cover news reporter Zhang Jie
Human beings have never stopped exploring and asking questions about the unknown world since ancient times. More than 2,300 years ago, the poet Qu Yuan once asked "Heavenly Question": At the beginning of the ancient times, who preached it? The upper and lower parts have no form, so how can we examine them? Between darkness and darkness, who can be the best? Feng Yiweixiang, how can he recognize it? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said that there are two things in the world that can shock people's hearts. One of them is the "vast and brilliant starry sky above our heads". Regarding major issues in astrophysics such as the origin of the universe and the starting point of life, it may be difficult for us to fully understand them from a physics perspective, but fortunately there are scientists who are willing to share their understandings with the public from the perspective of popular science, helping the public to understand better and become more curious about astrophysics and the universe.
John Gribbin, born in England in 1946, received a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1971. He is not only an astrophysicist, but also an outstanding popular science writer. He is the winner of the "Lifetime Achievement Award" of the British Science Writers Association. He is good at conveying complex ideas in concise language and has written nearly a hundred scientific works, including best-sellers such as " Searching for Schrödinger's Cat" and " Profound Simplicity". This book "Wonderful: The Mystery of the Moon, the Beginning of the Universe and the Beginning of Life" is one of the popular science books he wrote. In the book, Gribbin focuses on eight incredible astrophysics wonders: the mystery of the moon, the starting point of the universe, the development trend of the universe, and the common ancestor of complex life on earth... He uses easy-to-understand language and condenses profound scientific knowledge into a short length. It is easy and interesting to read, but it contains an amazing amount of information. It is rigorous and lively.
In this popular science book, John Gribbin draws our attention to some seemingly impossible, yet stunning astrophysical wonders. For example: "Only when the sun and the moon in the sky look as big as each other, can the creatures on the earth see the spectacle of a total solar eclipse. This wonderful coincidence happened no sooner or later than the moment human civilization appeared." "The water rotates in the bucket and rises along the wall of the bucket, forming a concave liquid surface, because it 'feels' the gravitational pull of everything in the distant galaxy and universe." and so on.
Science is a science of exploring the unknown. When the news that a certain scientific theory has been overturned suddenly makes the headlines of major newspapers and becomes another "Waterloo" in the scientific world in the eyes of the public, friends who are not scientists will occasionally cast sympathetic glances at John Gribbin. In the preface "The End of Knowledge", John Gribbin revealed that when scientists discovered that the expansion of the universe was actually accelerating, the existing Big Bang model was too simple and needed to be revised. After hearing the news, his friend once felt sorry for me: "You must be sad that such a beautiful theory is wrong, right?" John Gribbin's answer was, "Absolutely not! When new evidence emerges, suggesting that we may need to use new theories to explain the world, excellent scientists are too late to be happy, so how can they be sad? It is those who are constantly New ideas constitute the lifeblood of science. If all theories were perfect and accurately explained the world (I mean the entire universe, not just the earth), then scientists would have nothing to do and could retire. "
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