【预订】On the Origin of Time
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作者Thomas Hertog
出版社Random House Publishing Group
ISBN9780593128466
出版时间2024-03
装帧平装
定价98元
货号YB-88877
上书时间2024-06-28
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stephen Hawking’s closest collaborator offers the intellectual superstar’s final thoughts on the cosmos—a dramatic revision of the theory he put forward in A Brief History of Time.
“This superbly written book offers insight into an extraordinary individual, the creative process, and the scope and limits of our current understanding of the cosmos.”—Lord Martin Rees
Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life. In order to solve this mystery, Hawking studied the big bang origin of the universe, but his early work ran into a crisis when the math predicted many big bangs producing a multiverse—countless different universes, most of which would be far too bizarre to harbor life.
Holed up in the theoretical physics department at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking and his friend and collaborator Thomas Hertog worked on this problem for twenty years, developing a new theory of the cosmos that could account for the emergence of life. Peering into the extreme quantum physics of cosmic holograms and venturing far back in time to our deepest roots, they were startled to find a deeper level of evolution in which the physical laws themselves transform and simplify until particles, forces, and even time itself fades away. This discovery led them to a revolutionary idea: The laws of physics are not set in stone but are born and co-evolve as the universe they govern takes shape. As Hawking’s final days drew near, the two collaborators published their theory, which proposed a radical new Darwinian perspective on the origins of our universe.
On the Origin of Time offers a striking new vision of the universe’s birth that will profoundly transform the way we think about our place in the order of the cosmos and may ultimately prove to be Hawking’s greatest legacy.
纽约时报畅销书•史蒂芬·霍金最亲密的合作者提供了这位知识巨星对宇宙的最终想法——对他在《时间简史》中提出的理论进行了戏剧性的修订。
“这本写得很精彩的书深入了解了一个非凡的个人、创作过程以及我们目前对宇宙的理解的范围和局限性。”—马丁·里斯勋爵
也许史蒂芬·霍金在他非凡的一生中试图回答的最大问题是宇宙如何创造出如此完美适合生命生存的条件。 为了解开这个谜团，霍金研究了宇宙的大爆炸起源，但是& #160；他的早期工作遇到了危机，因为数学预测许多大爆炸会产生多元宇宙——无数不同的宇宙，其中大多数都太奇怪，无法“孕育生命”。
Holed 在剑桥大学理论物理系，斯蒂芬·霍金和他的朋友兼合作者托马斯·赫托格在这个问题上研究了二十年，开发了一种新的宇宙理论，可以解释生命的出现。凝视宇宙全息图的极端量子物理学，并冒险回到我们最深层的根源，他们惊讶地发现了更深层次的进化，其中“物理定律本身”发生转变和简化，直到粒子、力、甚至时间本身也会消失。这一发现使他们产生了一个革命性的想法：物理定律并不是一成不变的，而是随着它们所统治的宇宙的形成而诞生并共同进化的。随着霍金生命的最后几天的临近，两位合作者发表了他们的理论，提出了“关于宇宙起源的激进的新达尔文观点。
关于时间的起源 提供了关于宇宙诞生的惊人新愿景，它将深刻改变我们思考我们在宇宙秩序中的地位的方式，并可能最终被证明是霍金最伟大的遗产。
作者简介
Thomas Hertog is an internationally renowned cosmologist who was for many years a close collaborator of the late Stephen Hawking. He received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge and is currently professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leuven, where he studies the quantum nature of the big bang. He lives with his wife and their four children in Bousval, Belgium.
精彩内容
Chapter 1
A Paradox
Es könnte sich eine seltsame Analogie ergeben, daß das Okular auch des riesigsten Fernrohrs nicht größer sein darf, als unser Auge.
A curious correlation may emerge in that the eyepiece of even the biggest telescope cannot be larger than the human eye.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen
The late 1990s were the culmination of a golden decade of discovery in cosmology. Long regarded as a realm of unrestrained speculation, cosmology—the science that dares to study the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe as a whole—was finally coming of age. Scientists all over the world were buzzing with excitement about spectacular observations from sophisticated satellites and Earth-based instruments that were transforming our picture of the universe beyond recognition. It was as if the universe was speaking to us. These developments posed quite a reality check for theoreticians, who were told to rein in their speculation and flesh out the predictions of their models.
In cosmology we discover the past. Cosmologists are time travelers, and telescopes their time machines. When we look into deep space we look back into deep time, because the light from distant stars and galaxies has traveled millions or even billions of years to reach us. Already in 1927 the Belgian priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître predicted that space, when considered over such long periods of time, expands. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that advanced telescope technology made it possible to trace the universe’s history of expansion.
This history held some surprises. For example, in 1998 astronomers discovered that the stretching of space had begun to speed up around five billion years ago, even though all known forms of matter attract and should therefore slow down the expansion. Since then, physicists have wondered whether this weird cosmic acceleration is driven by Einstein’s cosmological constant, an invisible ether-like dark energy that causes gravity to repel rather than to attract. One astronomer quipped that the universe looks like Los Angeles: one-third substance and two-thirds energy.
Obviously, if the universe is expanding now, it must have been more compressed in the past. If you run cosmic history backward—as a mathematical exercise, of course—you find that all matter would once have been very densely packed together and also very hot, since matter heats up and radiates when it is squeezed together. This primeval state is known as the hot big bang. Astronomical observations since the golden 1990s have pinned down the age of the universe—the time elapsed since the big bang—to 13.8 billion years, give or take 20 million.
Curious to learn more about the universe’s birth, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite in May 2009 in a bid to complete the most detailed and ambitious scanning of the night sky ever undertaken. The target was an intriguing pattern of flickers in the heat radiation left over from the big bang. Having traveled through the expanding cosmos for 13.8 billion years, the heat from the universe’s birth reaching us today is cold: 2.725 K, or about –270 degrees Celsius. Radiation at this temperature lies mainly in the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum, so the remnant heat is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB radiation.
ESA’s efforts to capture the ancient heat culminated in 2013 when a curious speckled image resembling a pointillist painting decorated the front pages of the world’s newspapers. This image is reproduced in figure 2, which shows a projection of the entire sky, compiled in exquisite detail from millions of pixels representing the temperature of the relic CMB radiation in different directions in space. Such detailed observations of the CMB radiation provide a snapshot of what the universe was like a mere 380,000 years after the big bang, when it had cooled to a few thousand degrees, cold enough to liberate the primeval radiation, which has traveled unhindered through the cosmos ever since.
The CMB sky map confirms that the relic big bang heat is nearly uniformly distributed throughout space, although not quite perfectly. The speckles in the image represent minuscule temperature variations indeed, tiny flickers of no more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree. These slight variations, however small, are crucially important, because they trace the seeds around which galaxies would eventually form. Had the hot big bang been perfectly uniform everywhere, there would be no galaxies today.
The ancient CMB snapshot marks our cosmological horizon: We cannot look back any farther. But we can glean something about processes operating in yet earlier epochs from cosmological theory. Just as paleontologists learn from stone fossils what life on Earth used to be like, cosmologists can, by deciphering the patterns encoded in these fossil flickers, stitch together what might have happened before the relic heat map was imprinted on the sky. This turns the CMB into a cosmological Rosetta Stone that enables us to trace the universe’s history even farther back, perhaps as far back as a fraction of a second after its birth.
And what we learn is intriguing. As we will see in chapter 4, the temperature variations of the CMB radiation indicate that the universe initially expanded fast, then slowed down, and, more recently (about five billion years ago), began accelerating again. Slowing down appears to be the exception rather than the rule on the scales of deep time and deep space. This is one of those seemingly fortuitous biofriendly properties of the universe, for only in a slowing universe does matter aggregate and cluster to form galaxies. If it hadn’t been for the extended near-pause in expansion in our past, there would, again, be no galaxies and no stars, and thus no life.
In effect, the universe’s expansion history was at the center of one of the very first moments in which the conditions for our existence slipped into modern cosmological thinking. This moment occurred in the early 1930s, when Lemaître made a remarkable sketch in one of his purple notebooks of what he called a “hesitating” universe, one with an expansion history much like the bumpy ride that would emerge from observations seventy years later (see insert, plate 3). Lemaître embraced the idea of a long pause in the expansion by considering the universe’s habitability. He knew that astronomical observations of near
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