shadow. If the earth were flat, they should throw the same shadow; only if it was curved, the shadows would be different. Below: a man, living on the flat earth, under a dome of sun, moon, and stars, try to break out of the dome and take a look at the other side. If he goes any further he falls down. That the earth was flat was obvious from sense experience: earth is experienced as flat and we dont fall off. That the sky was moving was also obvious from experience, since all the objects in the sky seem to be moving around us in a half-circle from morning to dusk: the sun, the moon, the stars.
The Greeks had the idea that the most perfect movement had to be circular. The circle was the most perfect geometrical form, so if sun, moon, and star revolved around earth, they would do so in perfect circles. Ptolemy elaborated on Aristotles ideas, and came up with a model of the universe, that would last for nearly two thousand years. In the middle we have Earth, and revolving around earth, we have eight different spheres, that each of them control the movement of different bodies in the sky. The sphere closest to earth would thus account for the movement of the moon; the fourth sphere would be the sphere of the sun; the eighth sphere, farthest away, would be the sphere of the fixed stars. The universe was like an onion. In the middle, the earth, from there you can go out layer by layer, until the eighth sphere. What was outside the onion, nobody knew or asked about. One assumed that this was the sphere of God and his heaven.
There was problems with Ptolemys model. Not all bodies on the sky seemed to move in perfect circles. Some bodies seemed to wander around in strange patterns, one therefore gave these bodies the name, planetos, the Greek for wanderer. One tried to account for these strange movements by adding epi-circles to the original circles; one added a circle to the original circle, such that the second circle had a center moving with the original circle. Strange movements could now be explained by epi-circles; and if not by one epi-circle, then by adding an extra epi-circle, creating an epi-epicircle, etc. Ptolemys model survived. And when Christianity became the official religion in Europe, the theologians adopted the model too, because of its simplicity and perfection. The circle was still regarded as perfect; and could God have created the universe other than perfect? That the eighth sphere was a natural boundary of the universe also fit into Christian thinking. One had created enough space for heaven and hell. The church liked the model, and regarded every attack on it as heretic.
Below we still have Ptolemys model. Earth is in the center, and various planets and stars are orbiting around it in perfect circles. But we see a modification of the model, because one has added to the perfect circles so-called epi-circles. Observation had shown the early physicist that the sky was filled with so-called wandering stars (Planetos), that were wandering forth and back on the sky. How to solve the problem, without destroying the idea of perfect circles? By creating epi-circles!
The two models below look the same, but everything has changed from one to the other. The first is the Ptolemaic; it is GEO-CENTRIC: the Earth in the center, the Sun orbiting around. The second is the Copernican; it is HELIO-CENTRIC: Sun in the center, and Earth is orbiting around
Newtons law for Gravitational attraction: each body in the universe is attracted toward every other body by a force that is stronger the more massive the bodies and the closer they are to each other. Hawking, p. 5 Below: two bodies with the masses M and m. The force of the gravitational attraction one finds by multiplying M and m, and the gravitational constant, G, and thereupon divide the result by the square of the distance between the bodies.
Speed of Light
Einstein discovered that light has a speed, and it is invariable. It takes time for light to travel. A thousand kilometers takes around 0.0033356 second, and a million kilometers 3.3356 seconds. In other words, light travels at a speed of approximately 300,000 kilometers per second. Since light has an invariable speed, and we know its value, we can measure distances by measuring the time it takes for light to travel from one event to another (therefore, we no longer measure distances in a metrical system). In Hawkings illustration to the right, one sends a pulse of radio-waves (traveling with the same speed as light) out to an object, and measure the time it takes for it to be reflected back. Time is measured on the vertical y-axis; while distance is measured on the horizontal x-axis. To know the distance to the object, we take the time for the pulse to be reflected back to us, divide it by two (since it took a round-trip), and multiply time with the speed of light. Consequently, we have the distance to the object. We have said that the distance from the sun to Earth is about 8 Light-minutes. This means that the sunlight we see now is eight minutes old, or, it was emitted eight minutes ago. It also implies that we can know nothing about the sunlight that is being emitted in our present now. And since nothing travels faster than light, there is no way we can know the present On Hawkings illustration to the left, we have the Sun and the Earth lined up at time 0 on the x-axis. Time 0 represents the absolute present. At time 0, we imagine that the sun implodes and disappears; however, Earth is still unaffected, because it is outside the light cone of the sun; it is in what Hawking calls the Elsewhere. As the clock ticks, we move up along the vertical time axis, and after 8 minutes, we enter the light cone of the sun, and experience what happened 8 minutes ago, that the sun has vanished.
In order to understand the next discovery about our universe, we must understand the doppler effect. The doppler effect is well-known in our experience of sound. When for example a car comes toward us, the sound of the car increases in pitch (the sound waves are compressed), and when it moves away, the sound decreases in pitch (the sound waves are stretched out). As with the police-car in the example. When the sound moves toward us (when sound-waves are compressed), the waves are blue-shifted. When the sound moves away from us, the waves are red-shifted. The same is the case with light. When observing light emitted by a star, one breaks it up into a spectrum spanning from the deep red to the deep blue. Depending of the chemical composition of the star, the spectrum reveal patterns of absorptions lines (i.e., patterns
of dark lines in the spectrum that indicates the presence of various elements, such as Helium, Hydrogen, Carbon, etc.) From the
laboratory we know these patterns well enough, and from looking at them the astronomer can quickly determine the stars chemical composition. However, as in sound, there is a difference in the light spectrum according to whether the object moves away from us, or toward us. If it is moving toward us, the pattern of absorption lines is shifted toward blue. If it is moving away from us, the pattern is shifted toward red.
In 1929, the astronomer Edwin Hubble applied the notion of the Doppler effect to his observations of galaxies. He expected to see a random distribution of blue-shifted and red-shifted galaxies, but observed instead that distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us; they were all redshifted. Furthermore, not only were galaxies moving away, but there was a correlation between their distance from us and their velocity. In other words, the father away they are from us, the faster they move away. In the model to the right, the x-axis represents the distance from the observer; the y-axis represents the velocity (speed) of the galaxy. Galaxies close to us, moves away from us with slower speeds. Distant galaxies moves away with higher speeds. The father away a galaxy is, the faster does it also move away. The relation is a constant (diagonal line; Hubbles Constant: H0 = 72)
A Model of the Universe Expanding from an Inflationary Hot Big Bang Event
A model of the expanding universe. It starts in a super-hot Big Bang explosion in the first fraction of a second (T = 10-43). At this point, there are no particle formation and no physical forces; consequently no physical laws. At T = 10-32 seconds, this big bang singularity starts to inflate (with a doubling time of 1 picosecond). The model illustrates how the different forces starts to form, first strong, then weak, the electromagnetic, finally gravitational, and how the first particles start to form. Not before at around one second after the explosion, light elements start to form like He, D, Li. The exploding universe continues to produce clouds of mass, until the gravitational effect takes over, and mass starts to collapse into stars and galaxies. After around 13.7 billions years, the universe reaches is current state.
A Model of the Universe Expanding from an Inflationary Hot Big Bang Event
A model of the expanding universe. It starts in a super-hot Big Bang explosion in the first fraction of a second (T = 10-43). At this point, there are no particle formation and no physical forces; consequently no physical laws. At T = 10-32 seconds, this big bang singularity starts to inflate (with a doubling time of 1 picosecond). The model illustrates how the different forces starts to form, first strong, then weak, the electromagnetic, finally gravitational, and how the first particles start to form. Not before at around one second after the explosion, light elements start to form like He, D, Li. The exploding universe continues to produce clouds of mass, until the gravitational effect takes over, and mass starts to collapse into stars and galaxies. After around 13.7 billions years, the universe reaches is current state.
To the left, we have a model that depicts us in the middle, as observing the universe. The universe is consequently all around us, and the deeper we look into the universe with advanced telescopes like Hubble, the earlier an universe we see. With the current telescopes with can see until the blue line, the so-called Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which approximately corresponds to the formation of the first galaxies. Further out we have the radiation era, the Cosmic Microwave Background, and the outer periphery would represent the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. In this perspective the Big Bang is all around us. We notice that the universe expands from the inner core, i.e., from the center of the circle, pressing the periphery outwards To the right, we have a model that depicts the Big Bang in the middle, therefore a realistic model where the universe starts in the Big Bang, then expands up till the outer periphery, which represents the present state of the universe.
if a star before it starts to collapse on itself, is sufficiently heavy (about 2-3 times the mass of our sun), then the exclusion principle can no longer support it. The repulsive forces from nuclear reactions in its core cannot counteract its collapse. That is, without anything to stop the process, it continues to collapse. It collapses into a singularity, or a black hole. A black hole is a star that has collapsed into a mass that is so dense that light can no longer escape its gravitation. It is relatively easy to escape the gravitational field of earth. If one can make an object travel with a certain speed, one can send it out in space. The speed it needs in order to escape the gravitation of Earth is called its escape velocity. On a planet with higher mass than earth, it would be harder to escape, and one would need a higher escape velocity for the object to escape. On a neutron star, an object would need an incredible high speed. Now, since we know that there is a limit to speed, since nothing can travel faster than light, it can now be calculated that some objects would have masses so dense that not even light would have an escape velocity sufficiently high to escape from the objects gravitation. Such objects would be black holes. They must obviously appear black, since they emit no light. Light would be dragged back into the black hole. And if light can not escape, nothing else can everything is pulled back into the black hole.
A star with large mass has eventually burned out of fuel. Without sufficient repulsion of nuclear reactions, it continues to collapse into a singularity. This singularity is infinitely dense, and everything that comes within a certain boundary is pulled in and destroyed. This boundary, which is called the event horizon, is the distance within which everything, also light, is pulled in.
The two giants of modern physics: Newton and Einstein. Newton with his fixed and flat space, and Einstein with his dynamic and curved.