The Elegant Universe: Pt 1. The Elegant Universe: Part 3 PBS Airdate: November 4, 2003 NARRATOR: Now, on NOVA, take a thrill ride into a world stranger than science fiction, where you play the game by breaking some rules, where a new view of the universe pushes you beyond the limits of your wildest imagination. This is the world of "string theory," a way of describing every force and all matter from an atom to earth, to the end of the galaxies—from the birth of time to its final tick, in a single theory, a "Theory of Everything.
" Our guide to this brave new world is Brian Greene, the bestselling author and physicist. BRIAN GREENE (Columbia University): And no matter how many times I come here, I never seem to get used to it. NARRATOR: Can he help us solve the greatest puzzle of modern physics—that our understanding of the universe is based on two sets of laws that don't agree? NARRATOR: Resolving that contradiction eluded even Einstein, who made it his final quest. S. BRIAN GREENE:The atmosphere was electric. S. World's most powerful laser to tear apart the vacuum of space. How the Sun Shines. By John N.
Bahcall* What makes the sun shine? How does the sun produce the vast amount of energy necessary to support life on earth? These questions challenged scientists for a hundred and fifty years, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. Theoretical physicists battled geologists and evolutionary biologists in a heated controversy over who had the correct answer. Why was there so much fuss about this scientific puzzle? The nineteenth-century astronomer John Herschel described eloquently the fundamental role of sunshine in all of human life in his 1833 Treatise on Astronomy: The sun's rays are the ultimate source of almost every motion which takes place on the surface of the earth.
In this essay, we shall review from an historical perspective the development of our understanding of how the sun (the nearest star) shines, beginning in the following section with the nineteenth-century controversy over the age of the sun. The Age of the Sun How old is the sun? Who Was Right? F.W. A Universe b4 the Big Bang? The History of Pretty Much Everything : Starts With A Bang. “Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.” -e. e. cummings Sometimes, you just need to take stock of what we know, and appreciate how far we’ve come. A hundred years ago, we thought the Universe consisted of the stars and nebulae in our Milky Way. We thought Newton’s Law of Gravity governed it all, and that the other forces — electromagnetism and a few weird quantum things — were all there was.
So why not — all in one article — go through the entire history of the Universe, from as early as we can say anything sensible to as late as we can say anything sensible? Let’s get on with it! The first 10-25 seconds (or possibly even less): the Universe inflates. Image credit: Ned Wright. …and stretches it flat! …and stretches it across the whole sky, for hundreds of billions of light years! Inflation ends! 10-5 seconds: we can form stable protons and neutrons! What about anti-protons and anti-neutrons, you ask? 380,000 years: we’ve cooled down enough to form neutral atoms.