Synopsis "A Perspective on Life: The big Questions Addressed (in English)"
Science today is perceived by most readers as either incomprehensible with the use of so many specialized words or by the employment of baffling math that doesn’t make much sense. And to further escalate this plight, a strong movement has now arisen among those who claim to be “science deniers.” The public must be able to grasp the basics of science to participate and engage in informed decisions that today are facing the US and, indeed, the entire world.I am a physicist. I have written a new book written using understandable explanations of the fundamental thinking describing principles of different fields of science and of the deliberations of the great scientists in those fields as they developed their theories. The book is written in an informal and readable format offering an imagined dialogue between the reader and the author. It explains the overall rationale of some great thinkers without using math or technical jargon. Also incorporated are many images and sketches plus major events in the lives of some famous scientists. The book is divided into five divisions with extracts from each, below. Where the Hell Are We?from When the Hell Are We?What the Hell Are We?Who the Hell Are We?Why the Hell Are We?Following are some expressions of the contents of each division: Where? In the 1600’s Galileo in Italy used one of the very first telescopes to observe the moons of Jupiter orbiting that planet. That discovery questioned the widely held belief of the times that all the heavens revolved around the earth and our world was the center of it. It turned out that that centuries old belief couldn’t be more wrong.By the early days of the 20th century astronomy had greatly advanced to the point where it was known that the earth resided in a galaxy called the Milky Way Galaxy. And the Milky Way Galaxy composed all there was – it was entire universe out there. But Edwin Hubble extended the size of our universe by enormous magnitudes. He found that the universe was composed of an almost unfathomable number of galaxies. The earth, it seems, is just an insignificant speck in that universe, except to us, of course, because that’s where we all live. The advancements in scientific knowledge led to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in 1915 shortly followed by the development of Quantum Mechanics, a description of the atomic world - a world of probability. That small world somehow becomes the solid stable macro world, our world. How this expansion occurs from the probability of the atomic world to our firm, everyday realm remains a mystery, even today. from When?Hubble made another great discovery. He found that all the galaxies in the universe are moving away from each other much as dots painted on an expanding balloon move away from each other. This suggests that the entire universe must have expanded from a past moment when it was all together. This moment is now known as the Big Bang. Further cosmological advances showed the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago. What?Every cell in the body contains a macro molecule, DNA. The actual shape of the DNA macro molecule was discovered to be a ladder-like structure twisted into a helix. DNA houses all the instructions needed to build proteins which are the workhorses of the body and it also contains heredity information. Who?About 50,000 years ago a small group of humans living in Africa left that continent. They were hunter-gatherers who populated the entire earth over the next 35,000 years. Everyone alive today, except the few who remained in Africa those eons ago, is related to those early pioneers. Why?Almost unfathomable eons of time have passed since the birth of the earth. The integration of all the elements needed for life thus had time to evolve. It was all there. And thus, so are we. Now scientific progress continues to accelerate which foreshadows a life for our posterity that today is unimaginable.
