Genesis - the first part of the first chapter of the book "The Big Bang" by Simon Singh

The book was published by Elit HaGeg Books - Yedioth Books

Science must begin with myths, and criticism of myths.
Carl Popper
I don't feel obligated to believe that the same God who gave us reason, logic and reason intended for us to give up using them.
Galileo Galilei
Life on Earth may be expensive, but it includes a free annual trip around the sun.
anonymous
Physics is not a religion. If there was a religion, it would be much easier for us to raise money.
Leon Lederman

Our universe is dotted with over a hundred billion galaxies, and each one has about a hundred billion stars. It is not clear how many planets orbit these stars, but there is no doubt that at least one of them has developed life. And in particular, there is one life form that has the ability and the audacity to speculate on the origin of this vast universe.

Humans have raised their eyes to the sky for thousands of generations, but we were privileged to be part of the first generation that can claim to have a respectable, logical and consistent explanation for the formation and development of the universe. The Big Bang model offers an elegant explanation for the origin of everything we see in the night sky, making it one of the greatest achievements of the human mind and spirit. He is the result of an insatiable curiosity, a wonderful imagination, sharp observation and ruthless logic.

Even more wonderful is that basically anyone can understand the Big Bang model. I heard about the Big Bang for the first time when I was a student in high school, and I was amazed by its simplicity and elegance, and by the fact that it was built on principles that to a very large extent did not go beyond the physics I had already learned in school. Just as Darwin's theory of natural selection is both basic and comprehensible to almost any reasonable person, so it is also possible to explain the Big Bang model in terms that will be accepted by laymen, without having to simplify the basic concepts within the theory.

But before we turn to the early movements of the big bang theory, a little background must be provided. The big bang model of the universe was developed in the last hundred years, and this is probably only because the breakthroughs in the twentieth century were built on the basis of the astronomy created in previous centuries. These theories and observations of the sky have been integrated into a scientific framework that has been painstakingly crafted over two thousand years. Going even further back, the scientific method as a path to objective truth about the material world could only begin to flourish when the role of myth and folklore began to wane. In conclusion, the roots of the Big Bang model and the passion for the theory of the universe can be found in the decline of the ancient mythological view of the world.
From giant creatures to Greek philosophers

According to the Chinese creation myth from 600 BC, Pan Ku, the giant creator, hatched from an egg and continued to create the world in a sculpture that carved valleys and mountains in the landscape. Then, he set the sun, moon and stars in the sky; He dies immediately after completing these tasks. The death of the giant creator was an essential part of the creation process, because parts of his own body helped complete the world. Pan Ku's skull created the dome of the sky, flesh the earth, his bones turned into rocks and his blood watered the rivers and seas. His last breath created the wind and the clouds, while his sweat turned into rain. His hair fell to the ground and created the plant world, and the fleas that lived in his hair provided the basis for the human race. Because our birth required the death of our Creator, we were cursed with eternal sorrow from then on.

In contrast to this, in the Icelandic epic myth "Young Edda" the creation did not begin in a swamp, but in a "gaping chasm". This void broke through the confining realms of Muspel and Niflheim, until one day the burning, fiery heat of Muspel melted the snow and ice of Niflheim, and the moisture fell into the gaping abyss, igniting life in the form of Ymir, the giant. Only then could the creation of the world begin.

The people of Karachi in Togo, West Africa, speak of another giant, the vast blue god Wolbari - the sky. There were days when he lay just above the ground, but a woman crushed seeds with a long wooden beam and kept crushing and stabbing him until he rose and removed himself from the nuisance. Even so, the wolbari was still within reach of the humans, who used its belly as a towel and snagged chunks of its blue body to add spice to their soup. Gradually the wolbari rose higher and higher until the blue sky was far away, out of reach, and there they remained ever since.

Among the Yoruba people, also in West Africa, Olorun was the owner of the sky. Looking down at the lifeless swamp, he asked another celestial being to take an oyster. The oyster contained a pigeon, a chicken and a tiny amount of soil. The soil was spread over the swamps of the land, then the pigeon and the chicken began to scratch and peck at the soil, until the swamp became solid ground. Olorun sent the chameleon down to check out the world, and its color changed from blue to brown as it passed from the sky to the ground, a sign that the hen and dove had successfully completed their mission.

All over the world, each culture has developed its own myths about the origin of the universe and how it came to be. These creation myths are strikingly different from one another, each reflecting the environment and society from which it emerged. In Iceland, it was volcanic and meteorological forces that created the backdrop for Emir's birth, but according to the Yoruba people of West Africa it was the familiar hen and dove that caused the formation of the solid earth. And yet, all of these unique creation myths have some features in common. If it's the big, blue, bruised wolverine, or if it's the dying giant of China, these myths inevitably need at least one supernatural being to play a crucial role in explaining the creation of the universe. Also, each myth represents the absolute truth within its society. The origin of the word "mythos" is from the Greek word mythos, which can mean "story", but also "word", in the sense of "the last word". Indeed, anyone who dared to question these explanations exposed themselves to accusations of heresy.

Not much changed until the sixth century BC, when a sudden wind of tolerance began to blow among the educated. For the first time philosophers were free to abandon accepted mythic explanations of the universe and develop their own theories. For example, Anaximander of Miletus claimed that the sun is a hole in a ring full of fire that surrounds the earth and revolves around itself. He also believed that the moon and stars were nothing but holes in the sky, thus revealing hidden fires. Alternatively, Xenophanes of Colophon believed that the earth emits flammable gases that accumulate at night until they reach a critical mass and ignite, creating the sun. Night falls again as the gas balloon burns to the ground, leaving behind only sparks we call stars. He explained the moon in a similar way, with gases accumulating and flaring in a twenty-eight day cycle.

The fact that Xenophanes and Neximander were not very close to the truth is not important, because the main thing is that they developed theories that explained the natural world without resorting to supernatural tricks or divine beings. Theories that say the sun is watery fire visible through a hole in the sky, or a ball of burning gas, differ in essence from the Greek myth that explained the sun by means of a fiery chariot moving across the sky and driven by the god Helios. It should not be understood from this that the new wave of philosophers necessarily wanted to deny the existence of Greek gods, but rather that they simply refused to believe that divine intervention was responsible for a natural phenomenon.

The philosophers were the first cosmologists, to the extent that they were interested in the scientific study of the physical world and its origins. The word "cosmology" itself is derived from the ancient Greek word, kosmeo, which means "to order" or "to organize", and it reflects the belief that the world can be understood and is worthy of analytical study. The cosmos has patterns, and the ambition of the Greeks was to identify these patterns, examine them and understand what is behind them.

We exaggerate if we call Xenophanes and Aleximander scientists in the modern sense of the word, and flatter them if we see mature scientific theories in their ideas, but there is no doubt that they contributed to the birth of scientific thinking, and their ethos has much in common with modern science. For example, like ideas in modern science, the ideas of the Greek cosmologists could also be criticized and compared, refined or abandoned. The Greeks loved a good debate, and so a community of philosophers would examine the theories, question the logic behind them and ultimately choose the most convincing of them all. Unlike them, in many other cultures people did not dare to question their own mythologies. Each mythology was a core belief within its own society.

Pythagoras of Samos helped solidify the foundations of this new rationalist movement beginning around 540 BC. As part of his philosophy, he developed a passion for mathematics and showed how the use of numbers and equations could help formulate scientific theories. In one of his first breakthroughs, he explained the harmony in music through the harmony in numbers. The most important instrument in early Hellenic music was the tetrachord, a four-stringed harp, but Pythagoras developed his theory based on his experiments with the monochord, a one-stringed instrument. The string was held at constant tension, but the length of the string could be changed. A frittata on a certain length of the string produced a certain sound, but Pythagoras realized that if the length of that string were cut in half, a note would be produced one octave higher and in harmony with the sound produced by a frittata on the original string. As a matter of fact, changing the length of the string, in any simple ratio, will produce a harmonic sound to the original sound (eg, a ratio of 3:2, today called a musical fifth), but changing the length in a clumsy ratio (eg, 15:37) will lead to stringing.

After Pythagoras showed that the use of mathematics could help understand and describe music, subsequent generations of scientists continued to use numbers to study everything from the trajectory of cannonballs to the chaotic patterns of weather. Wilhelm Roentgen, who discovered X-rays
In 1895, he was a great believer in the Pythagorean philosophy of mathematical science, and once remarked that "the physicist preparing for his work needs three things: mathematics, mathematics and mathematics."

Pythagoras' mantra was "all numbers". With the power of this belief, Pythagoras tried to find the mathematical rules governing the heavenly bodies. He argued that the movement of the sun, moon and planets across the sky produces certain musical sounds, determined by the orbital radii of the bodies. Thus, Pythagoras concluded, these orbits and sounds must have certain numerical ratios for the universe to be in harmony. This conclusion became a popular theory at the time. We can re-examine it from a modern point of view and see how it stands up to the strict conditions of the scientific method nowadays. On the plus side, Pythagoras' claim that the world is full of music does not rely on any supernatural force. Also, the theory is quite simple and certainly elegant, two qualities that are highly valued in science. Generally, a theory that is based on one nice, short equation is better than a theory that is based on several ugly and cumbersome equations qualified by a lot of complicated and artificial caveats. As the physicist Brent Matthias said: "If you see a formula in the Physical Review that is more than a quarter of a page long, forget it. she is wrong Nature is not that complicated." However, simplicity and elegance are second only to the most important feature of any scientific theory, which is that it must conform to reality and be open to testing, and this is where the heavenly music theory fails a complete failure. According to Pythagoras, we are constantly immersed in a hypothetical heavenly music, but we are unable to perceive it because we have heard it since birth and become accustomed to it. In the end, any theory that predicts music that can never be heard, or anything else that can never be observed, is a poor scientific theory.

Any true scientific theory must give a prediction about the universe that can be observed or measured. If the experimental results or observations match the theoretical prediction, that is a good reason to accept the theory and integrate it into the larger scientific framework. On the other hand, if the theoretical prediction is inaccurate and contradicts the experiments and predictions, the theory should be rejected, or at least adjusted, no matter how outstanding it is in its beauty or simplicity. This is the supreme challenge, and a cruel challenge, but every scientific theory must meet this test and adapt to reality. The nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Huxley put it this way: "The great tragedy of science is the killing of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

Fortunately, Pythagoras' descendants built on his ideas and improved his methodology. Gradually, science became an increasingly sophisticated and powerful discipline, which managed to reach amazing achievements such as measuring the actual diameter of the sun, moon and earth, and the distances between them. These measurements were milestones in the history of astronomy, and they represent the first experimental steps on the way to understanding the entire universe. That is why these measurements deserve a more detailed description.

Before the ancient Greeks could calculate any celestial distances or magnitudes they had to first establish that the earth was a sphere. This view became accepted in ancient Greece when philosophers became familiar with the idea that ships gradually disappear over the horizon until only the tip of the mast can be seen. This can only be explained if the sea surface curves and disappears. And if the surface of the sea is curved, it must be assumed that the surface of the earth is also curved, and this means that the earth is probably a sphere. This view was reinforced by observations of lunar eclipses, when the Earth casts a disk-like shadow on the Moon, exactly in the way we would expect from a spherical body. Equally important was the fact that anyone can see that the moon itself is round, indicating that the sphere is the natural state of being, which added more ammunition to the round earth hypothesis. Everything began to make sense, including the writings of the Greek historian and traveler Herodotus, who told about people in the far north who slept for six months. If the earth is spherical, then different parts of the globe will be illuminated in different ways according to their latitudes, which naturally create a polar winter and nights that are six months long.

But a spherical earth raised a question that still bothers children today - what prevents the fall of the people in the southern hemisphere? The Greek solution to this riddle was based on the belief that the universe has a center and that everything is drawn to that center. The center of the earth is supposed to coincide with the center of this hypothetical universe, so that the earth itself is static, and everything on it is drawn to the center. Thus, the Greeks are bound to the ground by this force, like everyone else on the globe, even if they live down there.

The impressive feat of measuring the size of the Earth was first credited to Eratosthenes, who was born in approximately 276 BC in Cyrene, in present-day Libya. Already in his childhood it was clear that Artosthenes was endowed with a brilliant mind, and that he could excel in any field he turned to, from poetry to geography. He even received the nickname pentathlos, which means an athlete who participates in the five events of the pentathlon, to hint at the breadth of his talents. Artosthenes was for many years the chief librarian in Alexandria, probably the most prestigious academic position in the ancient world. Cosmopolitan Alexandria succeeded Athens as the intellectual center of the Mediterranean, and the city's library was the most respected institution of knowledge in the world. Forget the image of strict librarians signing books and scolding loud visitors: this was an exciting and vibrant place, full of enthusiastic scholars and brilliant students.

When he was in the library, Artosthenes heard about a well with unique properties, located near the city of Siena in southern Egypt, near present-day Aswan. At noon on June 21 every year, the longest day of the year, the sun sent its rays directly into the well and illuminated it all the way to the bottom. Artosthenes realized that on this particular day the sun must be right at the top of the sky, something that never happened in Alexandria, which was several hundred kilometers north of Siena. Today we know that Siena is near the Circle of Cancer, the northernmost latitude from which the sun can be seen overhead at midday.

Figure 1 Artosthenes used the shadow cast by a stick in Alexandria to calculate the circumference of the Earth. He conducted the experiment on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, when the earth is at its highest inclination and the cities located along the circle of Cancer were closest to the sun. This means that the sun was right at the top of the sky at noon above these cities. For reasons of clarity, distances in this and other charts are not drawn to scale.

Similarly, angles can also be exaggerated.

Details about the book and the author