Cosmic Heritage: Evolution from the Big Bang to Conscious Life
Peter Shaver
Language: English
Pages: 268
ISBN: 3642202608
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book follows the evolutionary trail all the way from the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago to conscious life today. It is an accessible introductory book written for the interested layperson – anyone interested in the ‘big picture’ coming from modern science. It covers a wide range of topics including the origin and evolution of our universe, the nature and origin of life, the evolution of life including questions of birth and death, the evolution of cognition, the nature of consciousness, the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the future of the universe. The book is written in a narrative style, as these topics are all parts of a single story. It concludes with a discussion on the nature and future of science.
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Relatively steady and uneventful lives. They spend their time converting hydrogen to helium. This involves bringing positively charged protons together into the same nucleus, which is not easy because similarly-charged particles repel each other. A very high temperature in the star’s core is required to make this possible. In that environment particles are moving in high-speed chaos, and sometimes come close to each other in spite of the electromagnetic repulsion. When they are close enough,.
Larger all structure would have collapsed into massive black holes, and if they were much smaller no structure (stars, galaxies) would have formed. Even the fact that our universe has three dimensions of space and one of time is crucial for the existence of life as we know it. P. Shaver, Cosmic Heritage, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-20261-2_6, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 65 66 Cosmic Heritage Planetary orbits are only stable in a universe with three spatial dimensions (not two or.
One universe – ours. 7. The Universe on Fast Forward For a bit of light relief, and in preparation for the next chapters, let’s now go back to our ‘own’ parochial universe and ‘run it forward’ from the Big Bang to the present, in the process summarizing the preceding chapters. Here’s what it would look like according to our current scientific knowledge. The Violent First Minutes From the instant of the Big Bang itself, the universe was exceedingly hot and dense; it was rapidly expanding,.
Transferred onto the white dwarf, providing it with a new energy source. As the matter accumulates on and around the white dwarf it gets hotter, ultimately reaching the point at which nuclear fusion can begin. This causes a thermonuclear flash on the surface of the white dwarf, and the binary system attains the luminosity of a hundred thousand stars for a period of a few weeks. This is called a nova. The accreted material is ejected, and the accumulation process starts all over again. Binaries.
(1996) wrote, “There is no evidence that humans have evolved new neuronal types and/or new forms of neural circuitry, new layers, new neurochemicals, or new areas that have no homologue in the primate brain.” In other words, the ingredients are identical. The common fundamental components are the forebrain, the midbrain, and the hindbrain, which is connected to the spinal cord. The most basic functions involve input of sensory information and output in the form of motor functions. In mammals.