John D. Barrow is a world-renowned British cosmologist, known to this writer at least twenty years, when he published his best seller "Because the world is mathematical," a genuine treaty popular (even) for non-experts who drew the ' attention of a young (future) engineers. His books are almost always best seller precisely because its tone is close to that of adviser, but with thicker (ok, it requires more attention, but reading it leaves a sense of great satisfaction, compared with a fast last in Focus, for understand!). He recently published "The Book of the Universe" with a fascinating theory about the nature of the universe. Ok, it is not the case of going into detail, but we are following a swift and nimble theoretically, to understand what we would be facing. The Universe, at least until the beginning of last century, had a number of interpretations closer to the philosophy, the mathematical certainty that: finite, infinite, cyclic, static, moving, etc etc.. theories which, again, with a pseudo cover mathematics responded to more philosophical needs (you pass the word) and physical. In 1915, Einstein, general relativity gave equations that allowed us to approach the universe in a more mathematical. From there, the discovery (the term is misleading because the results of equations are obtained "on table" but then are confirmed by empirical observations, so a true "discovery observation" that is!) that the universe is expanding. Symmetric and geometric expansion, it seemed. Well, over time it became clear that for this to happen and why there were singularities from time to time (the galaxies, to understand!) It needed a double expansion, the first of which is very fast (called inflation). Well, here go into detail is a bit 'complex, but we say that the speed of light ended, together with this first rapid expansion, let us think of "our" Universe as a branch universes of infinite boundaries (the Multiverse, in fact) we do not know (and know!) anything. This Multiverse, by its nature "repetitive", in fact, also corresponds to a crucial question when he started with a simple answer: it has no need to have had a beginning! Instead of individual universes, like ours, for example, that it is "started" about 14 billion years ago. I would add that it seems that for our universe, the phases of expansion does not seem to be only two but even three (the last acceleration, four billion years ago), and here the book reveals Barrow useful for understanding because there was this other expansion and what you can expect (as features) from our "small" universe. A book for those with (even minimal) mathematical education and desire to understand how the man, beyond the anthropic principle, push the nose out of his small physical boundaries.
Edited by Valerie Simeone
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