Chapter 1 OUR IMAGE OF THE UNIVERSE

Aristotle, in his book On the Heavens, established two arguments to believe that the
The Earth was round: The shadow of the Earth on the moon (during lunar eclipses) was
Always round and the North Star appeared lower when viewed from the south than from regions
further north. Aristotle even estimated that the distance around the Earth was
400,000 stadiums (about double the correct equator).
Aristotle believed that the Earth was stationary. This idea was expanded by
Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D. until building a complete cosmological model. The Earth
remained in the center, surrounded by eight spheres. The outermost sphere transported the
called fixed stars.
Nicolaus Copernicus, around 1514, proposed a simpler model. His idea was that the
the sun was stationary in the center and that the Earth and the planets moved in orbits
circles around them. Almost a century later, Kepler and Galileo began to support
publicly the Copernican theory. In 1609, Galileo started to observe the night sky.
with a telescope that had just been invented. The planet Jupiter was accompanied by
several small satellites or moons that orbited around it. This implied that not everything
It had to rotate directly around the Earth. Figure 1a1
Johannes Kepler had modified Copernicus's theory, suggesting that the
the planets moved in ellipses, not in circles. The predictions were now adjusted
finally to the observations.
The elliptical orbits were quite an unpleasant hypothesis. Kepler could not
reconcile them with their idea that the planets were designed to revolve around the
Solatraídos by magnetic forces. Around 1687 Isaac Newton in Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica postulated the law of universal gravitation, according to which each
a body in the universe was attracted to any other body with a force that was both
the larger the bodies were and the closer they were to each other
another.
It became natural to assume that the fixed stars were objects like our Sun.
but much further away.
Newton understood that the stars should attract each other; it did not seem
could they remain essentially at rest. Would it not reach a certain
moment when they would all gather? In 1691, Newton argued that this
it truly would happen if there were only a finite number of stars; if, on the contrary,
there would be an infinite number of stars in an infinite space, this would not happen, because
there would be no central point to gather.
In an infinite universe, each point can be considered as the center.
correct approximation is to first consider a finite situation, in which the stars
they would tend to cluster. We can add as many stars as we want, that despite
Hello, the original stars will continue to come together indefinitely. This assures us that it is
impossible to have a static and infinite model of the universe, in which gravity is
always attractive.
In the thought prior to the twentieth century, no one had suggested that the universe would
it was expanding or contracting. On the contrary, an attempt was made to modify the theory,
assuming that gravitational force was repulsive at very large distances. Today in
we believe that such equilibrium would be unstable: if the stars in some region were to come closer
only slightly to each other, once they started to agglomerate, they would continue to do so.
On the contrary, if the stars started to separate even a little, the dominion of the
repulsive forces would push them away indefinitely.
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Another objection to a static and infinite universe is attributed to Heinrich Olbers towards
1923. In such a universe, the entire field of our vision would be covered with stars, which
they might not see each other because of the intermediate matter; but after a while, this
it would have heated up so much that it would shine in our eyes like a star. the only way to
avoid the conclusion that the entire night sky should be as bright as the
the surface of the sun would be to assume that the stars have not been shining since always,
but they ignited at a certain moment in the past finite.
According to various primitive cosmologies and the Judeo-Christian tradition-
Muslim, the universe began at a certain finite time in the past, and not very distant.
A "First Cause" seemed necessary (within the universe, one always explains a
event as caused by some other earlier event.
In the City of God, St. Augustine pointed out that civilization is progressing, for
what man, and perhaps also the universe, could not have existed for a long time
a long time ago. According to the book of Genesis, it accepted a date of about 5,000 years.
Before Christopher, the creation of the universe (is not very far from the end of the last
glacial period, around 10,000 B.C., which is when archaeologists suppose that
civilization really began.
Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, was not in favor of the
idea of creation. They believed that the human race and the world around it had
existed, and they would exist, forever. The ancients had already considered the argument
described above about the progress, and they had resolved it by saying that there had been
periodic floods or other disasters that repeatedly placed the human race in
the beginning of civilization.
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason called these questions antinomies of
pure reason. If the universe had not had a beginning, there would have been a period of
infinite time before any event, which he considered absurd. If the
if the universe had had a beginning, there would have been an infinite period of time prior to
He. Both arguments are based on the implicit assumption that time continues towards
back indefinitely, whether the universe has existed always or not. As we will see
the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This had already
was first pointed out by Saint Augustine. When he was asked: What was God doing
Before he created the universe?, he said that time was a property of the universe, and that
Time did not exist prior to the beginning of the universe.
In 1929, Edwin Hubble made the crucial observation that, wherever one
look, the distant galaxies are moving away from us. The universe is...
expanding. It seems that there was a time, about ten or twenty billion of
years, when all objects were in the same place, and in which the density of
the universe was infinite (big bang). Under such conditions, all the laws of science
they would crumble. If there had been events prior to this time, they could not
does not affect in any way what happens in the present. One could say that time
it originates from the big bang, in the sense that previous times simply do not
they would be defined. In a motionless universe, there is no physical necessity for a principle. If
the universe is expanding there may be powerful physical reasons for it to have
There must be a beginning. A universe of this kind does not exclude the existence of a creator.
but it does set limits on when he could have carried out his mission!
A theory must accurately describe a broad set of observations, and it must
to be able to positively predict future observations. Any physical theory is
always provisional: it can never be proven. But if on the contrary it is done at some point.
a new observation that contradicts the theory, we will have to abandon it or modify it.

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In practice, what happens is that a new extension of the theory is constructed.

original.
The ultimate goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes
correctly the whole universe. It is very difficult to construct a single theory capable of describing
the whole universe.
Current scientists describe the universe through partial theories.
fundamentals: the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. They
constitute the great intellectual achievement of the first half of this century. The theory of the
general relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the
universe. Quantum mechanics deals with phenomena at extremely small scales.
small. Unfortunately, these two theories are inconsistent with each other: both do not
they can be correct at the same time. One of the greatest efforts of current physics is the
search for a quantum theory of gravity. Such a theory is not yet available, but there is
they know many of the properties that it must possess. We could expect that the
the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us continue to be valid in
our search for a complete unified theory.
Our search will not cease until we have a complete description of
universe we live in.

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Chapter 2 SPACE AND TIME

Aristotle said that the natural state of a body is to be at rest. From this,
he deduced that a heavy body should fall faster than a light one because it suffered a
greater attraction towards the Earth.
The Aristotelian tradition also maintained that all laws could be deduced that
they govern the universe through pure thought: it was not necessary to prove them by
through observation. No one before Galileo bothered to see if the bodies with
different weights fell at different speeds. Galileo verified that each body
it increased its speed at the same rate, regardless of its weight.
Galileo's measurements served as the foundation for Newton. The real effect of a force
it was about changing the speed of the body, instead of simply setting it in motion.
As long as no force acted on a body, it would continue moving in
a straight line at the same speed. The acceleration will decrease when the mass increases.
(amount of matter) in the body.
A body that has double weight will experience a double gravitational force, but at the same time
time will have double the mass. According to Newton's second law, these two effects
they will cancel each other out exactly and the acceleration will be the same in both cases.

The lack of an absolute standard of rest meant that it could not be determined whether
two events that occurred at different times had taken place at the same
spatial position. For example, let's suppose that on a train, a ping-pong ball is
bouncing, moving vertically up and down and hitting the table twice
times in the same place with an interval of one second. For an observer situated next to
the path, the two boats will seem to be spaced about forty meters apart, already
that the train will have covered that distance between the two boats. Thus the existence of
Complete rest means that an absolute position in space cannot be associated.
with an event.
Newton was very worried about this lack of an absolute position, or space.
absolute, as it was called, because it did not agree with his idea of an absolute God.
He refused to accept the non-existence of an absolute space, even though he was.
implicated by its own laws.
Both Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time. They thought it could be
to unequivocally assert the possibility of measuring the time interval between two events
without ambiguity, and that this interval would be the same for all who measured it. The
time was completely separate and completely independent of space.
The fact that light travels at a finite speed, although very high, was
discovered in 1676 by the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Roemer. He observed that the
times when the moons of Jupiter seemed to pass behind it were not
regularly spaced.
A true theory of light propagation did not emerge until 1865 with James
ClerkMaxwell. Maxwell's theory predicted that both radio waves and the
light should travel at a fixed determined speed. Light waves were supposed to travel
through the letter, just as sound waves do through the air. Different
observers moving in relation to the ether would see light approaching at speeds
different. In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley compared the speed of light

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in the direction of the Earth's movement, with the speed of light in the direction
perpendicular to said movement. Both speeds were equal!
In 1905, Albert Einstein noted that the idea of ether was completely unnecessary.
as if one were willing to abandon the idea of an absolute time. A proposition
similar was carried out by a prominent French mathematician, Henri Poincaré.
The laws of science should be the same for all observers in
free movement; now the idea was extended to also include Maxwell's theory and the
speed of light. This simple idea has some extraordinary consequences.
Perhaps the most well-known are the equivalence between mass and energy, and the law that
no object can travel faster than the speed of light. Due to this
equivalence, the energy that an object acquires due to its motion will be added to its
mass increasing it.
In other words, the greater the speed of a body, the more difficult it will be.
increase their speed. This effect is only really significant for speeds
close to that of light.
Only light, or other waves that do not possess intrinsic mass, can move at the
speed of light.
In Newton's theory, if a pulse of light is sent from one place to another, observers
different would agree on the time it took for the trip (since time is a
(absolute concept), but they would not always agree on the distance traveled by light.
Different observers will therefore measure different speeds of light. In relativity,
All observers must agree on how fast light travels. They will continue, won't they?
despite disagreeing on the distance traveled by light, for which now also
they must disagree on the time taken. Each observer must have their own measurement of
time, which is what a clock moving alongside it would register. And identical clocks,
moving with different observers would not have to coincide.
Each observer could use a radar to measure the time that passes until
receive the echo Figure 21. It is said that the time of the event is the average time between the
moment of pulse emission and the reception of the echo. The distance of the event is equal to the
half of the time elapsed in the complete round trip, multiplied by the
the speed of light. No measurement from any particular observer is more correct than
not that any of them is different, but all are equivalent, and they are also related to each other.
We must accept that time is not completely separate and independent.
of space, but rather combines with it to form an object called
space-time.
An event can be described in terms of four numbers or coordinates. If a
A pulse of light is emitted and will spread out like a sphere of light. Similarly, the
Light, when expanding from a given event, forms a three-dimensional cone in space-time.
four-dimensional. This cone is known as the future light cone of the event. From the
In the same way, we can draw another cone, called the past light cone, which is the
set of events, from which a pulse of light can reach the given event.
The light cones of the future and past of an event divide spacetime into three.
regions

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The absolute future. It is the set of all events that can in principle be
affected by what happens in events outside the light cone cannot be
reached by signals coming from P.
The absolute past of P. Set of all events whose signals can
reach P
- The 'rest'. Outside of the future and the past.
For example, if the Sun were to stop shining at this very moment, it would not affect
the things of the earth in the present time for being in the region of the rest of the event of
the Sun to set.
If gravitational effects are ignored, as Einstein and Poincaré did in
1.905, one has what is called the theory of special relativity.
However, the theory was inconsistent with Newton's theory of gravitation, which
It said that objects attract each other with a force dependent on distance.
among them. Gravitational effects should travel at an infinite speed, instead of
at a speed equal to or less than that of light, as per the theory of special relativity
required. Einstein, in 1915, proposed what is now known as the theory of the
general relativity. He made the revolutionary suggestion that gravity is not a
force like the others, but rather it is a consequence of the space-time not being
flat, as had previously been assumed: spacetime is curved, or
"deformed" by the distribution of mass and energy present in it. The bodies follow the
a trajectory most similar to a straight line in a curved space, that is to say, what is known
like a geodesic. In general relativity, bodies always follow straight lines, in the
four-dimensional space-time; however, it seems to us that they move along
curved trajectories throughout our three-dimensional space. (It's like seeing the shadow
of a plane flying over mountainous terrain.
Mercury suffers the strongest gravitational effects, general relativity predicts that
the major axis of its ellipse should rotate around the sun at a rate of one degree every 10,000
years. This effect had already been observed before 1915 and served as one of the first
confirmations of Einstein's theory.
General relativity predicts that light should be bent by fields.
gravitational. The theory predicts that the light cones of points close to the Sun will be
curved inward, due to the presence of the mass of the Sun. The light from a star
distant, when passing near the Sun, will be deflected at a small angle. It is possible to observe it this way.
during a solar eclipse.
Another prediction of general relativity is that time should pass more
slowly near a body of great mass. When light travels upward in the field
gravitational pull, loses energy, and therefore, its frequency decreases. To someone
situated above it would seem to you that everything happening below, on Earth, would pass more
slowly. This prediction was verified in 1962.
Before 1915, space and time were thought of as if they were a framework.
fixed in which the events took place, but which was not affected by what was happening in it
In general relativity it makes no sense to talk about space and time outside of
the limits of the universe. The idea of an essentially unchangeable universe had given way
to the concept of a dynamic, expanding universe that seemed to have begun some time ago

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a certain finite time, and that it could end in a finite time in the future. Roger Penrose and
We showed how Einstein's general theory of relativity implied that the universe
It should have had a beginning and, possibly, an end.