The Origins of the Future: Ten Questions for the Next Ten Years

by John Gribbin

How did the universe begin? Where do galaxies come from? How do stars and planets form? Where do the material particles we are made of come from? How did life begin? Today we have only provisional answers to such questions. But scientific progress will improve these answers dramatically over the next ten years, predicts John Gribbin in this riveting book. He focuses on what we know—or think we know—about ten controversial, unanswered issues in the physical sciences and explains how current cutting-edge research may yield solutions in the very near future.

With his trademark facility for engaging readers with or without a scientific background, the author explores ideas concerning the creation of the universe, the possibility of other forms of life, and the fate of the expanding cosmos. He examines “theories of everything,” including grand unified theories and string theory, and he discusses the Big Bang theory, the origin of structure and patterns of matter in the galaxies, and dark mass and dark energy. In the final chapter of the book, Gribbin ponders the future of Earth and the Sun and the possibility that the universe might expand forever.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

John R. Gribbin is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. His writings include quantum physics, human evolution, climate change, global warming, the origins of the universe, and biographies of famous scientists. He also writes science fiction.

Reviews

[Manny]

I remember reading this book, and thinking that someone had finally explained inflation (the kind that occurs in the early stages of the Big Bang) in a way I understood. That felt good, since I'd wondered about it on and off for ages. But now I can't remember the explanation. I think it had something to do with massive release of potential energy during spontaneous symmetry breaking... but I'm not at all sure about that, and I certainly don't recall any details.

Maybe I didn't really understand it after all. It's easy to have these illusions when you read popular science books.

[Jasonius Smith]

I bought this book originally in 2007 (?). It was published in 2006. Since the sub-title was "Ten Questions for the Next Ten Years", technically speaking I finished with nearly two year to spare (depending on your relative time-frame reference).

Not sure if that exactly qualifies as a review, but I'm new at this. Should you read? Wait for the Next Ten Questions.

[Dennis Littrell]

Fascinating and up-to-date information on the cosmos

Astrophysics, particle physics, cosmology, and astronomy require advanced mathematics and high tech tools to really get to the nitty-gritty of the subject matter. Having neither, I, like so many others, struggle along with help from writers like John Gribbin. The unwritten premise of this book and many another in similar fields is that there is something valuable to be gained by learning about physics, cosmology and kindred disciplines even without the mathematics and the high tech tools.

The ten questions that Gribbin addresses here begin with "How Do We Know the Things We Think We Know?" through "How Did the Universe Begin?" and "Why Is the Universe the Way It Is?" and "Where Did Life Originate?" etc., and end appropriately enough with, "How Will It All End?"

The first question is not a epistemological philosophic query, although it looks like one. He means how do we know the things about the cosmos that we think we know? and it is a very interesting question answered mostly through reading the electromagnetic radiation from distant sources and drawing conclusions based on spectrography. This knowledge is combined with what we know about particle physics, chemistry, general relativity, quantum mechanics and even geology to make some very clever deductions about what is out there very, very far away.

Even without the math some of the material is difficult. Especially challenging are the chapters dealing with the zoo of subatomic particles both extant and theorized. But Gribbin is a very good and knowledgeable writer with a flair for the kind of enthusiasm about his subject that makes the reading fascinating.

Many books on science find it necessary to repeat a lot of scientific history in the various disciplines before they get to the latest discoveries. Gribbin does not do that here, perhaps because his previous book, The Scientists was a history of science. He does give us information on earlier theories and ideas when such information is apt, such as when explaining how the solar system originated since the latest ideas are different from what you and I were probably taught in school. In fact, Gribbin considers "old science" that science which occurred before the 21st century!

I thought the most interesting chapters were the latter four on where the elements came from, on the origin of the solar system, on where life originated, and how the universe will end. Gribbin makes the argument that it is likely that life was already on its way to realization before the earth came into being. He supports this with new discoveries of amino acids and other "precursors of life" molecules in what are called Great Molecular Clouds seen throughout the universe. The material on the composition of comets and meteors furthers this argument since they contain many organic chemicals, some of which have only been recently discovered. Gribbin even goes so far as to say that "inside the icy bulk of a comet, warmed by the radioactive decay of short-lived isotopes...vesicles formed in little puddles and became filled with complex organic molecules...[T]his extends the time available for chemistry to take the step from nonliving to living from a couple of hundred million years...to several thousand million years." Big difference! (p. 243)

I found a lot of new information on the life and death of stars, on just which chemical elements are formed where and when, and a very clear delineation of the latest thinking about dark matter and dark energy. There is also some speculations in tune with M-theory and parallel universes and the relatively recent belief among cosmologists that the universe may very well be infinite. I learned that most stars are born in threes, but one is thrown out so most stars we see in the sky are actually binary stars. Gribbin dubs our star as a "wanderer" that was once part of a binary or triplet group.

Worried about an expanding sun some four or so billion years down the road? Gribbin explains how we might be able to use asteroids initially powered by rockets to swing around the earth and to the giant planets and back, transferring energy from there to here to gradually move the earth further away from the sun! (p. 253)

All in all a most interesting and informative read, one of the best I've read on cosmology and astrophysics in recent years.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Clint Joseph]

This is another prime example of me reading something that is a little bit too hard for me (I have this feeling that something 10-15 percent too hard is really where I ought to be aiming, but I think I missed it here).

The thing that I think I forgot about was how bad I did in chemistry in high school, and how much I floundered with DFW's "Everything and More," even though he swears all you really need for that book is one semester of college math, or a good high school teacher. I tend to think there is a forgivable aspect to very intelligent people trying their hardest to explain things to us normal folks, so when the book is still a pretty serious amount of work, I can't fault them. (DFW says that's one of the points of his writing anyway; it needs to be hard or you don't care. [I think this is probably true, but that's two DFW references in a book by someone else, so back to it.])

This book was fifty cents at the library book sale, and I of course looked right into when it was published: 2006. So, theoretically, we can assume that all fo the questions posed were answered 2 years ago. Given the fact that astrophysics isn't wildly popular, other than NDT, whom I have not read so can't chime in on, I wouldn't be wildly surprised to find that this book is super outdated and I would've done better to check the publication date first.

But, here's the thing, even given how much I struggled to understand, I think there's a point that you just have to accept that will happen with these types of books. I think if you have the time and the patience, it's not unreasonable to read a chapter every day or two and knock it out that way; that's how I ended up finishing. It's certainly not one I would encourage you to sit down and read front to back like it's a Jack Reacher novel, but I assume you probably figured that in a way I didn't.

Basically what you've got here is a book that takes you from the origin of the universe to the end of the universe, focusing on those first portions of seconds, and then carrying through to "well, we think it could go like this, not that anyone will be around to see it." And I do want to say this, Gribbin does an excellent job of taking a very realistic view of science, stressing continually how much of a "team sport" science has become, how it interacts, how things play off each other, and how, in all fairness, we are really just making a lot of smart guesses, and he certainly won't be the one to try and convince you otherwise.

[David P]

In the beginning... there was utter nothingness. Other dimensions might have existed, perhaps other universes (to be precise. the Bible states "in a beginning"). Maybe God, though it could be a very different God from than the one humans later envisioned. We just don't know and possibly, never will.

And God said: "Let there be space!" And there was space. Space, not an empty void--for even when space appears empty, it can support propagating fields, even create virtual particles, though for very, very short intervals only.

"And let there be time, making possible waves--electromagnetic and quantum--not to mention laws of Newton and Maxwell, years and leap seconds and the Hubble constant." Time which keeps everything from happening at once, starting at a definite instant, which Fred Hoyle flippantly named "The Big Bang." Such a starting point renders meaningless the question, "what happened before the Big Bang?" In this universe, there was no "before."

"And in that space, place ample energy and matter, letting it expand with time," an expansion which so far has lasted about 14 billion years. Energy shaped by gravity, with nuclear forces and electromagnetism determining its smaller scales, and with other large-scale forces also present, forces we are only beginning to appreciate.

...And God said: "Let us create Man" That might have been the easier part. The harder one was to create a universe where life was at all possible, satisfying the "anthropic principle." If this is a universe where creatures like us can exist and observe, its laws must meet stringent conditions. It must be a universe where matter and antimatter are almost balanced, but not quite (lest they completely annihilate each other), one where quarks can combine to protons and neutrons, and these in turn create nuclei of carbon (not just hydrogen and helium), then nitrogen, oxygen and the rest, opening the way to proteins, DNA and life. Who knows how many sterile universes exist where some such condition or another is not met?

Also, a universe which does not quickly collapse again, because its pull of gravity is opposed by forces not yet completely understood, and one smooth on large scales (as ensured by "dark matter" whose nature remains unclear) but grainy enough to let galaxies and stars form. If it all seems like a miracle--well, we are here, aren't we?

... And God said "Let man evolve, and let there be astronomers and physicists to puzzle out the mysteries of creation." Astronomers to observe distant galaxies, whose light grows redder with distance, microwaves from the "primordial fireball," and signatures of the curvature and flatness of space. Yet astronomers must rely on the transparency of space, which only appeared some hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang. They need physics to fill the gaps.

So let there be great minds like Albert Einstein's, who puzzled out the behavior of gravity and space-time on a large scale, also providing the foundation to its effects in very dense matter, as in black holes and the earliest universe. And battalions of researchers to build particle accelerators of greater and greater power (and greater size), to observe conditions like those near the Big Bang. And theorists like Alan Guth and Peter Higgs, to make sense of such observations.

And then God said, let there be John Gribbin, to try explain all this finely tuned complexity to the non-specialist reader. Not an easy task, either, especially if one has to avoid the mathematical, physical and astronomical nitty-gritty. If the reader finds much of this pretty heavy going, well, that is the nature of the beast (no, there will be no test at the end, and yes, a few judicious tables and diagrams could have helped).

Perhaps Gribbin will not satisfy everyone with the job he has done, but it is amazing how well he pulls it off at all, especially since many pieces of the puzzle remain to be fitted. Certain areas are still indistinct, especially in the final chapters (which seem like condensations of separate books Gribbin had written)--as in a computer picture of limited resolution, whose pixels dissolve into colored squares. The first half is much clearer than the latter one, which has too much speculation. Maybe this is unavoidable when trying to include areas where sound information is still lacking, just to fulfil the promised coverage--from the start of the universe to its end. Do not be too surprised if future observations change the picture presented here!

Still, this book will teach you a lot. Read it only if you are not satisfied with superficial descriptions, and if you are willing to read it slowly. If you do, you may be rewarded with understanding, because it stands head and shoulders above any non-technical book on cosmology I've seen. If you wish to visit the front-line trenches of science, John Gribbin may well be the best guide to take you there.

[Sri Vidya]

Reading this book 10 years after it was published was serendipity. The ten questions Gribbin explores are indeed 10 of the questions at the forefront of advancement and development in science right now. This was an exceptional read, holding my interest as a STEM student but not so filled with jargon that I couldn't follow it or recommend it to others. It makes science and technological innovation feel like everyone's investment!

[sarah]

The universe. It's kinda big.

This is the first book I've found that approaches physics from what's happening now and what's about to be uncovered instead of a history of what's already been thought and done with. This is what the epilogue to every other science book tries to be, but better!

"...you could regard the surfaces of the pages of a book as a series of two-dimensional universes, right next door to each other but seeming, to any two-dimensional creatures that inhabited them, to be the entire world."