ABOUT THE AUTHOR

All the topics below have been taken from the book " The brief history of time ", which was written by Sir Stephen Hawking.



Stephen Hawking, who was born in 1942 on the anniversary of Galileo’s death, holds Isaac Newton’s chair as
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Widely regarded as the most brilliant
theoretical physicist since Einstein, he is also the author of Black Holes and Baby Universes, published in 1993,
as well as numerous scientific papers and books.

OUR PICTURE OF THE UNIVERSE

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He
described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast
collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and
said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very
clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do
we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the
universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before
then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time? Recent breakthroughs
in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these
longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun – or
perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell.
As long ago as 340 BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book On the Heavens, was able to put forward
two good arguments for believing that the earth was a round sphere rather than a Hat plate. First, he realized
that eclipses of the moon were caused by the earth coming between the sun and the moon. The earth’s
shadow on the moon was always round, which would be true only if the earth was spherical. If the earth had
been a flat disk, the shadow would have been elongated and elliptical, unless the eclipse always occurred at a
time when the sun was directly under the center of the disk. Second, the Greeks knew from their travels that
the North Star appeared lower in the sky when viewed in the south than it did in more northerly regions. (Since
the North Star lies over the North Pole, it appears to be directly above an observer at the North Pole, but to
someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon. From the difference in the apparent
position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate that the distance around the
earth was 400,000 stadia. It is not known exactly what length a stadium was, but it may have been about 200
yards, which would make Aristotle’s estimate about twice the currently accepted figure. The Greeks even had a
third argument that the earth must be round, for why else does one first see the sails of a ship coming over the
horizon, and only later see the hull?
Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in
circular orbits about the earth. He believed this because he felt, for mystical reasons, that the earth was the
center of the universe, and that circular motion was the most perfect. This idea was elaborated by Ptolemy in
the second century AD into a complete cosmological model. The earth stood at the center, surrounded by eight
spheres that carried the moon, the sun, the stars, and the five planets known at the time, Mercury, Venus,
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.



The planets themselves moved on smaller circles attached to their respective spheres in order to account for
their rather complicated observed paths in the sky. The outermost sphere carried the so-called fixed stars,
which always stay in the same positions relative to each other but which rotate together across the sky. What
lay beyond the last sphere was never made very clear, but it certainly was not part of mankind’s observable
universe.
Ptolemy’s model provided a reasonably accurate system for predicting the positions of heavenly bodies in the
sky. But in order to predict these positions correctly, Ptolemy had to make an assumption that the moon
followed a path that sometimes brought it twice as close to the earth as at other times. And that meant that the
moon ought sometimes to appear twice as big as at other times! Ptolemy recognized this flaw, but nevertheless
his model was generally, although not universally, accepted. It was adopted by the Christian church as the
picture of the universe that was in accordance with Scripture, for it had the great advantage that it left lots of
room outside the sphere of fixed stars for heaven and hell.
A simpler model, however, was proposed in 1514 by a Polish priest, Nicholas Copernicus. (At first, perhaps for
fear of being branded a heretic by his church, Copernicus circulated his model anonymously.) His idea was that
the sun was stationary at the center and that the earth and the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun.
Nearly a century passed before this idea was taken seriously. Then two astronomers – the German, Johannes Kepler, and the Italian, Galileo Galilei – started publicly to support the Copernican theory, despite the fact that
the orbits it predicted did not quite match the ones observed. The death blow to the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic
theory came in 1609. In that year, Galileo started observing the night sky with a telescope, which had just been
invented. When he looked at the planet Jupiter, Galileo found that it was accompanied by several small
satellites or moons that orbited around it. This implied that everything did not have to orbit directly around the
earth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had thought. (It was, of course, still possible to believe that the earth was
stationary at the center of the universe and that the moons of Jupiter moved on extremely complicated paths
around the earth, giving the appearance that they orbited Jupiter. However, Copernicus’s theory was much
simpler.) At the same time, Johannes Kepler had modified Copernicus’s theory, suggesting that the planets
moved not in circles but in ellipses (an ellipse is an elongated circle). The predictions now finally matched the
observations.
As far as Kepler was concerned, elliptical orbits were merely an ad hoc hypothesis, and a rather repugnant one
at that, because ellipses were clearly less perfect than circles. Having discovered almost by accident that
elliptical orbits fit the observations well, he could not reconcile them with his idea that the planets were made to
orbit the sun by magnetic forces. An explanation was provided only much later, in 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton
published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most important single work ever
published in the physical sciences. In it Newton not only put forward a theory of how bodies move in space and
time, but he also developed the complicated mathematics needed to analyze those motions. In addition,
Newton postulated a law of universal gravitation according to which each body in the universe was attracted
toward every other body by a force that was stronger the more massive the bodies and the closer they were to
each other. It was this same force that caused objects to fall to the ground. (The story that Newton was inspired
by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of
gravity came to him as he sat “in a contemplative mood” and “was occasioned by the fall of an apple.”) Newton
went on to show that, according to his law, gravity causes the moon to move in an elliptical orbit around the
earth and causes the earth and the planets to follow elliptical paths around the sun.
The Copernican model got rid of Ptolemy’s celestial spheres, and with them, the idea that the universe had a
natural boundary. Since “fixed stars” did not appear to change their positions apart from a rotation across the
sky caused by the earth spinning on its axis, it became natural to suppose that the fixed stars were objects like
our sun but very much farther away.
Newton realized that, according to his theory of gravity, the stars should attract each other, so it seemed they
could not remain essentially motionless. Would they not all fall together at some point? In a letter in 1691 to
Richard Bentley, another leading thinker of his day, Newton argued that this would indeed happen if there were
only a finite number of stars distributed over a finite region of space. But he reasoned that if, on the other hand,
there were an infinite number of stars, distributed more or less uniformly over infinite space, this would not
happen, because there would not be any central point for them to fall to.
This argument is an instance of the pitfalls that you can encounter in talking about infinity. In an infinite
universe, every point can be regarded as the center, because every point has an infinite number of stars on
each side of it. The correct approach, it was realized only much later, is to consider the finite situation, in which
the stars all fall in on each other, and then to ask how things change if one adds more stars roughly uniformly
distributed outside this region. According to Newton’s law, the extra stars would make no difference at all to the
original ones on average, so the stars would fall in just as fast. We can add as many stars as we like, but they
will still always collapse in on themselves. We now know it is impossible to have an infinite static model of the
universe in which gravity is always attractive.
It is an interesting reflection on the general climate of thought before the twentieth century that no one had
suggested that the universe was expanding or contracting. It was generally accepted that either the universe
had existed forever in an unchanging state, or that it had been created at a finite time in the past more or less
as we observe it today. In part this may have been due to people’s tendency to believe in eternal truths, as well
as the comfort they found in the thought that even though they may grow old and die, the universe is eternal
and unchanging.
Even those who realized that Newton’s theory of gravity showed that the universe could not be static did not
think to suggest that it might be expanding. Instead, they attempted to modify the theory by making the gravitational force repulsive at very large distances. This did not significantly affect their predictions of the
motions of the planets, but it allowed an infinite distribution of stars to remain in equilibrium – with the attractive
forces between nearby stars balanced by the repulsive forces from those that were farther away. However, we
now believe such an equilibrium would be unstable: if the stars in some region got only slightly nearer each
other, the attractive forces between them would become stronger and dominate over the repulsive forces so
that the stars would continue to fall toward each other. On the other hand, if the stars got a bit farther away
from each other, the repulsive forces would dominate and drive them farther apart.
Another objection to an infinite static universe is normally ascribed to the German philosopher Heinrich Olbers,
who wrote about this theory in 1823. In fact, various contemporaries of Newton had raised the problem, and the
Olbers article was not even the first to contain plausible arguments against it. It was, however, the first to be
widely noted. The difficulty is that in an infinite static universe nearly every line of sight would end on the
surface of a star. Thus one would expect that the whole sky would be as bright as the sun, even at night.
Olbers’ counter-argument was that the light from distant stars would be dimmed by absorption by intervening
matter. However, if that happened the intervening matter would eventually heat up until it glowed as brightly as
the stars. The only way of avoiding the conclusion that the whole of the night sky should be as bright as the
surface of the sun would be to assume that the stars had not been shining forever but had turned on at some
finite time in the past. In that case the absorbing matter might not have heated up yet or the light from distant
stars might not yet have reached us. And that brings us to the question of what could have caused the stars to
have turned on in the first place.
The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed long before this. According to a number of early
cosmologies and the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, and not very distant,
time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have “First Cause”
to explain the existence of the universe. (Within the universe, you always explained one event as being caused
by some earlier event, but the existence of the universe itself could be explained in this way only if it had some
beginning.) Another argument was put forward by St. Augustine in his book The City of God. He pointed out
that civilization is progressing and we remember who performed this deed or developed that technique. Thus
man, and so also perhaps the universe, could not have been around all that long. St. Augustine accepted a
date of about 5000 BC for the Creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (It is interesting that
this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC, which is when archaeologists tell us that
civilization really began.)
Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation
because it smacked too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the
world around it had existed, and would exist, forever. The ancients had already considered the argument about
progress described above, and answered it by saying that there had been periodic floods or other disasters that
repeatedly set the human race right back to the beginning of civilization.
The questions of whether the universe had a beginning in time and whether it is limited in space were later
extensively examined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his monumental (and very obscure) work Critique of
Pure Reason, published in 1781. He called these questions antinomies (that is, contradictions) of pure reason
because he felt that there were equally compelling arguments for believing the thesis, that the universe had a
beginning, and the antithesis, that it had existed forever. His argument for the thesis was that if the universe did
not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd.
The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of
time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis
and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time
continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever. As we shall see, the concept of time
has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked:
“What did God do before he created the universe?” Augustine didn’t reply: “He was preparing Hell for people
who asked such questions.” Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and
that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.
When most people believed in an essentially static and unchanging universe, the question of whether or not it
had a beginning was really one of metaphysics or theology. One could account for what was observed equally
well on the theory that the universe had existed forever or on the theory that it was set in motion at some finite time in such a manner as to look as though it had existed forever. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the
landmark observation that wherever you look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us. In other words,
the universe is expanding. This means that at earlier times objects would have been closer together. In fact, it
seemed that there was a time, about ten or twenty thousand million years ago, when they were all at exactly
the same place and when, therefore, the density of the universe was infinite. This discovery finally brought the
question of the beginning of the universe into the realm of science.
Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was
infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability
to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect
what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational
consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply
would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had
been considered previously. In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be
imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necessity for a beginning. One can imagine
that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding,
there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still imagine that God created the
universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there
had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An
expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his
job!
In order to talk about the nature of the universe and to discuss questions such as whether it has a beginning or
an end, you have to be clear about what a scientific theory is. I shall take the simpleminded view that a theory
is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to
observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might
mean). A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of
observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite
predictions about the results of future observations. For example, Aristotle believed Empedocles’s theory that
everything was made out of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. This was simple enough, but did not make
any definite predictions. On the other hand, Newton’s theory of gravity was based on an even simpler model, in
which bodies attracted each other with a force that was proportional to a quantity called their mass and
inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Yet it predicts the motions of the sun, the
moon, and the planets to a high degree of accuracy.
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No
matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next
time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a
single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has
emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in
principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the
predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to
disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.
At least that is what is supposed to happen, but you can always question the competence of the person who
carried out the observation.
In practice, what often happens is that a new theory is devised that is really an extension of the previous theory.
For example, very accurate observations of the planet Mercury revealed a small difference between its motion
and the predictions of Newton’s theory of gravity. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted a slightly
different motion from Newton’s theory. The fact that Einstein’s predictions matched what was seen, while
Newton’s did not, was one of the crucial confirmations of the new theory. However, we still use Newton’s theory
for all practical purposes because the difference between its predictions and those of general relativity is very
small in the situations that we normally deal with. (Newton’s theory also has the great advantage that it is much
simpler to work with than Einstein’s!)
The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe. However, the approach most scientists actually follow is to separate the problem into two parts. First, there are the laws that
tell us how the universe changes with time. (If we know what the universe is like at any one time, these physical
laws tell us how it will look at any later time.) Second, there is the question of the initial state of the universe.
Some people feel that science should be concerned with only the first part; they regard the question of the
initial situation as a matter for metaphysics or religion. They would say that God, being omnipotent, could have
started the universe off any way he wanted. That may be so, but in that case he also could have made it
develop in a completely arbitrary way. Yet it appears that he chose to make it evolve in a very regular way
according to certain laws. It therefore seems equally reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing
the initial state.
It turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go. Instead, we break the
problem up into bits and invent a number of partial theories. Each of these partial theories describes and
predicts a certain limited class of observations, neglecting the effects of other quantities, or representing them
by simple sets of numbers. It may be that this approach is completely wrong. If everything in the universe
depends on everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by
investigating parts of the problem in isolation. Nevertheless, it is certainly the way that we have made progress
in the past. The classic example again is the Newtonian theory of gravity, which tells us that the gravitational
force between two bodies depends only on one number associated with each body, its mass, but is otherwise
independent of what the bodies are made of. Thus one does not need to have a theory of the structure and
constitution of the sun and the planets in order to calculate their orbits.
Today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories – the general theory of relativity
and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century. The
general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is,
the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million (1 with twenty-four
zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with
phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, however,
these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct. One of the
major endeavors in physics today, and the major theme of this book, is the search for a new theory that will
incorporate them both – a quantum theory of gravity. We do not yet have such a theory, and we may still be a
long way from having one, but we do already know many of the properties that it must have. And we shall see,
in later chapters, that we already know a fair amount about the predications a quantum theory of gravity must
make.
Now, if you believe that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to
combine the partial theories into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. But
there is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. The ideas about scientific
theories outlined above assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to
draw logical deductions from what we see.
In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose that we might progress ever closer toward the laws that govern
our universe. Yet if there really is a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions.
And so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we
come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong
conclusion.? Or no conclusion at all?
The only answer that I can give to this problem is based on Darwin’s principle of natural selection. The idea is
that in any population of self-reproducing organisms, there will be variations in the genetic material and
upbringing that different individuals have. These differences will mean that some individuals are better able
than others to draw the right conclusions about the world around them and to act accordingly. These individuals
will be more likely to survive and reproduce and so their pattern of behavior and thought will come to dominate.
It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a
survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all,
and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival.
However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that
natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not
lead us to the wrong conclusions. Because the partial theories that we already have are sufficient to make accurate predictions in all but the most
extreme situations, the search for the ultimate theory of the universe seems difficult to justify on practical
grounds. (It is worth noting, though, that similar arguments could have been used against both relativity and
quantum mechanics, and these theories have given us both nuclear energy and the microelectronics
revolution!) The discovery of a complete unified theory, therefore, may not aid the survival of our species. It
may not even affect our lifestyle. But ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see
events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the
world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity’s deepest desire for
knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete
description of the universe we live in.

SPACE AND TIME

Our present ideas about the motion of bodies date back to Galileo and Newton. Before them people believed
Aristotle, who said that the natural state of a body was to be at rest and that it moved only if driven by a force or
impulse. It followed that a heavy body should fall faster than a light one, because it would have a greater pull
toward the earth.
The Aristotelian tradition also held that one could work out all the laws that govern the universe by pure
thought: it was not necessary to check by observation. So no one until Galileo bothered to see whether bodies
of different weight did in fact fall at different speeds. It is said that Galileo demonstrated that Aristotle’s belief
was false by dropping weights from the leaning tower of Pisa. The story is almost certainly untrue, but Galileo
did do something equivalent: he rolled balls of different weights down a smooth slope. The situation is similar to
that of heavy bodies falling vertically, but it is easier to observe because the Speeds are smaller. Galileo’s
measurements indicated that each body increased its speed at the same rate, no matter what its weight. For
example, if you let go of a ball on a slope that drops by one meter for every ten meters you go along, the ball
will be traveling down the slope at a speed of about one meter per second after one second, two meters per
second after two seconds, and so on, however heavy the ball. Of course a lead weight would fall faster than a
feather, but that is only because a feather is slowed down by air resistance. If one drops two bodies that don’t
have much air resistance, such as two different lead weights, they fall at the same rate. On the moon, where
there is no air to slow things down, the astronaut David R. Scott performed the feather and lead weight
experiment and found that indeed they did hit the ground at the same time.
Galileo’s measurements were used by Newton as the basis of his laws of motion. In Galileo’s experiments, as a
body rolled down the slope it was always acted on by the same force (its weight), and the effect was to make it
constantly speed up. This showed that the real effect of a force is always to change the speed of a body, rather
than just to set it moving, as was previously thought. It also meant that whenever a body is not acted on by any
force, it will keep on moving in a straight line at the same speed. This idea was first stated explicitly in Newton’s
Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, and is known as Newton’s first law. What happens to a body when a
force does act on it is given by Newton’s second law. This states that the body will accelerate, or change its
speed, at a rate that is proportional to the force. (For example, the acceleration is twice as great if the force is
twice as great.) The acceleration is also smaller the greater the mass (or quantity of matter) of the body. (The
same force acting on a body of twice the mass will produce half the acceleration.) A familiar example is
provided by a car: the more powerful the engine, the greater the acceleration, but the heavier the car, the
smaller the acceleration for the same engine. In addition to his laws of motion, Newton discovered a law to
describe the force of gravity, which states that every body attracts every other body with a force that is
proportional to the mass of each body. Thus the force between two bodies would be twice as strong if one of
the bodies (say, body A) had its mass doubled. This is what you might expect because one could think of the
new body A as being made of two bodies with the original mass. Each would attract body B with the original
force. Thus the total force between A and B would be twice the original force. And if, say, one of the bodies had
twice the mass, and the other had three times the mass, then the force would be six times as strong. One can
now see why all bodies fall at the same rate: a body of twice the weight will have twice the force of gravity
pulling it down, but it will also have twice the mass. According to Newton’s second law, these two effects will
exactly cancel each other, so the acceleration will be the same in all cases.
Newton’s law of gravity also tells us that the farther apart the bodies, the smaller the force. Newton’s law of
gravity says that the gravitational attraction of a star is exactly one quarter that of a similar star at half the
distance. This law predicts the orbits of the earth, the moon, and the planets with great accuracy. If the law
were that the gravitational attraction of a star went down faster or increased more rapidly with distance, the
orbits of the planets would not be elliptical, they would either spiral in to the sun or escape from the sun.
The big difference between the ideas of Aristotle and those of Galileo and Newton is that Aristotle believed in a
preferred state of rest, which any body would take up if it were not driven by some force Or impulse. In
particular, he thought that the earth was at rest. But it follows from Newton’s laws that there is no unique standard of rest. One could equally well say that body A was at rest and body B was moving at constant speed
with respect to body A, or that body B was at rest and body A was moving. For example, if one sets aside for a
moment the rotation of the earth and its orbit round the sun, one could say that the earth was at rest and that a
train on it was traveling north at ninety miles per hour or that the train was at rest and the earth was moving
south at ninety miles per hour. If one carried out experiments with moving bodies on the train, all Newton’s laws
would still hold. For instance, playing Ping-Pong on the train, one would find that the ball obeyed Newton’s laws
just like a ball on a table by the track. So there is no way to tell whether it is the train or the earth that is moving.
The lack of an absolute standard of rest meant that one could not determine whether two events that took place
at different times occurred in the same position in space. For example, suppose our Ping-Pong ball on the train
bounces straight up and down, hitting the table twice on the same spot one second apart. To someone on the
track, the two bounces would seem to take place about forty meters apart, because the train would have
traveled that far down the track between the bounces. The nonexistence of absolute rest therefore meant that
one could not give an event an absolute position in space, as Aristotle had believed. The positions of events
and the distances between them would be different for a person on the train and one on the track, and there
would be no reason to prefer one person’s position to the other’s.
Newton was very worried by this lack of absolute position, or absolute space, as it was called, because it did
not accord with his idea of an absolute God. In fact, he refused to accept lack of absolute space, even though it
was implied by his laws. He was severely criticized for this irrational belief by many people, most notably by
Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher who believed that all material objects and space and time are an illusion. When
the famous Dr. Johnson was told of Berkeley’s opinion, he cried, “I refute it thus!” and stubbed his toe on a
large stone.
Both Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time. That is, they believed that one could unambiguously
measure the interval of time between two events, and that this time would be the same whoever measured it,
provided they used a good clock. Time was completely separate from and independent of space. This is what
most people would take to be the commonsense view. However, we have had to change our ideas about space
and time. Although our apparently commonsense notions work well when dealing with things like apples, or
planets that travel comparatively slowly, they don’t work at all for things moving at or near the speed of light.
The fact that light travels at a finite, but very high, speed was first discovered in 1676 by the Danish astronomer
Ole Christensen Roemer. He observed that the times at which the moons of Jupiter appeared to pass behind
Jupiter were not evenly spaced, as one would expect if the moons went round Jupiter at a constant rate. As the
earth and Jupiter orbit around the sun, the distance between them varies. Roemer noticed that eclipses of
Jupiter’s moons appeared later the farther we were from Jupiter. He argued that this was because the light from
the moons took longer to reach us when we were farther away. His measurements of the variations in the
distance of the earth from Jupiter were, however, not very accurate, and so his value for the speed of light was
140,000 miles per second, compared to the modern value of 186,000 miles per second. Nevertheless,
Roemer’s achievement, in not only proving that light travels at a finite speed, but also in measuring that speed,
was remarkable – coming as it did eleven years before Newton’s publication of Principia Mathematica. A proper
theory of the propagation of light didn’t come until 1865, when the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell
succeeded in unifying the partial theories that up to then had been used to describe the forces of electricity and
magnetism. Maxwell’s equations predicted that there could be wavelike disturbances in the combined
electromagnetic field, and that these would travel at a fixed speed, like ripples on a pond. If the wavelength of
these waves (the distance between one wave crest and the next) is a meter or more, they are what we now call
radio waves. Shorter wavelengths are known as microwaves (a few centimeters) or infrared (more than a
ten-thousandth of a centimeter). Visible light has a wavelength of between only forty and eighty millionths of a
centimeter. Even shorter wavelengths are known as ultraviolet, X rays, and gamma rays.
Maxwell’s theory predicted that radio or light waves should travel at a certain fixed speed. But Newton’s theory
had got rid of the idea of absolute rest, so if light was supposed to travel at a fixed speed, one would have to
say what that fixed speed was to be measured relative to.
It was therefore suggested that there was a substance called the "ether" that was present everywhere, even in
"empty" space. Light waves should travel through the ether as sound waves travel through air, and their speed
should therefore be relative to the ether. Different observers, moving relative to the ether, would see light coming toward them at different speeds, but light's speed relative to the ether would remain fixed. In particular,
as the earth was moving through the ether on its orbit round the sun, the speed of light measured in the
direction of the earth's motion through the ether (when we were moving toward the source of the light) should
be higher than the speed of light at right angles to that motion (when we are not moving toward the source). In
1887Albert Michelson (who later became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for physics) and Edward
Morley carried out a very careful experiment at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland. They
compared the speed of light in the direction of the earth's motion with that at right angles to the earth's motion.
To their great surprise, they found they were exactly the same!
Between 1887 and 1905 there were several attempts, most notably by the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, to
explain the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment in terms of objects contracting and clocks slowing down
when they moved through the ether. However, in a famous paper in 1905, a hitherto unknown clerk in the
Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein, pointed out that the whole idea of an ether was unnecessary, providing one
was willing to abandon the idea of absolute time. A similar point was made a few weeks later by a leading
French mathematician, Henri Poincare. Einstein’s arguments were closer to physics than those of Poincare,
who regarded this problem as mathematical. Einstein is usually given the credit for the new theory, but
Poincare is remembered by having his name attached to an important part of it.
The fundamental postulate of the theory of relativity, as it was called, was that the laws of science should be
the same for all freely moving observers, no matter what their speed. This was true for Newton’s laws of
motion, but now the idea was extended to include Maxwell’s theory and the speed of light: all observers should
measure the same speed of light, no matter how fast they are moving. This simple idea has some remarkable
consequences. Perhaps the best known are the equivalence of mass and energy, summed up in Einstein’s
famous equation E=mc2 (where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light), and the law that nothing
may travel faster than the speed of light. Because of the equivalence of energy and mass, the energy which an
object has due to its motion will add to its mass. In other words, it will make it harder to increase its speed. This
effect is only really significant for objects moving at speeds close to the speed of light. For example, at 10
percent of the speed of light an object’s mass is only 0.5 percent more than normal, while at 90 percent of the
speed of light it would be more than twice its normal mass. As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass
rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the
speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and
energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there. For this reason, any normal object is
forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light. Only light, or other waves that
have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light.
An equally remarkable consequence of relativity is the way it has revolutionized our ideas of space and time. In
Newton’s theory, if a pulse of light is sent from one place to another, different observers would agree on the
time that the journey took (since time is absolute), but will not always agree on how far the light traveled (since
space is not absolute). Since the speed of the light is just the distance it has traveled divided by the time it has
taken, different observers would measure different speeds for the light. In relativity, on the other hand, all
observers must agree on how fast light travels. They still, however, do not agree on the distance the light has
traveled, so they must therefore now also disagree over the time it has taken. (The time taken is the distance
the light has traveled – which the observers do not agree on – divided by the light’s speed – which they do
agree on.) In other words, the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time! It appeared that each
observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks
carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.
Each observer could use radar to say where and when an event took place by sending out a pulse of light or
radio waves. Part of the pulse is reflected back at the event and the observer measures the time at which he
receives the echo. The time of the event is then said to be the time halfway between when the pulse was sent
and the time when the reflection was received back: the distance of the event is half the time taken for this
round trip, multiplied by the speed of light. (An event, in this sense, is something that takes place at a single
point in space, at a specified point in time.) This idea is shown here, which is an example of a space-time
diagram...


Using this procedure, observers who are moving relative to each other will assign different times and positions
to the same event. No particular observer’s measurements are any more correct than any other observer’s, but
all the measurements are related. Any observer can work out precisely what time and position any other
observer will assign to an event, provided he knows the other observer’s relative velocity.
Nowadays we use just this method to measure distances precisely, because we can measure time more
accurately than length. In effect, the meter is defined to be the distance traveled by light in
0.000000003335640952 second, as measured by a cesium clock. (The reason for that particular number is that
it corresponds to the historical definition of the meter – in terms of two marks on a particular platinum bar kept
in Paris.) Equally, we can use a more convenient, new unit of length called a light-second. This is simply
defined as the distance that light travels in one second. In the theory of relativity, we now define distance in terms of time and the speed of light, so it follows automatically that every observer will measure light to have
the same speed (by definition, 1 meter per 0.000000003335640952 second). There is no need to introduce the
idea of an ether, whose presence anyway cannot be detected, as the Michelson-Morley experiment showed.
The theory of relativity does, however, force us to change fundamentally our ideas of space and time. We must
accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an
object called space-time.
It is a matter of common experience that one can describe the position of a point in space by three numbers, or
coordinates. For instance, one can say that a point in a room is seven feet from one wall, three feet from
another, and five feet above the floor. Or one could specify that a point was at a certain latitude and longitude
and a certain height above sea level. One is free to use any three suitable coordinates, although they have only
a limited range of validity. One would not specify the position of the moon in terms of miles north and miles
west of Piccadilly Circus and feet above sea level. Instead, one might describe it in terms of distance from the
sun, distance from the plane of the orbits of the planets, and the angle between the line joining the moon to the
sun and the line joining the sun to a nearby star such as Alpha Centauri. Even these coordinates would not be
of much use in describing the position of the sun in our galaxy or the position of our galaxy in the local group of
galaxies. In fact, one may describe the whole universe in terms of a collection of overlapping patches. In each
patch, one can use a different set of three coordinates to specify the position of a point.
An event is something that happens at a particular point in space and at a particular time. So one can specify it
by four numbers or coordinates. Again, the choice of coordinates is arbitrary; one can use any three
well-defined spatial coordinates and any measure of time. In relativity, there is no real distinction between the
space and time coordinates, just as there is no real difference between any two space coordinates. One could
choose a new set of coordinates in which, say, the first space coordinate was a combination of the old first and
second space coordinates. For instance, instead of measuring the position of a point on the earth in miles north
of Piccadilly and miles west of Piccadilly, one could use miles northeast of Piccadilly, and miles north-west of
Piccadilly. Similarly, in relativity, one could use a new time coordinate that was the old time (in seconds) plus
the distance (in light-seconds) north of Piccadilly.
It is often helpful to think of the four coordinates of an event as specifying its position in a four-dimensional
space called space-time. It is impossible to imagine a four-dimensional space. I personally find it hard enough
to visualize three-dimensional space! However, it is easy to draw diagrams of two-dimensional spaces, such as
the surface of the earth. (The surface of the earth is two-dimensional because the position of a point can be
specified by two coordinates, latitude and longitude.) I shall generally use diagrams in which time increases
upward and one of the spatial dimensions is shown horizontally. The other two spatial dimensions are ignored
or, sometimes, one of them is indicated by perspective. (These are called space-time diagrams, like Figure
2:1.)

For example, in Figure 2:2 time is measured upward in years and the distance along the line from the sun to
Alpha Centauri is measured horizontally in miles. The paths of the sun and of Alpha Centauri through
space-time are shown as the vertical lines on the left and right of the diagram. A ray of light from the sun
follows the diagonal line, and takes four years to get from the sun to Alpha Centauri.
As we have seen, Maxwell’s equations predicted that the speed of light should be the same whatever the
speed of the source, and this has been confirmed by accurate measurements. It follows from this that if a pulse
of light is emitted at a particular time at a particular point in space, then as time goes on it will spread out as a
sphere of light whose size and position are independent of the speed of the source. After one millionth of a
second the light will have spread out to form a sphere with a radius of 300 meters; after two millionths of a
second, the radius will be 600 meters; and so on. It will be like the ripples that spread out on the surface of a
pond when a stone is thrown in. The ripples spread out as a circle that gets bigger as time goes on. If one
stacks snapshots of the ripples at different times one above the other, the expanding circle of ripples will mark
out a cone whose tip is at the place and time at which the stone hit the water Figure 2:3.



Similarly, the light spreading out from an event forms a (three-dimensional) cone in (the four-dimensional)
space-time. This cone is called the future light cone of the event. In the same way we can draw another cone,
called the past light cone, which is the set of events from which a pulse of light is able to reach the given event
Figure 2:4.



Given an event P, one can divide the other events in the universe into three classes. Those events that can be
reached from the event P by a particle or wave traveling at or below the speed of light are said to be in the
future of P. They will lie within or on the expanding sphere of light emitted from the event P. Thus they will lie
within or on the future light cone of P in the space-time diagram. Only events in the future of P can be affected
by what happens at P because nothing can travel faster than light.
Similarly, the past of P can be defined as the set of all events from which it is possible to reach the event P
traveling at or below the speed of light. It is thus the set of events that can affect what happens at P. The
events that do not lie in the future or past of P are said to lie in the elsewhere of P Figure 2:5.

What happens at such events can neither affect nor be affected by what happens at P. For example, if the sun
were to cease to shine at this very moment, it would not affect things on earth at the present time because they
would be in the elsewhere of the event when the sun went out Figure 2:6.


We would know about it only after eight minutes, the time it takes light to reach us from the sun. Only then
would events on earth lie in the future light cone of the event at which the sun went out. Similarly, we do not
know what is happening at the moment farther away in the universe: the light that we see from distant galaxies
left them millions of years ago, and in the case of the most distant object that we have seen, the light left some
eight thousand million years ago. Thus, when we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past.
If one neglects gravitational effects, as Einstein and Poincare did in 1905, one has what is called the special
theory of relativity. For every event in space-time we may construct a light cone (the set of all possible paths of
light in space-time emitted at that event), and since the speed of light is the same at every event and in every
direction, all the light cones will be identical and will all point in the same direction. The theory also tells us that
nothing can travel faster than light. This means that the path of any object through space and time must be
represented by a line that lies within the light cone at each event on it (Fig. 2.7). The special theory of relativity
was very successful in explaining that the speed of light appears the same to all observers (as shown by the
Michelson-Morley experiment) and in describing what happens when things move at speeds close to the speed
of light. However, it was inconsistent with the Newtonian theory of gravity, which said that objects attracted
each other with a force that depended on the distance between them. This meant that if one moved one of the
objects, the force on the other one would change instantaneously. Or in other gravitational effects should travel
with infinite velocity, instead of at or below the speed of light, as the special theory of relativity required.
Einstein made a number of unsuccessful attempts between 1908 and 1914 to find a theory of gravity that was
consistent with special relativity. Finally, in 1915, he proposed what we now call the general theory of relativity.
Einstein made the revolutionary suggestion that gravity is not a force like other forces, but is a consequence of
the fact that space-time is not flat, as had been previously assumed: it is curved, or “warped,” by the distribution of mass and energy in it. Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity;
instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A
geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points. For example, the surface of the earth is a
two-dimensional curved space. A geodesic on the earth is called a great circle, and is the shortest route
between two points (Fig. 2.8). As the geodesic is the shortest path between any two airports, this is the route
an airline navigator will tell the pilot to fly along. In general relativity, bodies always follow straight lines in
four-dimensional space-time, but they nevertheless appear to us to move along curved paths in our
three-dimensional space. (This is rather like watching an airplane flying over hilly ground. Although it follows a
straight line in three-dimensional space, its shadow follows a curved path on the two-dimensional ground.)
The mass of the sun curves space-time in such a way that although the earth follows a straight path in
four-dimensional space-time, it appears to us to move along a circular orbit in three-dimensional space.
Fact, the orbits of the planets predicted by general relativity are almost exactly the same as those predicted by
the Newtonian theory of gravity. However, in the case of Mercury, which, being the nearest planet to the sun,
feels the strongest gravitational effects, and has a rather elongated orbit, general relativity predicts that the long
axis of the ellipse should rotate about the sun at a rate of about one degree in ten thousand years. Small
though this effect is, it had been noticed before 1915 and served as one of the first confirmations of Einstein’s
theory. In recent years the even smaller deviations of the orbits of the other planets from the Newtonian
predictions have been measured by radar and found to agree with the predictions of general relativity.
Light rays too must follow geodesics in space-time. Again, the fact that space is curved means that light no
longer appears to travel in straight lines in space. So general relativity predicts that light should be bent by
gravitational fields. For example, the theory predicts that the light cones of points near the sun would be slightly
bent inward, on account of the mass of the sun. This means that light from a distant star that happened to pass
near the sun would be deflected through a small angle, causing the star to appear in a different position to an
observer on the earth (Fig. 2.9). Of course, if the light from the star always passed close to the sun, we would
not be able to tell whether the light was being deflected or if instead the star was really where we see it.
However, as the earth orbits around the sun, different stars appear to pass behind the sun and have their light
deflected. They therefore change their apparent position relative to other stars. It is normally very difficult to see
this effect, because the light from the sun makes it impossible to observe stars that appear near to the sun the
sky. However, it is possible to do so during an eclipse of the sun, when the sun’s light is blocked out by the
moon. Einstein’s prediction of light deflection could not be tested immediately in 1915, because the First World
War was in progress, and it was not until 1919 that a British expedition, observing an eclipse from West Africa,
showed that light was indeed deflected by the sun, just as predicted by the theory. This proof of a German
theory by British scientists was hailed as a great act of reconciliation between the two countries after the war. It
is ionic, therefore, that later examination of the photographs taken on that expedition showed the errors were as
great as the effect they were trying to measure. Their measurement had been sheer luck, or a case of knowing
the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in science. The light deflection has, however, been
accurately confirmed by a number of later observations.
Another prediction of general relativity is that time should appear to slower near a massive body like the earth.
This is because there is a relation between the energy of light and its frequency (that is, the number of waves of
light per second): the greater the energy, the higher frequency. As light travels upward in the earth’s
gravitational field, it loses energy, and so its frequency goes down. (This means that the length of time between
one wave crest and the next goes up.) To someone high up, it would appear that everything down below was
making longer to happen. This prediction was tested in 1962, using a pair of very accurate clocks mounted at
the top and bottom of a water tower. The clock at the bottom, which was nearer the earth, was found to run
slower, in exact agreement with general relativity. The difference in the speed of clocks at different heights
above the earth is now of considerable practical importance, with the advent of very accurate navigation
systems based on signals from satellites. If one ignored the predictions of general relativity, the position that
one calculated would be wrong by several miles!
Newton’s laws of motion put an end to the idea of absolute position in space. The theory of relativity gets rid of
absolute time. Consider a pair of twins. Suppose that one twin goes to live on the top of a mountain while the
other stays at sea level. The first twin would age faster than the second. Thus, if they met again, one would be
older than the other. In this case, the difference in ages would be very small, but it would be much larger if one of the twins went for a long trip in a spaceship at nearly the speed of light. When he returned, he would be
much younger than the one who stayed on earth. This is known as the twins paradox, but it is a paradox only if
one has the idea of absolute time at the back of one’s mind. In the theory of relativity there is no unique
absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is
and how he is moving.
Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not
affected by what happened in it. This was true even of the special theory of relativity. Bodies moved, forces
attracted and repelled, but time and space simply continued, unaffected. It was natural to think that space and
time went on forever.
The situation, however, is quite different in the general theory of relativity. Space and time are now dynamic
quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time – and in turn the
structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect but
also are affected by everything that happens in the universe. Just as one cannot talk about events in the
universe without the notions of space and time, so in general relativity it became meaningless to talk about
space and time outside the limits of the universe.
In the following decades this new understanding of space and time was to revolutionize our view of the
universe. The old idea of an essentially unchanging universe that could have existed, and could continue to
exist, forever was replaced by the notion of a dynamic, expanding universe that seemed to have begun a finite
time ago, and that might end at a finite time in the future. That revolution forms the subject of the next chapter.
And years later, it was also to be the starting point for my work in theoretical physics. Roger Penrose and I
showed that Einstein’s general theory of relativity implied that the universe must have a beginning and,
possibly, an end.

THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE

If one looks at the sky on a clear, moonless night, the brightest objects one sees are likely to be the planets
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There will also be a very large number of stars, which are just like our own
sun but much farther from us. Some of these fixed stars do, in fact, appear to change very slightly their
positions relative to each other as earth orbits around the sun: they are not really fixed at all! This is because
they are comparatively near to us. As the earth goes round the sun, we see them from different positions
against the background of more distant stars. This is fortunate, because it enables us to measure directly the
distance of these stars from us: the nearer they are, the more they appear to move. The nearest star, called
Proxima Centauri, is found to be about four light-years away (the light from it takes about four years to reach
earth), or about twenty-three million million miles. Most of the other stars that are visible to the naked eye lie
within a few hundred light-years of us. Our sun, for comparison, is a mere light-minutes away! The visible stars
appear spread all over the night sky, but are particularly concentrated in one band, which we call the Milky
Way. As long ago as 1750, some astronomers were suggesting that the appearance of the Milky Way could be
explained if most of the visible stars lie in a single disklike configuration, one example of what we now call a
spiral galaxy. Only a few decades later, the astronomer Sir William Herschel confirmed this idea by
painstakingly cataloging the positions and distances of vast numbers of stars. Even so, the idea gained
complete acceptance only early this century.
Our modern picture of the universe dates back to only 1924, when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble
demonstrated that ours was not the only galaxy. There were in fact many others, with vast tracts of empty
space between them. In order to prove this, he needed to determine the distances to these other galaxies,
which are so far away that, unlike nearby stars, they really do appear fixed. Hubble was forced, therefore, to
use indirect methods to measure the distances. Now, the apparent brightness of a star depends on two factors:
how much light it radiates (its luminosity), and how far it is from us. For nearby stars, we can measure their
apparent brightness and their distance, and so we can work out their luminosity. Conversely, if we knew the
luminosity of stars in other galaxies, we could work out their distance by measuring their apparent brightness.
Hubble noted that certain types of stars always have the same luminosity when they are near enough for us to
measure; therefore, he argued, if we found such stars in another galaxy, we could assume that they had the
same luminosity – and so calculate the distance to that galaxy. If we could do this for a number of stars in the
same galaxy, and our calculations always gave the same distance, we could be fairly confident of our estimate.
In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is
only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself
containing some hundred thousand million stars. Figure 3:1 shows a picture of one spiral galaxy that is similar
to what we think ours must look like to someone living in another galaxy.



We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its
spiral arms orbit around its center about once every several hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary,
average-sized, yellow star, near the inner edge of one of the spiral arms. We have certainly come a long way
since Aristotle and Ptolemy, when thought that the earth was the center of the universe!
Stars are so far away that they appear to us to be just pinpoints of light. We cannot see their size or shape. So
how can we tell different types of stars apart? For the vast majority of stars, there is only one characteristic
feature that we can observe – the color of their light. Newton discovered that if light from the sun passes
through a triangular-shaped piece of glass, called a prism, it breaks up into its component colors (its spectrum)
as in a rainbow. By focusing a telescope on an individual star or galaxy, one can similarly observe the spectrum
of the light from that star or galaxy. Different stars have different spectra, but the relative brightness of the
different colors is always exactly what one would expect to find in the light emitted by an object that is glowing
red hot. (In fact, the light emitted by any opaque object that is glowing red hot has a characteristic spectrum
that depends only on its temperature – a thermal spectrum. This means that we can tell a star’s temperature
from the spectrum of its light.) Moreover, we find that certain very specific colors are missing from stars’
spectra, and these missing colors may vary from star to star. Since we know that each chemical element
absorbs a characteristic set of very specific colors, by matching these to those that are missing from a star’s
spectrum, we can determine exactly which elements are present in the star’s atmosphere.
In the 1920s, when astronomers began to look at the spectra of stars in other galaxies, they found something
most peculiar: there were the same characteristic sets of missing colors as for stars in our own galaxy, but they
were all shifted by the same relative amount toward the red end of the spectrum. To understand the
implications of this, we must first understand the Doppler effect. As we have seen, visible light consists of
fluctuations, or waves, in the electromagnetic field. The wavelength (or distance from one wave crest to the
next) of light is extremely small, ranging from four to seven ten-millionths of a meter. The different wavelengths
of light are what the human eye sees as different colors, with the longest wavelengths appearing at the red end
of the spectrum and the shortest wavelengths at the blue end. Now imagine a source of light at a constant
distance from us, such as a star, emitting waves of light at a constant wavelength. Obviously the wavelength of the waves we receive will be the same as the wavelength at which they are emitted (the gravitational field of the
galaxy will not be large enough to have a significant effect). Suppose now that the source starts moving toward
us. When the source emits the next wave crest it will be nearer to us, so the distance between wave crests will
be smaller than when the star was stationary. This means that the wavelength of the waves we receive is
shorter than when the star was stationary. Correspondingly, if the source is moving away from us, the
wavelength of the waves we receive will be longer. In the case of light, therefore, means that stars moving
away from us will have their spectra shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (red-shifted) and those moving
toward us will have their spectra blue-shifted. This relationship between wavelength and speed, which is called
the Doppler effect, is an everyday experience. Listen to a car passing on the road: as the car is approaching, its
engine sounds at a higher pitch (corresponding to a shorter wavelength and higher frequency of sound waves),
and when it passes and goes away, it sounds at a lower pitch. The behavior of light or radio waves is similar.
Indeed, the police make use of the Doppler effect to measure the speed of cars by measuring the wavelength
of pulses of radio waves reflected off them.
ln the years following his proof of the existence of other galaxies, Rubble spent his time cataloging their
distances and observing their spectra. At that time most people expected the galaxies to be moving around
quite randomly, and so expected to find as many blue-shifted spectra as red-shifted ones. It was quite a
surprise, therefore, to find that most galaxies appeared red-shifted: nearly all were moving away from us! More
surprising still was the finding that Hubble published in 1929: even the size of a galaxy’s red shift is not random,
but is directly proportional to the galaxy’s distance from us. Or, in other words, the farther a galaxy is, the faster
it is moving away! And that meant that the universe could not be static, as everyone previously had thought, is
in fact expanding; the distance between the different galaxies is changing all the time.
The discovery that the universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth
century. With hindsight, it is easy wonder why no one had thought of it before. Newton, and others should have
realized that a static universe would soon start to contract under the influence of gravity. But suppose instead
that the universe is expanding. If it was expanding fairly slowly, the force of gravity would cause it eventually to
stop expanding and then to start contracting. However, if it was expanding at more than a certain critical rate,
gravity would never be strong enough to stop it, and the universe would continue to expand forever. This is a bit
like what happens when one fires a rocket upward from the surface of the earth. If it has a fairly low speed,
gravity will eventually stop the rocket and it will start falling back. On the other hand, if the rocket has more than
a certain critical speed (about seven miles per second), gravity will not be strong enough to pull it back, so it will
keep going away from the earth forever. This behavior of the universe could have been predicted from
Newton’s theory of gravity at any time in the nineteenth, the eighteenth, or even the late seventeenth century.
Yet so strong was the belief in a static universe that it persisted into the early twentieth century. Even Einstein,
when he formulated the general theory of relativity in 1915, was so sure that the universe had to be static that
he modified his theory to make this possible, introducing a so-called cosmological constant into his equations.
Einstein introduced a new “antigravity” force, which, unlike other forces, did not come from any particular
source but was built into the very fabric of space-time. He claimed that space-time had an inbuilt tendency to
expand, and this could be made to balance exactly the attraction of all the matter in the universe, so that a
static universe would result. Only one man, it seems, was willing to take general relativity at face value, and
while Einstein and other physicists were looking for ways of avoiding general relativity’s prediction of a
nonstatic universe, the Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann instead set about explaining
it.
Friedmann made two very simple assumptions about the universe: that the universe looks identical in
whichever direction we look, and that this would also be true if we were observing the universe from anywhere
else. From these two ideas alone, Friedmann showed that we should not expect the universe to be static. In
fact, in 1922, several years before Edwin Hubble’s discovery, Friedmann predicted exactly what Hubble found!
The assumption that the universe looks the same in every direction is clearly not true in reality. For example, as
we have seen, the other stars in our galaxy form a distinct band of light across the night sky, called the Milky
Way. But if we look at distant galaxies, there seems to be more or less the same number of them. So the
universe does seem to be roughly the same in every direction, provided one views it on a large scale compared
to the distance between galaxies, and ignores the differences on small scales. For a long time, this was
sufficient justification for Friedmann’s assumption – as a rough approximation to the real universe. But more
recently a lucky accident uncovered the fact that Friedmann’s assumption is in fact a remarkably accurate description of our universe.
In 1965 two American physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson, were testing a very sensitive microwave detector. (Microwaves are just like light waves, but with a
wavelength of around a centimeter.) Penzias and Wilson were worried when they found that their detector was
picking up more noise than it ought to. The noise did not appear to be coming from any particular direction.
First they discovered bird droppings in their detector and checked for other possible malfunctions, but soon
ruled these out. They knew that any noise from within the atmosphere would be stronger when the detector
was not pointing straight up than when it was, because light rays travel through much more atmosphere when
received from near the horizon than when received from directly overhead. The extra noise was the same
whichever direction the detector was pointed, so it must come from outside the atmosphere. It was also the
same day and night and throughout the year, even though the earth was rotating on its axis and orbiting around
the sun. This showed that the radiation must come from beyond the Solar System, and even from beyond the
galaxy, as otherwise it would vary as the movement of earth pointed the detector in different directions.
In fact, we know that the radiation must have traveled to us across most of the observable universe, and since
it appears to be the same in different directions, the universe must also be the same in every direction, if only
on a large scale. We now know that whichever direction we look, this noise never varies by more than a tiny
fraction: so Penzias and Wilson had unwittingly stumbled across a remarkably accurate confirmation of
Friedmann’s first assumption. However, because the universe is not exactly the same in every direction, but
only on average on a large scale, the microwaves cannot be exactly the same in every direction either. There
have to be slight variations between different directions. These were first detected in 1992 by the Cosmic
Background Explorer satellite, or COBE, at a level of about one part in a hundred thousand. Small though these
variations are, they are very important, as will be explained in Chapter 8.
At roughly the same time as Penzias and Wilson were investigating noise in their detector, two American
physicists at nearby Princeton University, Bob Dicke and Jim Peebles, were also taking an interest in
microwaves. They were working on a suggestion, made by George Gamow (once a student of Alexander
Friedmann), that the early universe should have been very hot and dense, glowing white hot. Dicke and
Peebles argued that we should still be able to see the glow of the early universe, because light from very
distant parts of it would only just be reaching us now. However, the expansion of the universe meant that this
light should be so greatly red-shifted that it would appear to us now as microwave radiation. Dicke and Peebles
were preparing to look for this radiation when Penzias and Wilson heard about their work and realized that they
had already found it. For this, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 (which seems a bit
hard on Dicke and Peebles, not to mention Gamow!).
Now at first sight, all this evidence that the universe looks the same whichever direction we look in might seem
to suggest there is something special about our place in the universe. In particular, it might seem that if we
observe all other galaxies to be moving away from us, then we must be at the center of the universe. There is,
however, an alternate explanation: the universe might look the same in every direction as seen from any other
galaxy too. This, as we have seen, was Friedmann’s second assumption. We have no scientific evidence for, or
against, this assumption. We believe it only on grounds of modesty: it would be most remarkable if the universe
looked the same in every direction around us, but not around other points in the universe! In Friedmann’s
model, all the galaxies are moving directly away from each other. The situation is rather like a balloon with a
number of spots painted on it being steadily blown up. As the balloon expands, the distance between any two
spots increases, but there is no spot that can be said to be the center of the expansion. Moreover, the farther
apart the spots are, the faster they will be moving apart. Similarly, in Friedmann’s model the speed at which any
two galaxies are moving apart is proportional to the distance between them. So it predicted that the red shift of
a galaxy should be directly proportional to its distance from us, exactly as Hubble found. Despite the success of
his model and his prediction of Hubble’s observations, Friedmann’s work remained largely unknown in the West
until similar models were discovered in 1935 by the American physicist Howard Robertson and the British
mathematician Arthur Walker, in response to Hubble’s discovery of the uniform expansion of the universe.
Although Friedmann found only one, there are in fact three different kinds of models that obey Friedmann’s two
fundamental assumptions. In the first kind (which Friedmann found) the universe is expanding sufficiently
slowly that the gravitational attraction between the different galaxies causes the expansion to slow down and
eventually to stop. The galaxies then start to move toward each other and the universe contracts.


Figure 3:2 shows how the distance between two neighboring galaxies changes as time increases. It starts at
zero, increases to a maximum, and then decreases to zero again. In the second kind of solution, the universe is
expanding so rapidly that the gravitational attraction can never stop it, though it does slow it down a bit.


Figure 3:3 Shows the Separation between neighboring galaxies in this model. It starts at zero and eventually
the galaxies are moving apart at a steady speed. Finally, there is a third kind of solution, in which the universe
is expanding only just fast enough to avoid recollapse.

In this case the separation, shown in Figure 3:4, also starts at zero and increases forever. However, the speed
at which the galaxies are moving apart gets smaller and smaller, although it never quite reaches zero.
A remarkable feature of the first kind of Friedmann model is that in it the universe is not infinite in space, but
neither does space have any boundary. Gravity is so strong that space is bent round onto itself, making it rather
like the surface of the earth. If one keeps traveling in a certain direction on the surface of the earth, one never
comes up against an impassable barrier or falls over the edge, but eventually comes back to where one
started.
In the first kind of Friedmann model, space is just like this, but with three dimensions instead of two for the
earth’s surface. The fourth dimension, time, is also finite in extent, but it is like a line with two ends or
boundaries, a beginning and an end. We shall see later that when one combines general relativity with the
uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, it is possible for both space and time to be finite without any edges
or boundaries.
The idea that one could go right round the universe and end up where one started makes good science fiction,
but it doesn’t have much practical significance, because it can be shown that the universe would recollapse to
zero size before one could get round. You would need to travel faster than light in order to end up where you
started before the universe came to an end – and that is not allowed!
In the first kind of Friedmann model, which expands and recollapses, space is bent in on itself, like the surface
of the earth. It is therefore finite in extent. In the second kind of model, which expands forever, space is bent
the other way, like the surface of a saddle. So in this case space is infinite. Finally, in the third kind of
Friedmann model, with just the critical rate of expansion, space is flat (and therefore is also infinite).
But which Friedmann model describes our universe? Will the universe eventually stop expanding and start
contracting, or will it expand forever? To answer this question we need to know the present rate of expansion of
the universe and its present average density. If the density is less than a certain critical value, determined by
the rate of expansion, the gravitational attraction will be too weak to halt the expansion. If the density is greater
than the critical value, gravity will stop the expansion at some time in the future and cause the universe to
recollapse.
We can determine the present rate of expansion by measuring the velocities at which other galaxies are
moving away from us, using the Doppler effect. This can be done very accurately. However, the distances to
the galaxies are not very well known because we can only measure them indirectly. So all we know is that the
universe is expanding by between 5 percent and 10 percent every thousand million years. However, our
uncertainty about the present average density of the universe is even greater. If we add up the masses of all the stars that we can see in our galaxy and other galaxies, the total is less than one hundredth of the amount
required to halt the expansion of the universe, even for the lowest estimate of the rate of expansion. Our galaxy
and other galaxies, however, must contain a large amount of “dark matter” that we cannot see directly, but
which we know must be there because of the influence of its gravitational attraction on the orbits of stars in the
galaxies. Moreover, most galaxies are found in clusters, and we can similarly infer the presence of yet more
dark matter in between the galaxies in these clusters by its effect on the motion of the galaxies. When we add
up all this dark matter, we still get only about one tenth of the amount required to halt the expansion. However,
we cannot exclude the possibility that there might be some other form of matter, distributed almost uniformly
throughout the universe, that we have not yet detected and that might still raise the average density of the
universe up to the critical value needed to halt the expansion. The present evidence therefore suggests that the
universe will probably expand forever, but all we can really be sure of is that even if the universe is going to
recollapse, it won’t do so for at least another ten thousand million years, since it has already been expanding
for at least that long. This should not unduly worry us: by that time, unless we have colonized beyond the Solar
System, mankind will long since have died out, extinguished along with our sun!
All of the Friedmann solutions have the feature that at some time in the past (between ten and twenty thousand
million years ago) the distance between neighboring galaxies must have been zero. At that time, which we call
the big bang, the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time would have been infinite. Because
mathematics cannot really handle infinite numbers, this means that the general theory of relativity (on which
Friedmann’s solutions are based) predicts that there is a point in the universe where the theory itself breaks
down. Such a point is an example of what mathematicians call a singularity. In fact, all our theories of science
are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly fiat, so they break down at the big bang
singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite. This means that even if there were events before the
big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would
break down at the big bang.
Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we could not
determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no
consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them
out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang.
Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.
(The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951officially pronounced it to
be in accordance with the Bible.) There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there
had been a big bang. The proposal that gained widest support was called the steady state theory. It was
suggested in 1948 by two refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, together
with a Briton, Fred Hoyle, who had worked with them on the development of radar during the war. The idea was
that as the galaxies moved away from each other, new galaxies were continually forming in the gaps in
between, from new matter that was being continually created. The universe would therefore look roughly the
same at all times as well as at all points of space. The steady state theory required a modification of general
relativity to allow for the continual creation of matter, but the rate that was involved was so low (about one
particle per cubic kilometer per year) that it was not in conflict with experiment. The theory was a good scientific
theory, in the sense described in Chapter 1: it was simple and it made definite predictions that could be tested
by observation. One of these predictions was that the number of galaxies or similar objects in any given volume
of space should be the same wherever and whenever we look in the universe. In the late 1950s and early
1960s a survey of sources of radio waves from outer space was carried out at Cambridge by a group of
astronomers led by Martin Ryle (who had also worked with Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle on radar during the war).
The Cambridge group showed that most of these radio sources must lie outside our galaxy (indeed many of
them could be identified with other galaxies) and also that there were many more weak sources than strong
ones. They interpreted the weak sources as being the more distant ones, and the stronger ones as being
nearer. Then there appeared to be less common sources per unit volume of space for the nearby sources than
for the distant ones. This could mean that we are at the center of a great region in the universe in which the
sources are fewer than elsewhere. Alternatively, it could mean that the sources were more numerous in the
past, at the time that the radio waves left on their journey to us, than they are now. Either explanation
contradicted the predictions of the steady state theory. Moreover, the discovery of the microwave radiation by
Penzias and Wilson in 1965 also indicated that the universe must have been much denser in the past. The
steady state theory therefore had to be abandoned. Another attempt to avoid the conclusion that there must have been a big bang, and therefore a beginning of
time, was made by two Russian scientists, Evgenii Lifshitz and Isaac Khalatnikov, in 1963. They suggested that
the big bang might be a peculiarity of Friedmann’s models alone, which after all were only approximations to
the real universe. Perhaps, of all the models that were roughly like the real universe, only Friedmann’s would
contain a big bang singularity. In Friedmann’s models, the galaxies are all moving directly away from each
other – so it is not surprising that at some time in the past they were all at the same place. In the real universe,
however, the galaxies are not just moving directly away from each other – they also have small sideways
velocities. So in reality they need never have been all at exactly the same place, only very close together.
Perhaps then the current expanding universe resulted not from a big bang singularity, but from an earlier
contracting phase; as the universe had collapsed the particles in it might not have all collided, but had flown
past and then away from each other, producing the present expansion of the the universe that were roughly like
Friedmann’s models but took account of the irregularities and random velocities of galaxies in the real universe.
They showed that such models could start with a big bang, even though the galaxies were no longer always
moving directly away from each other, but they claimed that this was still only possible in certain exceptional
models in which the galaxies were all moving in just the right way. They argued that since there seemed to be
infinitely more Friedmann-like models without a big bang singularity than there were with one, we should
conclude that there had not in reality been a big bang. They later realized, however, that there was a much
more general class of Friedmann-like models that did have singularities, and in which the galaxies did not have
to be moving any special way. They therefore withdrew their claim in 1970.
The work of Lifshitz and Khalatnikov was valuable because it showed that the universe could have had a
singularity, a big bang, if the general theory of relativity was correct. However, it did not resolve the crucial
question: Does general relativity predict that our universe should have had a big bang, a beginning of time?
The answer to this carne out of a completely different approach introduced by a British mathematician and
physicist, Roger Penrose, in 1965. Using the way light cones behave in general relativity, together with the fact
that gravity is always attractive, he showed that a star collapsing under its own gravity is trapped in a region
whose surface eventually shrinks to zero size. And, since the surface of the region shrinks to zero, so too must
its volume. All the matter in the star will be compressed into a region of zero volume, so the density of matter
and the curvature of space-time become infinite. In other words, one has a singularity contained within a region
of space-time known as a black hole.
At first sight, Penrose’s result applied only to stars; it didn’t have anything to say about the question of whether
the entire universe had a big bang singularity in its past. However, at the time that Penrose produced his
theorem, I was a research student desperately looking for a problem with which to complete my Ph.D. thesis.
Two years before, I had been diagnosed as suffering from ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, or
motor neuron disease, and given to understand that I had only one or two more years to live. In these
circumstances there had not seemed much point in working on my Ph.D.– I did not expect to survive that long.
Yet two years had gone by and I was not that much worse. In fact, things were going rather well for me and I
had gotten engaged to a very nice girl, Jane Wilde. But in order to get married, I needed a job, and in order to
get a job, I needed a Ph.D.
In 1965 I read about Penrose’s theorem that any body undergoing gravitational collapse must eventually form a
singularity. I soon realized that if one reversed the direction of time in Penrose’s theorem, so that the collapse
became an expansion, the conditions of his theorem would still hold, provided the universe were roughly like a
Friedmann model on large scales at the present time. Penrose’s theorem had shown that any collapsing star
must end in a singularity; the time-reversed argument showed that any Friedmann-like expanding universe
must have begun with a singularity. For technical reasons, Penrose’s theorem required that the universe be
infinite in space. So I could in fact, use it to prove that there should be a singularity only if the universe was
expanding fast enough to avoid collapsing again (since only those Friedmann models were infinite in space).
During the next few years I developed new mathematical techniques to remove this and other technical
conditions from the theorems that proved that singularities must occur. The final result was a joint paper by
Penrose and myself in 1970, which at last proved that there must have been a big bang singularity provided
only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe. There was a lot
of opposition to our work, partly from the Russians because of their Marxist belief in scientific determinism, and
partly from people who felt that the whole idea of singularities was repugnant and spoiled the beauty of
Einstein’s theory. However, one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem. So in the end our work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a big bang
singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that
there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe – as we shall see later, it can disappear once
quantum effects are taken into account.
We have seen in this chapter how, in less than half a century, man’s view of the universe formed over millennia
has been transformed. Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding, and the realization of the
insignificance of our own planet in the vastness of the universe, were just the starting point. As experimental
and theoretical evidence mounted, it became more and more clear that the universe must have had a
beginning in time, until in 1970 this was finally proved by Penrose and myself, on the basis of Einstein’s general
theory of relativity. That proof showed that general relativity is only an incomplete theory: it cannot tell us how
the universe started off, because it predicts that all physical theories, including itself, break down at the
beginning of the universe. However, general relativity claims to be only a partial theory, so what the singularity
theorems really show is that there must have been a time in the very early universe when the universe was so
small that one could no longer ignore the small-scale effects of the other great partial theory of the twentieth
century, quantum mechanics. At the start of the 1970s, then, we were forced to turn our search for an
understanding of the universe from our theory of the extraordinarily vast to our theory of the extraordinarily tiny.
That theory, quantum mechanics, will be described next, before we turn to the efforts to combine the two partial
theories into a single quantum theory of gravity.