1. Scientific Theories and Laws
2. The First Decade (1936-1946)
4. The Second Decade (1946-1956)
6. The Third Decade (1956-1966)
8. The Fourth Decade (1966-1976)
10. The Fifth Decade (1976-1986)
12. The Sixth Decade (1986-1996)
14. The Seventh Decade (1996-2006)
15. The Theory of More than Everything
16. The Eighth Decade (2006-2016)
18. The Ninth Decade (2016-2026)
Appendix A Paintings
Appendix B TTOMTE and a Steady State Universe
Appendix C Musical Compositions
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The driving force of early science was survival; staying alive was all we had time for. We tested rocks, clubs, and spears in order to get ahead of the other species. After all, in those days, only two kinds of animals existed: predator and lunch. In order to eat a good meal and not become one, we needed to find out which club worked the best. Don't bother with the balsa tree.
Fire was a great discovery: We stayed warm, scared off the animals too big to club, and cooked the food we caught. (We were getting pretty tired of sushi.) Eventually, we had some free time to listen to the Tar Pit Philharmonic and visit the Cave Museum of Modern Art featuring "The Hunt" (artist unknown). The thinkers of the day sat around the fire at night and started looking at the sky; the time was ripe for the birth of cosmology and wonder.
Astronomers, cosmologists, and mathematicians try to answer three main questions:
1) What are we seeing? Gribbin's book starts with the years when astronomers understood almost everything they saw, around the 1600's.
2) How big is the universe or parts of it? Gribbin describes how we can measure the universe without a heap of yardsticks nailed together, and sometimes we go back and forth between these first two questions. We might first take a guess as to what we're looking at, but when we find that the size of it doesn't make any sense, we have to go back over our original idea.
3) Why does the universe act the way it does? In Search of the Big Bang presents a theory accepted by almost everybody since the 1960's.
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