On the Edge of Infinity

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How I came across this book: As a follow-up to ‘A brief history of Time.’

Favorite Line from the book: The rose is metamorphosed stardust.

Einstein: “Most of my intellectual children end up very young in the graveyard of disappointed hopes.”

When we go from astronomical to atomic, the principles of physics have to rely on different fundamentals. The smallest particle in a matter is an atom. The atom has a nucleus around which electrons are rotating with the bonding energy of the photons. The space in between the electrons is empty. The nucleus itself is made up of tinier particles called quarks, which are bonded together by gluons. Once again, the space in between quarks is empty. The bonding energy of photons and gluons gives some of the mass to the matter but if everything is empty then how do the particles acquire most of their mass? The scientific community was in search of this answer until they came across the concept of Higg’s field in 2012 at CERN (Geneva). Higgs’s field is like a white snowfield. Stefan Klein explains, “anyone walking across the snow in dull light will experience resistance, but all they can see is a shapeless expanse of white. Similarly, Higg’s field cannot be seen as it is permeable to light yet omnipresent.” In this book, Stefan Klein relates all these complex ideas in physics to everyday events. ‘On the edge of infinity’ was thought-provoking and felt like reading a sequel to ‘A brief history of time,’ but by a different author. The book also tries to explain the probability of life on a different planet.

Einstein mulled with the idea what would happen if someone travels on the ray of light. Light consists of invisible particles called photons. They are particles without mass, and since they move at a finite speed, we only see parts of the world. Light determines what we see as past, present, and future. For the Light, time is standing still. So, riding on the ray of light would be like living in an eternal present. When we are gazing at the stars at night, we are looking at the past. Cosmic background radiation was discovered in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson. The time it has taken the cosmic radiation to travel tells us the birth history of our universe – roughly 13.8 billion years and expanding. Today we know with exact precision what happened in the first billionth of a second after the big bang. The star chart by the European space probe Planck shows the birth of our universe.

In the last decade, with the help of space probes, we were able to prove that our universe is flat and infinite. The diameter of the universe is 46 billion light years which corresponds to an age of 13.8 billion years. Some scientists predict that the universe is one googol (10 to the power 100) larger than what we can see. Since the universe keeps expanding, it is unlikely that our future generation will be able to see any of this hidden part either. Most of our universe, more than 80%, is made of dark matter – a simple way of saying we do not know what is going on there. This dark matter exerts enough gravity on the rest of the galaxies to keep it together. We owe our existence to this dark matter – the same dark matter about which we do not know anything. After coming along so far in science, we still don’t know to what we owe our existence. When we are discovering new things in a universe at such a rapid rate, an ever-expanding universe which has billions and billions of stars and galaxies, it is a matter of time before we find life on another planet.