Eternal Inflation ... An infinite number of infinite universes. ibid.
Ever since the first humans stood in awe and wonder beneath the night sky we’ve wanted to know what’s out there. The Final Frontier: A Horizon Guide to the Universe, BBC 2012
Where did the universe come from? ibid.
Experimental evidence has proved that Einstein was right. ibid.
The Big Bang: a single moment of creation in which everything in the universe burst into existence. ibid.
The Hubble space telescope went on to produce the most magnificent images of the universe the world had ever seen. ibid.
On Earth whenever there is water, there is life. ibid.
In July 2012 the first glimpse of the Higgs Particle was announced. ibid.
What created the Big Bang? ibid.
NASA’s nothing has properties. ibid.
Scientists in the United States say they have found the first direct evidence of what happened in the first moments of the universe. Horizon: The Hunt for Gravitational Waves, news report, BBC 2015
How the universe was born – this is the inside story of the greatest scientific quest of our time. ibid.
First predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago, they are invisible disturbances in the fabric of space and time itself. ibid.
The hot Big Bang model was about to get rewritten: Guth’s inflation. ibid.
How did inflation come to an end? ibid.
In the beginning – the universe was a bit of a let-down really. The real moment of creation came a hundred million years later – the Cosmic Dawn. It’s the moment the first stars were born. The moment that lit up the universe. Horizon: Cosmic Dawn: The Real Moment of Creation, BBC 2015
The Dark Ages are the last great frontier in our cosmic history. ibid.
Stefan’s [Keller] star ... from only the second generation of stars ever made. ibid.
Volker’s [Bromm] model has given us an image of these first stars. ibid.
Their huge size ... They burnt through their fuel incredibly quickly ... A hyper-nova: the biggest explosion ever in the universe. ibid.
There’s an idea once thought so radical that just mentioning it was considered pure insanity ... They think that our universe is not alone. Horizon: Which Universe Are We In? BBC 2015
Which one are we living in? ibid.
This is eternal inflation. ibid.
How does a universe actually work? ibid.
Quantum Physics: ‘In the mid-twentieth century Hugh Everett came up with what he originally called the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics.’ ibid.
Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton has a radically new vision of the multiverse ... She combined the physics of string theory with those of quantum mechanics. ibid.
All of Laura’s predictions have since been observed, including this cold spot she claims is the trace of another universe once entangled with our own. It’s a discovery beyond anything she dared hope for. ibid.
This is the story of how the Big Bang evolved from a left-field proposition to an excepted explanation of how the universe began. Lost Horizons: The Big Bang, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, BBC 2013
For generations scientists, particularly physicists like me, have tried to understand how the world around us came into being. ibid.
At the centre of this debate were two opposing theories: the first is that the universe has always been around ... the brainchild of Fred Hoyle ... Professor Hoyle passionately disagreed with the second idea – that the universe somehow was created out of nothing in an almighty explosion. ibid.
Professor Hoyle called his own idea the Steady State model. And at the time many cosmologists preferred it to its rival. ibid.
In 1949 he [Hoyle] coined the term Big Bang. ibid.
The Doppler Shift also applies to light: by measuring changes in the wavelength of light emitted from galaxies Hubble was able to figure out that galaxies were flying away from each other. And receding galaxies could mean only one thing – the universe was expanding. ibid.
Galaxies it seemed could not have formed from ordinary matter alone. Normal matter just wasn’t made of the right stuff to clump together and produce galaxies quickly enough after the Big Bang. Another strange type of material must have been at work as well. But unfortunately it didn’t seem to shine like normal matter. Which meant nobody was able to see it. So imaginatively it was called Dark Matter. In short to explain how galaxies came about scientists had to call on a new type of exotic material – dense enough to help galaxies form yet inconveniently invisible. ibid.
As for Dark Matter – it remains elusive. ibid.
But as soon as you delve deeper into the atom things get stranger. Hidden within the maze of mathematics were the descriptions of an array of sub-atomic particles no-one had ever seen before. ibid.
A few minutes were all Gamov needed. In that time all the hydrogen and almost all the helium was made. That’s about 98% of all the atoms in the universe today. Or as Gamov put it, our universe was cooked in less time that it takes to cook a dish of duck and roast potatoes. Jim Al-Khalili, Atom: The Key to the Cosmos, BBC 2008
What if you were an ant stuck on the surface – how would it know that that surface is curved? ibid.
Einstein would reveal that we live not in the flat world of Euclid. But in the strange curved worlds of Gauss and Riemann. ibid.
It was the presence of mass that caused Space to curve and distort. ibid.
The Cosmological Constant that would stabilize the universe, but Einstein was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. ibid.
Our entire universe is 13.7 billion years old. ibid.
We only ever see the stars and galaxies whose light has had a chance to reach us. And that’s why it gets dark at night. ibid.
There will come a time when in the future when it [Space] is expanding so rapidly light cannot outrun it. ibid.
It has been estimated that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world. Jim Al-Khalili, Everything & Nothing: Everything, BBC 2011
The universe they were seeing was revealing itself to be one of dynamic complexity. A universe of natural organic motion. A place of endless wonder. ibid.
Dotted around the sky Herschel and others had been observing strange cloud-like objects known as nebulae. Some of these nebulae seemed to have distinctive form and complex structure. Some astronomers began to suggest a radical idea. Perhaps the Milky Way wasn’t everything there was. ibid.
They had no way of measuring distances in outer space. ibid.
One of the great unsung heroes of science. She worked at the Harvard College Observatory. And her name was Henrietta Leavitt. Leavitt’s job was to count and catalogue the stars. ibid.
The talented, passionate and eccentric Hubble rapidly made a name for himself in the field of astronomy. ibid.
Andromeda was indeed an island universe ... We now estimate Andromeda contains over a trillion stars. And it’s just one of a vast multitude of galaxies. ibid.
What is Space? ... Does Space only exist when there is stuff in it? ibid.
The properties of Space were first described by the mathematician Euclid over two thousand years ago. ibid.
What is nothing? It is an extraordinarily difficult question to answer. Jim Al-Khalili, Everything & Nothing: Nothing
Emptiness makes up almost the entire universe. ibid.
It’s about Reality at the very furthest reaches of human perception. ibid.
To Aristotle the concept of nothingness was deeply disturbing. It seemed to present all sorts of problems and paradoxes. He came to believe Nature would for ever fight against the creation of true nothingness. As he put it, Nature abhors a vacuum. ibid.
A vacuum is Nature’s default state. ibid.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle ... The more I know about where something is, the less I know about how it is moving. In the Quantum world I cannot at the same time know both these quantities exactly. ibid.
Heisenberg showed in his mathematics that this is an inescapable feature of reality on this scale. ibid.
If particles can pop into existence, where do they go? ibid.
By 1928 Physics was struggling with a big problem. The two most important theories that describe how the universe worked didn’t agree with each other. ibid.
So it seems nothingness is a seething mass of virtual particles. ibid.
Nothing really has shaped everything. And what’s more, we now have a way to see this. ibid.