Download e-book for iPad: The Origins of Everything in 100 Pages by David Bercovici

By David Bercovici

ISBN-10: 0300215134

ISBN-13: 9780300215137

Covering 13.8 billion years in a few a hundred pages, a calculatedly concise, wryly clever historical past of every thing, from the massive Bang to the appearance of human civilization

With ask yourself, wit, and flair—and in checklist time and space—geophysicist David Bercovici explains how every thing got here to be far and wide, from the production of stars and galaxies to the formation of Earth’s surroundings and oceans, to the foundation of lifestyles and human civilization. Bercovici marries humor and legit medical intrigue, rocketing readers throughout approximately fourteen billion years and making connections among the basic theories that provide us our present knowing of issues as diverse as particle physics, plate tectonics, and photosynthesis. Bercovici’s distinct literary pastime is a treasure trove of actual, compelling technological know-how and interesting background, offering either technological know-how fans and entire neophytes with an unforgettable advent to the fields of cosmology, geology, weather technology, human evolution, and more.

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Extra resources for The Origins of Everything in 100 Pages

Example text

Although they are small, they will maintain this state of “burning” hydrogen for a very long time. The reason for this slow burn is that the process of fusing hydrogen atoms is itself infrequent, since it is essentially impossible to get four hydrogen nuclei, or protons, to stick together at once to make one helium nucleus. Thus, the process involves several steps in what is called the proton-proton reaction sequence. In this case, the first two protons slam together, overcoming their electrical repulsion, and join briefly to make a two-proton nucleus that is a light isotope of helium.

And thus at that point, our star will really be dead, and after shedding its remaining hydrogen and helium atmosphere, it will leave behind a very slowly cooling, glowing body made of extremely dense carbon and oxygen, called a white dwarf, with a size about one-hundredth that of our Sun. The death of giant stars is more cataclysmic but also more productive. Once a giant star has used up its fusion fuel, it also starts to collapse again. However, it is so large the collapse is very sudden and violent, and the rebound of its outer layer off the denser core creates a massive shock wave and explosion, a supernova.

Thus, if red supergiant stars lived as long as our small star, then most would still exist today and very few would have given up their elements to make solar systems elsewhere. But because of their extreme temperatures and pressures, the red supergiants (and the first stars that ever formed, when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old) rapidly churn out heavier elements and burn through their fuel quickly. This entire process of burning through hydrogen to produce elements up to iron is so fast that a giant star finishes its work, uses up its fuel, and explodes to seed other pre-solar clouds in just a few million years.

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The Origins of Everything in 100 Pages by David Bercovici


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