Humans have always craved adventure since the beginning of time. The brave conquistadors travelled across the Atlantic to mysterious lands that have never before been known. Like the conquistadors, physicists search the vast universe for answers to how life and nature first began. We have explored very little of the universe, yet we have learned an incredible amount with the help of our intelligence and vision. Some believe that physics could one day find a theory of everything, such as why we feel love and other emotions. As of now, physicists are far from a theory of everything, but they are still fighting through barriers to hopefully answer more questions. One of the biggest mysteries of the universe was how the earth and humans came to be. With the formulation of the Big Bang theory, we could finally begin writing Earth’s history. With breakthroughs in technology, we finally have an accurate cosmic calendar. The calendar combines 13.8 billion years since the creation of the universe, into a 365 daylong visual adventure through the history of Earth and humans. This calendar is important to all physicists, including my physic’s teacher Dr. Bob Echols. Dr. Bob spends his Physics 111 class explaining the possible theories that are the backbone of the cosmic calendar The cosmic calendar serves as a trophy, reminding us how much we have learned about ourselves along with motivating our future generation to fill in the blanks and dive into the details of our universe.
The Big Bang marks January 1st and is represented by a huge explosion on the upper left corner. The background of the first four months, the first row, transitions very smoothly from left to right as we observe the birth of the Milky Way galaxy with a background of hu...
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... brought the beginning of humanity.
The cosmic calendar contains a lot of information for viewers to digest. As people scan from left to right, they are actually skimming through history. It seems as if we know the entire history of the universe, but we still are confused about why and how all the events in the last 13.8 billion years occurred the way it did. The calendar leaves a lasting first impression, while also attempting to interest our future generation in space and the mysteries that physicists are still attempting to solve. Looking back, it is hard to believe that we have been able to map 13.8 billion years of our past in only the last seconds of the cosmic calendar. In the end, the calendar is perfect for an adult who is fascinated about the science and history of how life came to be, while also having the dynamics to interest children in the universe.
“Beyond Biocentrism is a joyride through the history of science and cutting-edge physics, all with a very serious purpose: to find the long-overlooked connection between the conscious self and the universe around us.”
Hawking, Stephen. “Our Picture of the Universe.” Fields of Reading. 6th ed. Ed. Nancy R. Comely et al. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001. (565-574)
Despite the detail and thought that went into both Pereboom and Kanes’ work, the debate of free will is nowhere near being settled. Regardless, it is the possible ideas and theories such as these that allow us to explore and understand the concepts that make up our universe.
An underlying theme present throughout the series is the possibility that our existence is not the only one. According to current theories in physics, it is entirely possible that our universe is just one of many universes f...
The number of theories surrounding how the universe materialized is nearly endless, but Krauss’ thesis is one of the most convincing and buttressed that has been proposed. Lawrence Krauss is one of the most well respected theoretical physicists and cosmologists in America and has done extensive research on how and why the universe is in existence. Like the title of his book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing, his entire theory surrounds the fact the universe was created from nothing. In support of his argument, he explores the weight and shape of the universe, dark matter and energy, quantum mechanics, visual particles, and expansion rates. While the world may never know exactly how the universe was created, society is getting closer to figuring it out and Krauss may have been the one to figure it out.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the scientific revolution brought about a slow change in societies’ thinking regarding math, earth science, physics, and astronomy. Early on, new ideas about our universe were not widely accepted, especially from the church. This soon changed due to the hard work and perseverance of several scientists and philosophers who unbeknownst to them brought about an era known as the Enlightenment.
Polkinghorne asserts that “scientists are motivated by the desire understand what is happening in the world.”(551, Polkinghorne). As a physicist himself, Polkinghorne understands the desire to understand the world, even shifting careers to become a priest to better his understanding. Science asks how things happen, and does not attempt to answer every question. Questions asking why go ignored, as if they are not necessary to fully understand the world and the life that lives here. Science alone
Since its inception, science relied on predictability and order. The true beauty of science was its uncanny ability to find patterns and regularity in seemingly random systems. For centuries the human mind as easily grasped and mastered the concepts of linearity. Physics illustrated the magnificent order to which the natural world obeyed. If there is a God he is indeed mathematical. Until the 19th century Physics explained the processes of the natural world successfully, for the most part. There were still many facets of the universe that were an enigma to physicists. Mathematicians could indeed illustrate patterns in nature but there were many aspects of Mother Nature that remained a mystery to Physicists and Mathematicians alike. Mathematics is an integral part of physics. It provides an order and a guide to thinking; it shows the relationship between many physical phenomenons. The error in mathematics until that point was linearity. “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” - Benoit Mandlebrot. Was it not beyond reason that a process, which is dictated by that regularity, could master a world that shows almost no predictability whatsoever? A new science and a new kind of mathematics were developed that could show the universe’s idiosyncrasies. This new amalgam of mathematics and physics takes the order of linearity and shows how it relates to the unpredictability of the world around us. It is called Chaos Theory.
Impey, Chris. How It Began: A Time-traveler's Guide to the Universe. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 123+. Print.
On the other hand, believers in science take a completely different approach in explaining the origin of the universe. Although there is more than one theory, the most popular today is the concept of the big ba...
The first three chapters of A Brief History of Time cover a variety of topics. In chapter one, Stephen Hawking tries to provide a single theory to describe the entire universe. Chapter two describes some of the ideas that scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and physicians of the past had about gravity and theories of motion. The third chapter in the book talks about the work of many scientists of the past concerning whether the universe is expanding or not. In each chapter, Stephen Hawking describes several different things to solve the huge idea of the entire universe.
The early Universe was not bound by the laws of physics as we know them today, and consequently this means scientists cannot predict with great accuracy what the Universe looked like during the ear...
Even though Albert Einstein’s life ended on that fateful April day, he will live on through the many contributions he has made to theoretical physics. A man of great creativity and perseverance, Einstein never stopped asking, “Why?” Perhaps humanity as a whole should start asking, “Why,” more often.
Fifteen billion years ago, give or take five billion years, the entirety of our universe was compressed into the confines of an atomic nucleus. Known as a singularity, this is the moment before creation when space and time did not exist. According to the prevailing cosmological models that explain our universe, an ineffable explosion, trillions of degrees in temperature on any measurement scale, that was infinitely dense, created not on fundamental subatomic particles and thus matter and energy but space and time itself. Cosmology theorists combined with the observations of their astronomy colleagues have been able to reconstruct the primordial chronology of events known as the big bang.
During the seventeenth century, the modern science of physics started to emerge and become a widespread tool used around the world. Many prominent people contributed to the build up of this fascinating field and managed to generally define it as the science of matter and energy and their interactions. However, as we know, physics is much more than that. It explains the world around us in every form imaginable. The study of physics is a fundamental science that helps the advancing knowledge of the natural world, technology and aids in the other sciences and in our economy. Without the field of physics, the world today would be a complete mystery, everything would be different because of the significance physics has on our life as individuals and as a society.