Wonders of the Universe - Brian Cox [2]
THE VALUE OF WONDER
The idea that a journey to the edge of the Universe is deeply relevant to our everyday lives lies at the heart of Wonders of the Universe. I cannot emphasize enough my strong conviction that exploration, both intellectual and physical, is the foundation of civilisation. So whilst building rockets to the Moon and telescopes to capture the light from the most distant stars may seem like an interesting luxury, such a view would be superficial, incorrect and downright daft – to borrow a phrase from my native Oldham. We are part of the Universe; its fate is our fate; we live in it and it lives in us. How can anything be more important, relevant and useful than understanding its workings?
When we began to think about the series, we wanted to make programmes that were more than a simple tour of the wonders of the Universe. Of course black holes, colliding galaxies and stars at the edge of time are fascinating, and we see them all, but to characterise the ancient science of astronomy as a spectator sport would be to miss the point. The wonders we see through our telescopes are laboratories where we can test our understanding of the natural world in conditions so extreme that we will never be able to recreate them here on Earth. With this in mind, we decided to base the programmes around scientific themes rather than the wonders themselves.
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When you set sail for Ithaca, wish for the road to be long, full of adventures, full of knowledge.
—C. P. Cavafy
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Endeavour that we can truly begin to understand the origins and the workings of the Universe and use this information to plan for our future on Earth.
‘Messengers’ is about light – our only connection with the distant Universe that may lie forever beyond our reach. But it is also about the information stored within light itself, and how that information got there; the fingerprints of the chemical elements are to be found in the most distant starlight, enabling us to know with certainty the composition of the most distant star.
‘Stardust’ asks an ancient question: what are the building blocks of the Universe? And also, how was the raw material of a human being assembled from the debris of the Big Bang? – a searingly hot, yet beautifully ordered fireball with no discernable structure.
‘Falling’ tells the story of the great sculptor of the Universe: gravity. For some reason that we do not understand, gravity is by far the weakest of the four fundamental forces in the Universe, but because it has an infinite range and acts between everything that exists, its influence is all-pervasive. Our most precise theory of gravity, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, dates from 1915, which makes it the oldest of the modern theories of the forces. The theory of the electromagnetic force, Quantum Electrodynamics, dates from the 1950s, while the theory of the Strong Nuclear Force from the 1960s and 70s. Our description of last of the four, the Weak Nuclear Force, resides in the Standard Model of particle physics. This theory, a product of the 1970s, unifies the description of the Weak Nuclear Force with Quantum Electrodynamics, although there is a missing piece of the theory known as the Higgs Boson that is currently being searched for at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. Until the Higgs Boson, or whatever does its job, is found, we cannot claim to have a working description of the Weak Nuclear Force and its relationship with electromagnetism.
However despite the long