Just Six Numbers; The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe

x, [2], 173, [7] pages. Cover has minor wear and soiling. List of Illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgments; The Cosmos and the Microworld; Our cosmic habitat I: planets, stars and life; The large number 'N: gravity in the cosmos; Stars, the periodic table, and E; Our cosmic habitat II: beyond our galaxy; The fine-tuned expansion: Dark Matter and [symbol for Omega]' The number [symbol for lambda]: is cosmic expansion slowing or speeding?; Primordial ripples: the Number Q; Our cosmic habitat III: what lies beyond our horizon?; Three dimensions (and more); Coincidence, providence - or multiverse? Notes. Index. The genesis of the universe elegantly explained in a simple theory based on just six numbers by one of the world's most renowned astrophysicists. Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, Kt, OM, FRS, FREng, FMedSci, FRAS, HonFInstP (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010. After holding postdoctoral research positions in the United Kingdom and the United States, he taught at Sussex University and the University of Cambridge, where he was the Plumian Professor until 1991, and the director of the Institute of Astronomy. Rees is the author of more than 500 research papers, and he made contributions to the origin of cosmic microwave background radiation, and to galaxy clustering and formation. His studies of the distribution of quasars led to final disproof of steady state theory. How did a single 'genesis event' create billions of galaxies, black holes, stars and planets? How did atoms assemble -- here on Earth, and perhaps on other worlds -- into living beings intricate enough to ponder their origins? This book describes the recent avalanche of discoveries about the universe's fundamental laws, and the deep connections that exist between stars and atoms -- the cosmos and the microscopic world. Just six numbers, imprinted in the 'big bang', determine the essence of our world, and this book devotes one chapter to explaining each. Derived from a review by Ann Skea found on line: In this book Sir Martin shows how just six numbers, imprinted in the "big bang," determine the essential features of the physical cosmos. He also shows that cosmic evolution is highly sensitive to the values of these numbers and that if any one of them were "untuned" there could be no stars and no life. Or at least not in the way that we know them today. The first is a ratio of the strength of the electrical forces that hold atoms together divided by the force of gravity between them. It is very large, about 1036. The second number is also a ratio and is the proportion of energy that is released when hydrogen fuses into helium. This number is 0.007. The third number, also a ratio, relates the actual density of matter in the universe to a "critical" density. At first sight this number appears to be about 0.4. If this ratio were too high the universe would have collapsed long ago: if too low, galaxies or stars would not have formed. The fourth number, only recently discovered, is a cosmic "antigravity" and appears to control the expansion of the universe even though it has no discernible effect on scales less than a billion light years. The fifth number is the ratio of the energy required to break apart a galaxy compared to its "rest mass energy" and is about 10-5. The sixth number, surprisingly, is the number of spatial dimensions in our world (3). In this book Sir Martin discusses each of the above and develops reasons for the limits that he gives. He postulates that perhaps there are some connections between these numbers but states that at the moment we cannot predict any one of them from the values of the others. Perhaps a "theory of everything" will eventually yield a formula that interrelates them. More thought provoking is Sir Martin's discussion of wha.…