Reading about cosmology, I am immediately drawn into the big questions it attempts to answer about from the very start of the universe, how it was created, and ultimately, how matter and life exists at all. After all, what we learn in a variety of subjects always has pertinence, but I was infinitely more curious to the creation, to how we live and how nature conspired to allow our own conception and the universe’s creation.
What is fascinating news about the topic of cosmology that Carroll and Ostile have written about is the fundamental difference between how what many of us were taught as children was a hotly debated topic as to the cosmological creation of the universe. With the study of the cosmic microwave background and its proven existence by blackbody radiation and microwaves existent in the atmosphere, the theory of a steady-state universe was proven false. The steady-state universe theory really drew me due to its idealization of the universe as constant and never-changing, never created and with no beginning or time with the tying of time to the infinite scale, and more due to the fact that it seems like a foreign theory. As children, we were never taught about the steady-state universe and were immediately drawn towards the Big Bang, which is now the standard theory of choice, but it is interesting to look into alternate theories.
Cosmic microwave background
The cosmic microwave background shown here is something that is common practice when describing the start of the universe. However, its fascinating nature and description only continues to be exacerbated when one considers the fact that this energy released from the Big Bang was expected to have nuclear reactions, and with the light elements in the universe, that Big Bang nucleosynthesis occurred to ensure that reactions continued occurring to create the universe from the very dense point of spacetime. Further, this picture is also shown to see what we from Earth can see as the last traces of scattering from the photons that were not scattered by free electrons, leading to an expansion and also revealing what areas are more energy dense.
It is absolutely baffling to consider how much work goes into the consideration and theories that shape our conceptions of the modern world and of the science-fiction world in which we have curved spacetime, meaning relativistic cosmology and creation, as well as traveling towards these sources to see what they mean. However, when one considers it, this is the fundamental question that behooves us all as people to understand, to see and discover more about our own creation.
