Forget those 1,000 things you need to do before you die, the 10 commandments and seven deadly sins.
Concentrate instead on six impossible things that, as the White Queen advised Alice, you must try to believe before
breakfast.
Without them there would be no galaxies of stars, no chemistry, no people, no books and no breakfast.
There is - there has been for decades - an almost absurd number of brilliantly books about why the universe is as
it is, but this one just possibly might be my favourite: it's basic idea is so simple, it's structure so contained, and
yet - like the universe it describes - so rich with possibilities.
Some of the six numbers should already be familiar to anyone who reads about cosmology, though one is a complete
surprise, not because the number is new, but because it is do familiar it had never occurred to me that it was a
property that could be different.
One can marvel, almost I definitely, at the balance between the nuclear forces and the astoundingly feeble but
ultimately inexorable power of gravity, giving us N, a huge number 36 zeroes, and nod gratefully each time one is
told that were gravity not almost exactly 10 times weaker then we wouldn't be here. One gasp at the implication
of the density parameter 'omega sign', which one second after the Big Bang could not have varied from unity by
more than one part in a million billion or the universe would not still. Be expanding, 13.7bn years on.
But who'd have thought that we also needed D for dimension to equal three, because without that value the show
would never got on the road? We go up the stairs, down the hall or across the living room so often that we tend to
Imagine that those are the only imaginable dimensions, but there could have been just two, for instance, or perhaps
four.
Had there been four dimensions, gravitational and other forces would have varied inversely as the cube of the
distance rather than the square, and the inverse cube law would be an unforgiving one. Any orbiting planet that
slowed for whatever reason in its orbit would swiftly plunge into the heart of its parent star; any planet that
increased its speed would spiral madly into the cold and the dark.
Under the universe law, however, a planet that speeds up ever so slightly-or slows down-simply shifts to a very
slightly different orbit. That is, we owe the stability of the solar system to the fact that spacetime has, on the
macroscale, only three physical dimensions.
All six values featured in this book permit something significant to happen, and to go on happening. Take for instance
Q, the part in 100,000 ratio between the rest mass energy of matter and the force of gravity. Were this ratio a lot
smaller, gas would never condense into galaxies. Were it only a bit smaller, star formation would be slow and the
raw material would be slow and the raw material for future planets would not survive to form planetary systems.
Were it much bigger, stars would collapse swiftly into black holes and the surviving gas would lister the universe
with gamma rays.
Just Six Numbers was written in 1999, before we got used to the idea of "dark energy" as the dominant
force in the cosmos. The concept is there, all the sam. The strength of this book, is that it addresses the single most
profound mystery of the universe-how it i that we are here to ask these questions? - in a neat series of brief
chapters, but also gives, Rees room to discuss all the associated puzzles of antimatter, quantum effects, cosmic
string, magnetic monopoles, cosmic inflation, dark matter. Planck time, mini black holes and so on in the same
questioning context.
More info on this link below..
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... ees-review
We must not forget the important number 1836
You are going on a journey...