The "face of God"? It is the expression used by astrophysicist George Smoot (Nobel Prize 2006) when April 23, 1992, he succeeded, thanks to the COBE satellite, taking photos of the birth of the universe as it emerged from the cosmic darkness just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
Since this term has been around the world, triggered the fury of the scientists, and upset the faithful. But, beyond these few words, what is the amazing secret behind the "baby universe"? Smoot Why is there seen the "face of God"? This book - fueled revelations provided by the new Planck satellite launched May 14, 2009 - approaches, as ever, this supreme mystery: the moment of Creation.
Three of the heroes of this fantasy adventure - Jim Peebles (Crafoord Prize in astronomy 2005), Robert W. Wilson (Nobel Prize 1978) and John Mather (Nobel Prize 2006) - afterword that book over which it is realized that science sometimes merges with the highest spirituality.
First, we must recognize that this book reads very easily, the authors have a very good style that flows well. Except maybe the two last three chapters employ some slightly more technical terms.
course given the subject of the book, one must have some knowledge of physics and astronomy, if albeit very simplified we may still not understand much.
The chapters are very short, about ten pages on average. They always end in a way that makes you want to know what's next.
The summary is not necessarily very explicit, focusing on the most famous expression of the "Face of God" much more "spectacular". This is mainly due to trace an outline and a simplified history of the universe, and the state of knowledge and discovery about it since the 20th century, globally and specifically in the last 50 years.
It's pretty funny to hear such a genius like Einstein was convinced that the Universe was fixed, had no beginning and never ending. He was so convinced he was dealing with violent and contemptuous manner the few scientists who dared to try to prove otherwise.
And it is also strange to hear that what most of us learned in school and take for granted, namely the Big Bang, has actually been proved only in 1965.
You learn really interesting things about how the researchers during all these years, made these discoveries, the earliest that issued the assumptions in the wildest can not prove anything, then the following that darkened the pages and pages of complicated calculations, to today where most of the old as new hypotheses and theories can be verified using satellite observation extremely powerful and capable of extreme precision.
We also learn that the universe is what it is thanks to the "laws" extremely accurate, up to several tens of decimal places. One might say that such precision is strange, and that's exactly what researchers have said that have been simulated by calculations taking values slightly higher or lower simply by increasing or decreasing by 1 the last digit ... And it turns out that each of these laws, simply change the last digit of 1 gives results quite impressive, in all cases where the universe as we know it would not. No galaxies, no stars, no planets, and especially no life.
And anyway, this leads many researchers to say that this is all very well calculated, and seems to have some sort of purpose, the emergence of life. And suddenly some think it could be something, a force, a kind of intelligence may be behind the Big Bang. This hypothesis
interesting and attractive, but I am a little suspicious to me, it makes me think about creationism or intelligent design theory . It is the only point that I shall make a reserve against this book which otherwise is very well designed, very well written and formidably documented because of the special relationship of the two authors with many scientists mentioned in this book .
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