L’ultimo orizzonte
What do we know about the universe? A lot: its age, its structure, what it contains and how it evolved into a space littered with galaxies, stars, planets. Just a little over a century ago, we didn’t know almost anything.
The story of how modern physics has come so far on the path of knowledge of the cosmos is the story of an extraordinary scientific adventure, which Amedeo Balbi, astrophysicist and popularizer, helps us to follow step by step: from Einstein’s theory of relativity to the discovery of the expansion of the universe, from the observation of the cosmic background radiation, to the elaboration of the ‘classic’ model of the Big Bang that we consider today the best description of the origin of the cosmos.So, do we know everything about the universe now? Of course not: if we are sure about the general system, we have not exactly defined all the details.
Balbi invites us to discover the frontier land on which the current research takes place, from the confirmations of the inflationary theory, to the search for dark matter, to the explanation of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. But even at the frontier of research, we are far from finding the definitive answer to basic questions: is the universe finite or infinite? Did space and time have a beginning, and will they have an end? Could the laws of nature be different? Are there other universes besides ours?To confront these questions with the tools of science, we must go beyond the last horizon, where the events of the beginning are hidden from our eyes by a wall of fire, where the measurements we have made on the universe may no longer be valid, where we may discover that the physics we have developed only describes a brief moment and a limited space of a much larger and unattainable cosmos.What do we know about the universe?
ASIMOV PRIZE 2021
The “Asimov Prize” is an award reserved for particularly deserving works of popularization and scientific non-fiction.
Amedeo Balbi is associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the Physics Department of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy. The author of over 100 scientific papers, he is a member of the International Astronomical Union, of the IAA SETI Permanent Committee and of the Scientific Council of the Italian Society of Astrobiology. He is also very active as a science popularizer. He is the author of several popular science books.
