As the cosmos continued to expand and cool, growing larger than the size of our solar system, the temperature dropped rapidly below a trillion degrees Kelvin.

A millionth of a second has passed since the beginning.

We are told that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. But after reading the above, I'm reminded that actually everything in the universe has gone much faster than the speed of light at the beginning of time. Tyson doesn't explicitly state it here, but it's obvious since it currently takes light from the sun a little over 8 minutes to reach the earth - now contrast that with the rate of expansion described above. I don't know how these two facts regarding the speed of light are reconciled; perhaps we should be stating something like "Although everything in the universe at one point greatly exceeded the speed of light, currently nothing is able to do so."

Penelope wrote:It seems that the beginning of everything was infinitesimally small. Even smaller than atoms and electrons? Is it still matter? Is it a thing? Or is it just a wave or vibration?

In the first sentence of the book, Tyson describes how unimaginably small.

In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.

Later in this chapter, Tyson briefly wonders what happened before the big bang, while admitting "Astrophysicists have no idea."

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify...

That caught me because the singularity, that tiny point before the big bang, could be eternal. Why should we assume there was nothing before then and wonder how the singularity was created?

Robert Tulip wrote:

Penelope wrote: Isn't this why the author is calling it a story?

I think he is calling it a story in order to claim that the astronomical explanation of the universe is a greater story than the story of Jesus Christ, which is the origin of his chapter title, The Greatest Story Ever Told. Christianity tells the story of creation in Genesis to explain why human beings are important and why we are immoral. But Tyson aims to replace the Christian fantasy with scientific knowledge. It is just quite hard, as Carl Sagan noted in his book Pale Blue Dot, to explain the story of why humans are significant in objective terms when the universe is so big and old.

Yes, well said. I think it's Mr. Tulip who says on occasion that until science comes up with overarching stories or myths that inspire awe and common people can use for understanding, it will have little power over religion. This amazing story is one attempt at that. The story of evolution is another that can inspire awe as one considers a personal unbroken line of ancestors back to primordial life. Perhaps Tyson will have other such stories in this book.

However, as you imply, I doubt any scientific stories or "myths" can compete with an invisible powerful deity who is working to improve your life and grant eternal happiness.

I'm thinking of that song 'From a distance '. God is watching us,...... from a distance.

I think it is wrong to think that religious persecution always grew from political or economic ambitions. We are approaching November 5th . Guy Fawkes Night here in UK. It is horrific to contemplate that they were attempting to release the Catholics of England out of oppression. They didn't just try to eliminate Catholicism, they did it by inflicting the utmost suffering they could devise. And vice versa. It is sickening to contemplate.

I'm going on to the next chapter now because I am despairing at how we got the whole religion/greatest story ever told thing, so bloody wrong.

It has taken us 400 years to rise out of this religious mire, here in the U.K. It looks as though we are being dragged back down by Islamist fanatics.

LanDroid wrote:

As the cosmos continued to expand and cool, growing larger than the size of our solar system, the temperature dropped rapidly below a trillion degrees Kelvin.

A millionth of a second has passed since the beginning.

We are told that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. But after reading the above, I'm reminded that actually everything in the universe has gone much faster than the speed of light at the beginning of time.

I remember having the same question as I read this. There is a bit more on the issue, well into
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)
but all it does is assert that things moved "beyond the event horizon" as the universe flew apart from itself at a speed which made some parts move away from other parts faster (relative to each other) than the speed of light. Not sure what Einstein would make of it, but it seems inflation is still not agreed on despite making several predictions which have been confirmed.

LanDroid wrote: I don't know how these two facts regarding the speed of light are reconciled;

Well, neither do I. I could try getting Fred, in Michigan, to answer, but until he retires he is probably too busy.

LanDroid wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:

Penelope wrote:Isn't this why the author is calling it a story?

I think he is calling it a story in order to claim that the astronomical explanation of the universe is a greater story than the story of Jesus Christ, which is the origin of his chapter title, The Greatest Story Ever Told. Christianity tells the story of creation in Genesis to explain why human beings are important and why we are immoral. But Tyson aims to replace the Christian fantasy with scientific knowledge. It is just quite hard, as Carl Sagan noted in his book Pale Blue Dot, to explain the story of why humans are significant in objective terms when the universe is so big and old.

Yes, well said. I think it's Mr. Tulip who says on occasion that until science comes up with overarching stories or myths that inspire awe and common people can use for understanding, it will have little power over religion. This amazing story is one attempt at that. The story of evolution is another that can inspire awe as one considers a personal unbroken line of ancestors back to primordial life. Perhaps Tyson will have other such stories in this book. However, as you imply, I doubt any scientific stories or "myths" can compete with an invisible powerful deity who is working to improve your life and grant eternal happiness.

Hi LanDroid, thanks. The problem I see in Tyson’s “story” here is the need for intermediate stages in the structure of time between our mundane lives and the grand tale of the origin and extent of the universe as revealed to modern astrophysics.

One great astronomical story is the orbital drivers of climate, how the stable patterns of earth’s spin and orbit lead over thousands of years to regular patterns of glaciation, which allowed the great story of the peopling of the earth as told by Stephen Oppenheimer, with people moving around the planet out of Africa over the last hundred millennia as the sea went up and down and the ice advanced and retreated.

Another structure of cosmic time, stepping up through the aeons to the scale of millions of years, is the geological framework of plate tectonics. The great book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe explains that without tectonics, and without Jupiter playing interference, blocking comets like an offensive lineman, life would not be possible on earth. That geological structure of time creates a connection between the astronomical birth of earth and human concern, extending over the millions of years of evolution.

Climate and geology tell stories that relate to human concern, whereas somehow the billion year astronomical aeons of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the singularity at the origin of the Big Bang and the accelerating expansion of space time are harder to relate to immediate terrestrial priorities.

Each of these scales of time nest within each other, millennial, million and billion years. My impression is that the millennial scale is a bit too geocentric to capture the interest of astrophysicists like Tyson, which is a great shame since there is so much mistaken thinking out there about orbital drivers of climate change.

You suggest I imply science can’t compete against myths. On a minor point of pedantry, I’m not sure the inference you draw here was actually implied in my comments. I do think that science can compete, since Christian myths have anomalies that will explode their paradigm. For example, Christianity maintains that it has a focus on truth, which means Christians should respect evidence and logic when it comes to analysing Bible stories, but they often don’t.

This cognitive dissonance within faith is not sustainable, since it puts the Christian faith into disrepute in the broader secular world, due to its incoherence. It is precisely because science will be able to provide encompassing myths, once it gets its aeons in a row, that it will be possible to see the Christian creation stories as symbolically meaningful, even while they are recognised as literally false.

Mr. Tulip wrote:You suggest I imply science can’t compete against myths. On a minor point of pedantry, I’m not sure the inference you draw here was actually implied in my comments.

OK I think it may have been Ant who was saying such things, not you. Sorry 'bout that...

NDT wrote:Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else—the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.

Now with even more precise measurements, we may have a major problem - check this headline.

Universe shouldn’t exist, CERN physicists conclude
...Physicists at CERN in Switzerland have made the most precise measurement ever of the magnetic moment of an anti-proton – a number that measures how a particle reacts to magnetic force – and found it to be exactly the same as that of the proton but with opposite sign.

...The new measurement is precise to nine significant digits, the equivalent of measuring the circumference of the Earth to within a few centimeters, and 350 times more precise than any previous measurement.

“All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.”

...The standard model predicts the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter – but that’s a combustive mixture that would have annihilated itself, leaving nothing behind to make galaxies or planets or people.

10/23/17
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/univ ... s-conclude

So how is it we exist? Notice Tyson is talking about a minute imbalance in the amount of matter Vs. anti-matter. So all properties could be identical and the universe would not have self-annihilated into pure light.

Robert Tulip wrote: I do think that science can compete, since Christian myths have anomalies that will explode their paradigm. For example, Christianity maintains that it has a focus on truth, which means Christians should respect evidence and logic when it comes to analysing Bible stories, but they often don’t.

This cognitive dissonance within faith is not sustainable, since it puts the Christian faith into disrepute in the broader secular world, due to its incoherence.

The broader secular world likes to think it can get by without stories embodying values. No heros, no sense of karma, no exemplification of character.

What we have instead is an abundance of villains. Joseph Kony, Vlad the Putin, Torquemada, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Harvey Weinstein, Lord Jeff Amherst (who first sent smallpox blankets to the Native Americans), Cortez, Nathan Bedford Forrest, now Columbus and Robert E. Lee, the pirate Henry Morgan, (Saint) Thomas More, Woody Allen, and on and on the list goes. I could make a point about incoherence from that list, but I have a different point in mind.

Just as language works through a "mother tongue" and so a viable culture will continue to pass on its language, culture is passed on in the home. If there is no coherent culture to pass on in the home, then the fragments will add up to something less than mythic force.

Right now the biggest cleavage in cultures all over the world is between the cosmopolitan culture of the educated and the provincial culture of the base population. Between English and the local mother tongue, in most parts of the world.

Religion has some problems among the cosmopolitans. Not among the base populations. Religion is thriving there (except in Europe, and in China). But it is also responsible for tribalist rivalries in the base populations.

Cosmopolitans are dedicated to the culture that really begins at university, or perhaps high school. Critical as to common values, insisting on facts, accepting of complexity and fragmentation and human fallibility - they have to be, because that is what work is like in the world of the highly educated. But parents cannot pass that on. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't, because it is always based within a specialized discipline which you can't learn til you reach the age of formal thinking, around 16 to 18. (Notice how often the military, or art, or the theater, or engineering get passed down in families these days. These are not just jobs, they are entire worldviews, and some of that can be passed on in families.)

They often tell themselves that they cannot accept religion because its way of telling stories is based in outmoded, unbelievable images. But really it is because a critical view of values, a priority on facts, and acceptance of complexity and fragmentation are not in the old mythology. Sam Harris and Richard Feynman and George Carlin are the new heroes, except they aren't. What five year old can think, "I want to be like George Carlin when I grow up"?

I suspect that when the pace of economic change has finished slowing down, and the world more or less looks like today's Wuhan or Curitiba, new cultural syntheses will show up in the homes around the globe. But they are more likely to look like stories of the supernatural than like George Carlin. Provincial, mother-tongue cultures will have the strongest hold on people's hearts and minds, and cosmopolitan culture will have to accept the world not understanding how things really work. The elites must be satisfied with steering the technical processes and having genuine spiritual and mystical input into religion, but they will have to give up on telling the world how to think about matters of the heart. And that's a good thing, if you ask me.

Before I begin, I must admit to a mea culpa. I volunteered to be discussion leader on this book, then dropped the ball. In my defense, I have been helping my son-in-law and daughter with some remodeling of their home, so have been distracted. I promise to do better in the future.

First of all, a big "Thank Ypu" to all who have participated.

I have read the first three chapters of Dr.Tyson's book, and have just finished re-reading Chapter One and the postings herein. It seems that the book is a success, if it promotes comments and discussion like I see here. I admit, some of the content leaves me puzzled; but again, we must consider the title: "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry." It is clearly Tyson's intent to inspire us to delve deeper into the subject. (see the Preface). As we learn more about the universe (multiverse?), our perspective changes. When I was a boy, a reference book showed a picture of our galaxy and proclaimed it to be "the universe." If we could resurrect Isaac Newton, his head would probably spin at the idea of quarks, hadrons, photons, leptons, etc. Science builds on the contributions of the past, but seeks to go beyond them, and not be hide bound because "Aristotle (Plato, Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton) said so. True we look to those individuals; Newton himself said, "It I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." But they help us see further. And they were not infallible. To quote another Isaac (Asimov), "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' "

An aside: Dr. Tyson's chapter headings do what they are supposed to do, grab your attention. True "The Greatest Story every told is a biblical allusion, but is not found in the Bible itself. The only refernce I could find on the internet was to the 1965 movie with that title, a purported life story of Jesus. It is perhaps better known for its plethora of cameo performers (John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Pat Boone, Van Heflin, Martin Landau, Angela Lansbury, Dorothy McGuire, Sidney Poitier, Donald Pleasence, and others) than for its accuracy.

NDT wrote:We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out - and we have only just begun.

Chapter 1 ends on a high note.