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    Relatively Spacious: Space and Time and our Place Within It
    Relatively Spacious: Space and Time and our Place Within It
    Relatively Spacious: Space and Time and our Place Within It
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    Relatively Spacious: Space and Time and our Place Within It

    By Gary Bridges

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    About this ebook

    Stars, there are trillions of them in the universe, and yet most of us don't really know much about them. Our own star can produce more energy in a single second than mankind has achieved in thousands of years.
    This fascinating book will take you on a journey of amazing discovery and draw back the veil of scientific terminology so you the reader, can enjoy some of the most incredible facts and theories of a universe to which you owe your very existence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGary Bridges
    Release dateAug 11, 2021
    ISBN9781739907419
    Relatively Spacious: Space and Time and our Place Within It

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      Book preview

      Relatively Spacious - Gary Bridges

      A little Introduction

      I guess we have all contemplated our existence at some point. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where did we really come from? What does it actually mean to be alive?

      Are we beginning to understand the miracle of living?

      I guess you could call life a miracle, but we certainly don’t understand it.

      The word miracle is defined in the English dictionary as:

      An extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency. (Oxford Dictionaries)

      Until quite recently, this is what most people attributed to things they didn’t understand.

      In fact, when you come to understand a little of the universe and how it, and we, came to be, it does seem like there was a divine blueprint for our existence. Fortunate event followed fortunate event that has allowed for you and me to be here now, to exist.

      Kind of like a million double sixes in a row on a celestial dice roll. There is a vast amount of information that scientists have been able to gather from the stars and galaxies, but there is also an astronomical amount we don’t know.

      Incredible amounts of information come pouring into scientists’ databases constantly from large communication dishes, satellites, telescopes, space telescopes, interplanetary probes, surface rovers on Mars and, not to mention, the International Space Station. There are still so many unanswered questions though.

      What I am hoping to share with you in my book is a bit of both; some mind-boggling facts along with some interesting theories about some of the mysteries of the universe.

      I had always wanted to write a book; it was going to be science fiction though, about a large, ark-type spacecraft drifting through space and its encounters with black holes and neutron stars, discovering planets where life was just starting out or planets where life was barely hanging on.

      So, what changed?

      Well, to be honest, I don’t really know. I think, as I began to read more and more science books, I realised that the universe we live in is a much more strange and incredible place than anything I ever could have imagined.

      As I am sure you can imagine it wasn’t always straightforward and more than once I had all but given up. Luckily there were times that spurred me on to write or jolted me back to the unfinished manuscript. Whilst I was away abroad with some friends I found myself sitting on the terrace of a bar while the sun was setting. We were all a little transfixed by the beautiful scene. I noticed a few of my group were very red in the face. They had been careless, spending time out of the shade without adequate protection from the colossal 864,000-mile-wide nuclear reactor we now found ourselves staring at.

      The sun was magnificent that evening, an immense, deep-singed, orange semi sphere, balancing, half submerged on the Mediterranean horizon.

      I casually asked one of my friends how far away he thought the sun might be. He looked uncomfortable at first, then after a few seconds blurted out, Ten thousand miles.

      I smiled thinking he was joking. He wasn’t.

      I was staggered. Upon more questions, like Do you know how far away the moon is? or Do you know what gravity is?, he seemed to become hot and agitated and eventually, after pulling some strange faces, jumped up from his seat and walked off, leaving his drink unfinished!

      I was still quite shocked; this friend wasn’t stupid, in fact he had the better education of the two of us and was a very successful businessman. Somehow, though, he had very limited knowledge of the world around him and clearly didn’t want to appear ignorant about it.

      I began to realise this was quite a common thing. People were happy to go about their daily routines without knowing about the really big stuff, the really interesting stuff, the stuff that explains our very existence and ultimately our fate, not just as a species but as a planet, as a solar system. Space isn’t somewhere else, a place beyond human boundaries or comprehension, space is all around us. Travel upwards for a hundred miles and you’re there. You would travel further for a holiday abroad.

      At an early age, the solar system had caught my attention. I became kind of hooked on the planets and their movements around the sun. I began to get an understanding of gravity and planetary orbits.

      Which is all rather strange really, as I wasn’t particularly good at maths, or anything else, come to think of it.

      I struggled to get dirty washing into the laundry bin or remember things on a shopping errand, even if I was handed a list. I was a poor student, easily distracted by a runaway imagination. I found myself constantly in trouble, much to my parents’ despair!

      Growing up, I was lucky to have a good library though. Here, I spent days looking through all the science books I could find. On bright, summer days, the light of the sun would illuminate a little corner of the quiet room through an arched window, and I would sit for hours on a rather unstable, wonky wooden chair reading, fascinated. On winter days, it was a haven from the cold and an excuse to get stuck into even more books.

      The problem I had, though, was that I struggled to understand most of them; a great deal of them were, well, just beyond me. Take a look at the paragraph below from Neil deGrasse Tyson about the universe, a trillionth of a second from its conception, and you might see what I mean:

      All the while, the interplay of matter in the form of subatomic particles, and energy in the form of photons (massless vessels of light energy that are as much waves as they are particles) was incessant.

      I really wanted to know what these words meant. These science books I was attempting to read were written for people who must have had a much greater understanding than me. I wanted to read a book that would explain these things without having to have a degree in chemistry or astrophysics.

      There must be a book, a kind of Rosetta Stone for space science, so everybody could enjoy the wonders of space, the planets and the universe.

      There was no book, or maybe there was, just not in my little library though. This was, of course, well before the time of Amazon or the internet.

      So, after a while I realised, I was going to have to start at the very basics and teach myself from there. And that’s how it started, with atoms, I mean.

      If I was going to be able to understand the big stuff, I was going to have to understand the very little stuff first. I needed to understand light and chemicals and elements. I was going to have to find out what an atom was and where I could find one. I became curious about what elements made up these enormous bodies in space that I had become so captivated with.

      The more I read, the more I needed to know. The problem was an answer to one question almost always opened up more questions.

      I would look at pictures in books and it would seem like questions were falling from the pages.

      Why are all the planets nearly perfect spheres? Not most of them but all of them. Why aren’t they triangular or just totally irregular? What process could make that happen?

      How does our sun continue to shine for billions of years? Surely it would have used up all its fuel by now?

      Why is gravity so weak that we can leap into the air but strong enough to enable a moon, hundreds of thousands of miles away, to affect our oceans?

      How fast does the earth travel through the void of space?

      What is a black hole? And why is there a black hole?

      How did the universe begin?

      I am not an astronomer or a mathematician or even a writer, as it happens. I am just attempting to write a book to explain some of the mysteries, and amazing facts and theories, about the universe that I think people would like to know.

      Guys like Brian Cox and Bill Bryson have done a fantastic job of doing this, and I highly recommend reading their works.

      They have both been a real inspiration to me.

      However, I’m still surprised at the lack of knowledge a lot of people have when it comes to these subjects. Most people I asked couldn’t tell me the nearest or furthest planet from the sun, or how far away they are.

      I have learnt, through reading and studying, that science is amazing.

      We don’t feel the need now to sacrifice a small child when a volcano erupts or worship a bright light in the sky because we have no other explanation than a divine one.

      Science searches for the answers, for the truth.

      Science had a pretty tough time getting going though, but when it did, the leaps forward have been incredible. So, what held science back for so long?

      The great German physicist Max Planck once wrote:

      A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

      Basically, I believe he is saying scientists can be stubborn and closed to radical thinking, so new ideas can only prevail upon the death of the scientists who object to

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