Wonders of the Universe - Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen (4.5🌟)

Wonders of the Universe is a book about the Universe, providing scientific explanations about its birth and life so far to accurate predictions of its death. This is cosmology and physics but don't panic, it is very accessible for a non-scientific reader like me.

This book is very well written explaining difficult concepts in an unbelievable easy language. I can appreciate its pedagogical aspect as it felt like a series of lectures very well put together. The division of Chapters and sub-sections, the analogies: describing natural phenomena on earth to explain a concept or the qualities of a celestial object, the vignettes, the photographs, and the diagrams all perfect. I can now better understand Concepts such as the Big Bang, Quarks, Atoms, the 4 forces of the universe (Strong and Weak nuclear Force, Gravitational Force, and Electromagnetic Force), Time, Entropy and the death of the universe. Also loved to read about the Nature of Astronomical Objects such as the Stars, Galaxies and Black Holes.

One thing that struck me was the realisation that we, human beings and all life on earth, were part of the Big Bang. It sounds obvious, but I have never thought about that before. All the matter that exists in the universe was created in fractions of a second after the Big Bang. (Cox himself worked at the Large Hadron Colladier in Sern trying to recreate the big bang. They managed to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson. I don't understand the Higgs Boson that much only that it has a role in providing matter to energy particles. And this is how the universe expanded with particles acquiring mass at the beginning of time.) Then the universe started to expand. After millions if not billions of years the stars were created. The strong nuclear force making protons, electrons and neutrons and the gravitational force putting all those atoms together forming starts. They were made of hydrogen and helium and when they died or collided between them they could fusion newer elements as their temperatures rose to unimaginable temperatures. Carbon and oxygen were created in/by the starts and with that the foundations for life. Look at your body, at your house, at the sky, everything you see was part of (a) star(s) billions of years before.

The Big Bang explained:

One

Two

Three

Four

I will not try to explain more than the above as don’t see the point. Professor Cox and Andrew Cohen are so good at it! And although I can now understand a bit more the above concepts, concepts I have read about in Science Fiction so many times, I am still not able to articulate them in a coherent way. I should read more non-fiction about the Universe! This is a book every person interested in astronomy, physics, and even Science Fiction (like me) should read.

My book was published in 2011 by Harper Collins. It has 256 pages.