There is something for every taste. The editors of the weekly supplement “Science & Medicine” have read and selected for you these books which will take you on a journey from the first seconds of the Big Bang to the railway networks, passing through the time of the dinosaurs and the landscapes of Van Gogh.
The origins of knowledge on Earth
Some might see it as a biblical tale. In the beginning, a second following the Big Bang, the original soup consisted only of particles, neutrons, protons, electrons and other neutrinos. It was 13.8 billion years ago. At the end, or more exactly at our end, when the planet Earth will have been pulverized by the Sun ending its life as a star, by 7.6 billion years from now, part of the particles constituting our bodies, the animals , the forests or the oceans will be expelled at an incredible speed beyond the Solar System and even out of our galaxy to, who knows, provide the elementary material necessary for the appearance of life in another world…
Between these two cataclysmic stages, the process by which these same particles arranged or transformed so that galaxies formed, stars lit up, planetary systems were created and life appeared is detailed with clarity in this book written for the non-specialists. Alain Riazuelo, CNRS researcher and astrophysicist at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, takes the reader on two parallel paths with obvious pleasure. That of the phenomena at work in the Universe, whose time scale is therefore a billion years, and that of their understanding by humanity and its scientists. On the second path, the pace of upheaval is measured more in centuries, even in decades.
As for a puzzle of which one cannot place a piece without attaching it to another already placed, the author recounts the epic of knowledge, emphasizing how such a statement by Galileo on heliocentrism and such an equation by Henri Poincaré on the orbits of the stars might not have been designed without relying on the observations and work of their predecessors. “Science is a collective work, and what is most precious is knowing how to stimulate a new direction of research, which will be refined little by little by future generations. Being right right away is not decisive as long as we give the means to others to achieve it”writes Alain Riazuelo.
The reader follows the most illustrious astronomers, physicists and mathematicians step by step through the stages of the formation of the Earth and the appearance of life. The author’s pedagogy makes it possible to transform counter-intuitive information into luminous evidence: the bigger a star, the more quickly it will consume its resources and the shorter its life will be; it is an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide and methane that allowed the emergence of life on our telluric planet, and not oxygen, which was almost absent.
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