First Dawn From the Big Bang to Our Future in Space

From the very first moments of the universe to the birth of the first star, our solar system, and our planet: a physicist traces the known and the unknown.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the horizon of our knowledge about the universe has expanded to encompass the infinitesimally small—and the infinitely vast. In First Dawn, physicist Roberto Battiston takes readers on a journey through space and time, to the boundaries of our knowledge and beyond. From the violence of the Big Bang and the birth of the first star, hundreds of millions of years later, to the emergence of our solar system, the dawn of life on Earth, and the possibility of life on other planets, Battiston maps what we know about the universe and how we came to know it—cautioning us, however, that what we know is a minuscule fraction of what there is to know.
 
Battiston outlines discoveries by some of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, including Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Fermi, and Hubble; discusses the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter; and considers what it means for the universe to have emerged out of nothing. The ignition of the first star illuminated a universe that had been expanding, unobserved and unobservable, in the dark. Drawing on his own research, Battiston discusses the birth of the Sun, the formation of planets, the origins of life, interstellar migrations, extrasolar planets, black holes, gravitational waves, and much more. But, he warns, for some questions—the dimensions of the universe, for example, or the existence of other universes—we are destined to remain in the realm of speculation.
 

Roberto Battiston is a physicist who specializes in the field of experimental fundamental and elementary particles physics, both at particle accelerators and in space. He is the author of A Dialogue between an Artist and a Scientist, Quantum Mechanics for Dummies, Making Space, and The Mathematics of the Virus.

Foreword by Marcia Bartusiak IX
Preface XIII
1 Lights Beyond the Horizon 1
2 Traveling Companions 5
3 The Laws of the Cosmos 9
4 Knowing that we Don't Know 17
5 Elephants in the Room 23
6 Fiat Lux? 29
7 Space 33
8 Ten Infernal Minutes 39
9 And There Was Not Light 49
10 The First Dawn of the Cosmos 53
11 A Special Star 57
12 The Dawn of the Solar System 61
13 The Earth and Its Climate 67
14 The Dawn of Life 71
15 Interstellar Migrations 77
16 Other Suns, Other Worlds 83
17 Where Are They? 89
18 The Dark Side of the Cosmos 93
19 The Organization of the Universe 99
20 Black Holes 103
21 Toward a New Astronomy 111
22 Toward the Infinitely Large 119
23 Toward the Infinitely Small 123
24 Big Science 129
25 The Universe as a Laboratory 135
26 A Special Particle 139
27 Antimatter 143
28 Hunting for Antimatter in Space 149
29 New Territories, New Dawns 155
30 The Dawn of Astronautics 167
31 The Dawn of the Next Star 171
32 Even More Satellites, Even Smaller 175
33 The Dawn of the Future 181
Acknowledgments 189
Index 191