Big History Concepts – Threshold 1

Claim Testers

1. Intuition
2. Authority
3. Logic
4. Evidence

Before one second of the Big Bang had elapsed the four fundamental forces that govern matter had
come into being:

1. gravitational force
2. electromagnetic force
3. strong nuclear force
4. weak nuclear force

These four forces work in perfect balance to allow the universe to exist and expand at a sustainable
rate.

If the gravitational force were a tiny bit stronger, all matter would likely implode in on itself. If
gravity were slightly weaker, stars could not form.

If the temperature of the universe had dropped more slowly, the protons and neutrons might not
have stopped at helium and lithium but continued to bond until they formed iron, too heavy to form
galaxies and stars.

Hubble’s Discoveries

 Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), an American astronomer, announced in 1924 that the universe
consisted not just of one galaxy but of many.

 Within a few years, Hubble’s work led him to an insight that was even more revolutionary, and
much more profound. In the late 1920s, he found that most distant galaxies seemed to be
moving away from us. Indeed, the farther away they were, the faster they seemed to be moving
away from our galaxy. We now know that the most distant observable galaxies are moving away
from us at more than 90 percent of the speed of light. Star spectra can tell us whether a star is
moving toward or away from us, and at what speed. The principle here is that of the Doppler
effect—the phenomenon that makes an ambulance siren seem to drop in pitch as it passes by
us. If a moving object (such as an ambulance) emits energy in waves (such as sound waves),
those waves appear to be squashed up if the object is moving toward us, and stretched out if it
is moving away from us
'Red shift' is a key concept for astronomers. The term can be understood literally - the wavelength
of the light is stretched, so the light is seen as 'shifted' towards the red part of the spectrum.

 Hubble also showed that by measuring the rate of expansion, scientists should be able to
estimate how long the universe has been expanding. This was an astonishing conclusion, for it
seemed to imply something totally unexpected. Hubble had found a way of measuring the age
of the universe!

CMB

 The Ukrainian-American physicist George Gamow was the first to realize that, because
the universe is all there is, the huge heat from a hot Big Bang could not dissipate in the same
way as the heat from a regular explosion and therefore it must still be around today. Because
the Big Bang effectively happened everywhere simultaneously, that energy should be equally
spread as cosmic microwave background radiation (or CMB for short) throughout the universe.
In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two young employees of Bell Telephone Laboratories
in New Jersey, discovered, although totally by accident, exactly that. The mysterious microwave
static they picked up on their microwave antenna seemed to be coming equally from every
direction in the sky. Eventually they realized that this microwave radiation must indeed be the
“afterglow” of the Big Bang. Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for
their discovery. Examining the CMB also gives astronomers clues as to the composition of the
universe. Researchers think most of the cosmos is made up of matter and energy that cannot be
"sensed" with conventional instruments, leading to the names dark matter and dark energy.
Only 5 percent of the universe is made up of matter such as planets, stars and galaxies.

 Albert Einstein suggested that the universe, like a pin standing on its end, had to fall to one side
or the other. It had to be either expanding or contracting; a perfectly balanced universe was
very unlikely. Einstein himself resisted this conclusion. But in what Einstein later described as
the greatest error of his life, he altered his theory by proposing the existence of a force he called
the “cosmological constant,” in order to preserve the idea of a stable universe. This force he
imagined as a sort of antigravity, which could counterbalance gravity and thus prevent the
universe from collapsing in on itself.

Laws

 The law of conservation of angular momentum states that when no external torque acts on an
object, no change of angular momentum will occur.

 First Law (the Law of Conservation of Energy): matter and energy cannot be created or
destroyed.

 The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of any isolated system always
increases.
 Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium—the state of maximum
entropy of the system. More simply put: the entropy of the universe (the ultimate isolated
system) only increases and never decreases.

 A simple way to think of the second law of thermodynamics is that a room, if not cleaned and
tidied, will invariably become more messy and disorderly with time – regardless of how careful
one is to keep it clean. When the room is cleaned, its entropy decreases, but the effort to clean
it has resulted in an increase in entropy outside the room that exceeds the entropy lost.