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
Chapter 0-Page 0
Then we'd have the end of scientific advancement for a while with the justification of power in a top-down kind of universe.
When we had the freedom of individual thought, along came people like Leonardo de Vinci, Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo. They thought thoughts like: the Earth moves, planets go around the sun, the stars are suns, and the universe is infinite. All of these ideas faced condemnation as heresies from time to time, but science progressed quite steadily up to the twentieth century in one place or another.
Then we went back to the idea of a limited universe that started out pure and now decays. The twentieth-century impact on cosmology is clear. We've had two world wars, several smaller wars, the Holocaust, natural disasters, diseases, and mass starvation. Our cosmology depends more on what we see on Earth than through telescopes. Edgar Allan Poe was actually the first person we know of who thought of a big explosion in the beginning. He also thought once the universe is fully extended, gravity will force it to collapse, so here we are, thinking the end is in sight again. But how stable was Edgar Allan Poe really?
Some scientists think we are close to a grand unified theory, the theory of everything, but we have so many unanswered questions. Why do protons and electrons weigh what they do? How are matter and space related? Can we convert one to the other? In the laboratory, we always convert energy into matter and antimatter at the same time. Why is the universe only matter? Where's all the antimatter?
Chapter 0-Page 0