Jeremy Black

WHERE DOES THE ENERGY COME FROM?

‘The wonder is, not that the field of the stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.’

Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus (1894)

‘Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.’

- Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles (1765)

If you retune your radio, part of the ‘white noise’ you hear between stations is this very same echo from the beginning of time.

Towards the end of the 18th century, geologists began to realize that the Earth must be much more ancient than had been thought (at least in Europe) – perhaps millions if not billions of years old. However, into the 20th century the scientific consensus was that the universe itself was eternal, and in a ‘steady state’. Stars might be born and die, but the dimensions of the universe were fixed and unchanging.

‘The wonder is, not that the field of the stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.’

Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus (1894)

chink in this theory came in the 1920s when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble observed that the further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it is receding. He concluded that the universe is expanding, and that this expansion started in a single great explosion, which became known as ‘the Big Bang’.

Our Sun lies on one of the spiral arms of our galaxy, about 30,000 light years from the centre. The nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, just 4.24 light years away.