THE BIRTH OF QUANTUM PHYSICS

This book presents a non-mathematical look at what we know of our universe thanks to Quantum Physics. These are facts and findings learned over more of a century of investigations, as well as some questions for which we still have no answers: Why does light bend under gravity pull? Did the big bang create matter and energy but also space and time? People die, planets erode, stars explode, and even black holes evaporate, but... Will the Universe live forever? There are about a hundred billion galaxies in the observable Universe, each containing tens of billions of stars. Is it all uninhabited? If life were to happen on one planet out of every trillion, the number of life-bearing planets in the Universe should be in the order of one billion. Dark energy is a catchy name, but we don't know what it is, although it accounts for 70% of the Universe. The rest is Dark matter, which we do not know what it is either. It is invisible but reveals its presence by its gravitational influence. Scientists feel it may consists of subatomic particles that are very different from the matter we see around us. We know the amount of matter in the universe is more than 30 times what we see with telescopes. Surprisingly, the galaxy LEDA 074886, roughly 70 million light-years away from earth, is shaped like a rectangle. Could the entire universe collapse into a singular point-a mirror reverse image of the Big Bang, that we could call the Big Crunch. There are many fascinating -resolved and unresolved- issues in this book that our young generations will have to understand and settle.