One of the most important theoretical physicists at CERN in Geneva returns by train from a conference, his eyes fixed on a dense article on quantum cosmology. Suddenly, a little girl’s voice interrupts his reflections. “What are you reading?” «It’s the story of the universe.» “If it tells the whole story of the universe, is it also about me?” The book you hold in your hands begins from this question, and from the urgency to explain – combining the precision of the scientist with the never banal nor hermetic register of the popularizer – the history of the cosmos and the theories that describe it.
A journey through the evolution of the universe, which pushes itself to the current limits of the possibilities of human knowledge, winding between general relativity and the cosmological constant, quantum mechanics and non-Euclidean geometries, spaces with positive and negative curvature, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and multiverse…
Gian Francesco Giudice manages to unite science, history of science and history of thought, retracing the debate that animated a community of physicists and astronomers faced with the hypothesis and then the confirmation of the Big Bang: not the “Beginning of Everything” , the hypothesized event at the origin of space-time to which this expression is often connected, but the now established physical phenomenon that marks the advent of the cosmos describable by known physical laws.
From the most heated diatribes to the first empirical confirmations of the Big Bang, this book traces the discoveries of great thinkers and scientists to lead us to the frontiers of current scientific research. A fascinating and stimulating parable, which addresses complex concepts with the fluidity of the story and allows us to better understand the universe around us.