The State of the Universe

It is science's last and greatest challenge: fathoming the depths of the night sky. The objective: to crack to cosmic code, to unravel the blueprint for nature's grandest conception, a machine constructed on an unimaginably vast scale - the Universe itself.

Today's model of an expanding Universe - the Big Bang cosmology - is actually built on principles derived from a few simple mathematical equations. Gravity-warped space - time, quantum mechanics, the physics of the subatomic - these crucial insights, stemming from Einstein's revolutionary theories of relativity, have led to a simple and elegant framework within which the whole of the Universe, over billions of years, has been described. But recent evidence has begun to make wrinkles in the neat fabric of the big bang cosmology. There is now overwhelming evidence that there is more stuff in the Universe than we can see. And it now appears that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating: something out there - some exotic 'dark energy' - is acting against gravity to push space and time apart...

“Ferreira does a good job of balancing the likely with the improbable -- Financial Times , -”

Authoritative, accurate, clear and up to date--The Independent
Deeply interesting--Guardian
Ferreira does a good job of balancing the likely with the improbable--Financial Times

Pedro G. Ferreira is a Lecturer in Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Tutor and Fellow of Oriel College. He studied physics at the Technical University of Lisbon and obtained a doctorate from Imperial College, London in 1995. He was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2000.

Jen Finer is an artist, musician and composer living in London. From 2003 until 2005 he was an artist in residence in the Astrophysics Department at the University of Oxford.

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State Of The Universe (HC Jun 06)

The universe is a mess. Or rather, our understanding of it is. That's the message of this lively introduction to the conundrums shaking up the field of cosmology. Pedro Ferreira, a noted lecturer in astrophysics at Oxford, explains how a universe once ruled by Einstein's simple equations has given way to a more complex and confusing one: where mysterious "dark matter" outweighs visible matter a hundred to one, and "dark energy" seems to be hurling the galaxies apart. Ferreira takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of astronomy to show how we arrived here, clarifying today's many contending theories.

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