Chapter 2 - The Paradoxical Universe

When the apple fell on Newton’s head, this caused him to think to himself: “if an apple falls, does the moon also fall?

Newton, while observing Halley’s comet noticed that the force of the sun on the comet diminished as the comet got further away. Newton discovered that the comet was moving in an ellipse as a consequence of the inverse square law. After the apple incident, Newton realized that everything in the universe falls under the inverse square law. Newton also noticed that the mathematics of his time were too primitive to solve the law, he created calculus to help determine the motion of falling objects, including the moon.

Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy or, Principia, described the rules of mechanics such as the inverse square law, and it raised paradoxes about the construction of the universe. After Newton’s work had been published, there were arguments debating the size of the universe and whether or not it was finite. In 1962, Richard Bentley wrote a letter to Newton concerning the finiteness of the universe. Bentley noted that since gravity was always attractive, and if the universe was finite, all the stars would collide into a fiery superstar. He also wrote that if the universe was infinite, any force tugging on the star would be infinite as well resulting in all the stars being ripped to shreds.

Newton responded saying that he preferred an infinite universe, but the force pulling the star to the right would be cancelled by the force pulling it to the left leaving us with a static infinite universe.

Since the universe is infinite, there should be an infinite number of stars glowing white, and therefore the night sky should be white. Edgar Allen Poe, a famous poet wrote that “… that there could be absolutely no point … at which would not exist a star.” He concluded that even though there is never a point in the universe where a star doesn’t exist, that the distance between us and this invisible background is so immense that the light from these stars still has not hit our eyes.

With this new idea from Poe, astronomers programmed the Hubble space telescope to take a picture of the farthest point in the universe. This photograph showed ten thousand infant galaxies 13 billion light-years from Earth. When studied, scientists noticed that there is only blackness between the galaxies and this is what causes our night sky to be black. However, they soon discovered that the blackness was actually microwave radiation from the big-bang itself. So, if we could somehow see microwave radiation in colour, our night sky would not be black at all, but the colour of microwave radiation.

Below is a time line of the creation of our universe.

Chapter 1 - Baby Pictures of the Universe

Since the beginning of human existence, we have pondered whether or not the universe is timeless or has a beginning or end. In different cultures, you’ll find different answers. Scientifically, we have found that there was beginning, but when did this beginning happen?

Scientists have been studying a new satellite known as the WMAP or the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe. This satellite was launched in 2001 and can paint a detailed picture of the universe when it was 380,000 years old. (Comparing the universe to an 80 year-old man, this detailed picture would show the man as a newborn less than a day old.) The WMAP can detect the radiation emitted from the original fireball that created the universe. This map measured the age of the universe to be about 13.7 billion years old and that the temperature of the universe was between 2.7249 and 2.7251degrees Kelvin.

When the Big bang originally happened, the universe had a great period of inflation. Now, scientists predict that within a fraction of a second, the universe is expanding by a factor 1050. But, what caused this inflation? It is not yet discovered what caused it, but Russian physicist has proposed that whatever caused the inflation then could still be at work randomly causing other regions of the universe to expand.

According to this theory, a part of the universe will “bud” creating a “daughter” parallel universe which will in turn bud and create another daughter universe. This theory could mean that our universe could simply be the daughter universe of another universe.

So, if our universe was simply a daughter of another universe, the chances of life in other universes are relatively high. And so, the next question is proposed: will we ever be able to leave our own universe, and how can we do this?