Our Living Multiverse

This was one heavy book. And at 250 pages and bound in paperback, I don't mean that physically. Fred Adams has spent seven chapters bringing us from the beginning of time through the development of intelligent life. Never before have I seen astrophysics, atomic physics, and biochemistry so beautifully intertwined. Adams does his best to make his material understandable for the common man, but he doesn't go as far as dumbing down the information enough to put it in layman's terms. Because of this, I often found myself having to reread passages or at least taking them very, very slowly. I've actually been reading this book for a couple of weeks, interspersing a few of the chapters with the children's books you've seen peppering my late August reading list. Without daring to even try to explain any of what Our Living Multiverse has taught me, I'll give a few highlights in a nutshell. Here it goes. There are ten or eleven possible spatial dimensions. Our particular universe includes only three of them. Outside of our universe are many others. This entire network of space-time is called the Multiverse. The average lifespan of a universe is 10^-47 seconds, an unfathomably small amount of time. In fact, outside of our own universe, and before it was created, the concept of "time" is irrelevant. Still, while "time" began along with our universe 14 billion years ago in the big bang event, the raw mess of space-time from which it emerged has been extant forever, and always will be. While our sun and galaxy are by no means "special," our universe is; it has survived for 10⁶⁰ times as long as the average one, and is expected to expand forever, thus lasting forever. This infinite expansion is thanks to the presence of dark energy, which acts as a negative pressure. While gravity alone would eventually pull every piece of matter in our universe back together in a collapse of proportions as epic as the big bang itself, dark energy will instead always continue to stretch the universe. The universe itself will thus never die, but everything in it has a definitive lifespan. Protons themselves will decay into energy eventually, some trillions of trillions of trillions of years from now. Our sun will flicker out (after a brief stint as a red giant) in just 4 or 5 billion years. Our galaxy itself will collide and combine with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in just 3 billion years. In just 1.1 billion years, our sun will grow too bright and powerful for water to exist in its liquid form on Earth. Within the next million years, a red dwarf star may or may not come close enough to our solar system to severely alter our planet's orbit, destroying the delicate balance of seasonal change that most ecosystems thrive on. The planet could be ejected from its orbit altogether, careening off into empty space where all life on the surface would freeze over and die. Does this sound grim? It shouldn't. Human civilization spans back about 10,000 years at most. While our sun and planet may be middle-aged, we as a species are still in our infancy, much like the universe itself. Part of what made this book so great was that in addition to answering a lot of questions, it creates new ones, most of them unanswerable. Is there other life out there? Can we survive the end of the earth? Most importantly, while Adams never alludes to God or religion at all - something I commend him for doing - it was impossible for me, and I would think most people, to read the book without wondering about such concepts and their role in all of this. I think that atheists and the faithful alike can enjoy this book, so long as they can get over the whole creation story and be willing to accept a new one as, well, factually true. It's the most engrossing scientific book I've ever read, as well as the most epic in scope. I recommend it for any interested party, but be warned: it's not for those who don't want to put in the effort to understand what's being said. I'm not saying you need a PhD to comprehend what's going on, but I mean, even the most elementary understanding of quantum mechanics - quarks, wavefunctions, particle-wave duality - would be helpful. I don't know if this book changed my outlook on life in any meaningful or permanent way, but it certainly was engrossing to read and will be worth remembering. If you've got what it takes to handle it, give it a try. If not, you can always try a special on the Discovery Channel.