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This is the website for ORIGINS, my book about the
latest research into the origin questions - the questions of
how the planets, stars, galaxies and the Universe itself were formed.
I have written the book for the general reader
(no previous scientific knowledge is needed at all) and it
is being published by Springer-Verlag in December 2006. My
book was partly a reaction to the
shelves of books
written about the first
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the
Big Bang, including the famous one by Steven Hawking. This tiny sliver of time is important
because it probably holds the answers to
some important questions, including the connection
between gravity and the other forces of nature.
However, according to the latest results from the WMAP satellite,
the Big Bang occurred - and therefor Time began -
13.7 billion years ago, and so this sliver is only an
infinitesimal fraction of the total history of the
Universe*.
I wrote my book to describe what we know about the
remainder of the history of the Universe, and
in particular to tell the
stories of how the planets, stars and galaxies that fill
the Universe today came into existence.
The main argument I make in the
book is that as the result of the revolution that
has occurred in observational astronomy during the
last decade, we now have fairly convincing answers to
three of the four origin questions, even if many
of the details have yet to be worked out.
In the book I
have also tried to tell the human stories behind the scientific discoveries.
This website gives a rather dry summary of some of the
main scientific arguments (if you want the human
stories you will have to buy the book).
After the book is published, I also intend to
post regular updates about new research into the origins questions.
Stephen Eales
*To write a book that excludes 99.9999 per cent (I will not bother with the
remaining 37 digits) of the history of the Universe and then call it
A Brief History of Time does seem, to say the very least, rather
inaccurate.
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how the planets, stars, galaxies and the
