Where did the universe come from? Book Review.

OK, this is pushing the boundaries for a travel blog, but I would count a journey to the stars as travel!

I suppose I should have expected the answers this book provides. I won’t say what those are because that would spoil the reading of the book for some people.

Basically, physicists face a fundamental problem in that they have come no nearer to creating / finding a Theory of Everything in the last hundred years. To me this begs the questions – does there have to be one, does there have to be a theory of everything? This is more a philosophical conundrum than one for physicists to answer.

A Theory of Everything would combine one of the four fundamental forces of nature – Gravity – which applies on a grand cosmological scale with the other three: The Strong Nuclear Force, Electromagnetism, and the Weak Nuclear Force which apply at the quantum level i.e. at the smallest levels of the universe. Gravity is in the world of Albert Einstein and General Relativity and the other three belong in the world of Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Quanta.

The two worlds can’t be combined and yet they both exist before our very eyes. So what is going on?

Well, I think the problem might just be human logic wanting to close the circle on our understanding of the universe by creating a nice formula to explain everything. On the other hand, as this book indicates, differences and lack of symmetry do occur in the universe for example in the amount of matter vs the amount of anti-matter. Different amounts of matter and anti-matter were produced by The Big Bang otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this review, so why did that happen?

Not everything has to fit into a nice logical system does it?

As you can probably tell, this book raises more questions than it answers, which seems to be the fate for physicists for the foreseeable future.