Contents

Introduction

Part One: In the Beginning

The Creation of the Universe by Professor Stephen Hawking
A Voyage Across the Universe by Professor Bernard Carr
Uniformity in Space
The Theory of Everything
The Big Bang
The Expansion of the Universe
Did Life Come from Mars? by Dr Brandon Carter
How Did Life Begin?
The History of Life by Professor Michael J. Reiss
Genetics by Professor Ammar Al Chalabi

Part Two: What on Earth?

Earth: What’s It Made Of?
How Long Is a ‘Day’ on Earth?
The Goldilocks Zone
The Oceans of Earth by Professor Ros E. M. Rickaby
Volcanoes on Earth, in our Solar System and Beyond by Professor
Tamsin A. Mather
What Is the Earth Made Of?
Particle Collisions
Uncertainty and Schrödinger’s Cat
M-Theory – Eleven Dimensions!
The Building Blocks of Life by Dr Toby Blench
Flat-Earthers, Moon-Hoaxers and Anti-Vaxxers by Dr Sophie Hodgetts

Part Three: Exploring the Universe

Space Diving
The Night Sky
Our Moon
Light and Stars
The Solar System
Mercury
Venus
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto
Bits and Pieces
Exoplanets
Alpha Centauri
55 Cancri
Andromeda
Satellites in Space
The Multiverse by Professor Thomas Hertog

Part Four: Dark Matters

The Dark Side of the Moon
The Dark Side of the Universe by Dr Paul Davies
Dark Matter and Dark Energy
What You Need to Know About Black Holes by Professor Stephen
Hawking
Singularities
Going Dark
Black Holes by Sasha Haco

Part Five: Life in Space

Why Do We Go Into Space? by Professor Stephen Hawking
Life on Mars – For Real?
Building Rockets for Mars by Allyson Thomas
Imagining a Life on Mars by Kellie Gerardi
Humans in Space
The Overview Effect by Dr Richard Garriott de Cayeux
The Drake Equation
Zero-Gravity Flights
Robotic Space Travel
Comets
Light and How It Travels Through Space
Getting in Touch with Aliens by Dr Seth Shostak
How Sound Travels Through Space
Is There Anyone Out There? by Lord Martin Rees

Part Six: Time Travel …

Wormholes and Time Travel by Dr Kip S. Thorne
Space, Time and Relativity
Time Travel and the Mystery of the Moving Clocks by Professor Peter
McOwan

Part Seven: … To the Future!

My Robot, Your Robots by Professor Peter McOwan
Robot Ethics by Dr Kate Darling
Artificial Intelligence by Dr Demis Hassabis
On the Ethics of AI by Carissa Véliz
What Is a Computer?
The Universal Turing Machine
What Can’t a Computer Do?
Quantum Computers by Dr Raymond Laflamme
3D Printing by Dr Tim Prestidge
Driverless Cars
Problems Facing Our Planet
The Future of Food by Dr Marco Springmann
The Future of Politics is … You! by Andy Taylor
Cities of the Future by Beth West
The Internet: Privacy, Identity and Information by Dave King
Climate Change by Nitya Kapadia

Afterword

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Index
 About the Authors

STEPHEN HAWKING was a brilliant theoretical physicist,

generally considered to have been one of the world’s greatest thinkers.
He was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of
Cambridge and was the author of A Brief History of Time, which was an
international bestseller. His other books for the general reader include A
Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby
Universe, The Universe in a Nutshell, and Brief Answers to the Big
Questions. He died on 14 March 2018.

LUCY HAWKING uses storytelling to help audiences

understand and engage with science. She is the co-creator of the George
series with her father, Stephen Hawking, which was a global hit,
translated into over forty languages. Among the awards Lucy has
received for her work is an honorary doctorate of sciences by Queen
Mary University of London. Over the past four years, Lucy created two
hugely successful projects with the European Space Agency and Curved
House to increase STEM engagement in primary schools through arts-
based learning. Lucy has made radio documentaries for the BBC and a
virtual-reality lm with the Guardian Media Group about autism in
teenage girls. She is chair of the Stephen Hawking Foundation.
‘Remember to look up at the stars and not down at
your feet’

Stephen Hawking
 Introduction

Throughout my life, I had the extraordinary privilege of spending time

with, talking to, and asking questions of some of the world’s greatest and
most innovative scientists who were the friends and colleagues of my
father, Stephen. My father was an amazing scientist who realized how
important it was to talk about the work he did in ways that people could
understand. He thought that everyone had the right to know what
scientists did and what it meant. So, to me, it seemed entirely normal to
be a schoolgirl who asked questions – and got answers. Sometimes the
answers were ba ing or thoughtprovoking or even made me angry. But
I got answers from people who knew what they were talking about. And
listening to them or asking yet more questions made me feel as though
I could reach out and touch the magni cence of the Universe.
When I grew up, I realized how unusual it was to have had this
opportunity. If I’ve tried to do one thing with my work, it is to share the
great piece of luck I had in life to have access to these fascinating,
original, creative, brilliant and hilarious people by putting them into the
books. Starting with my father’s amazing essay in our rst book
together, George’s Secret Key to the Universe, the whole George series is
enriched and illuminated by the voices of these diverse and fabulous
scientists and experts, writing about their research and their lives’ work
for young readers.
Of course, thanks to the internet, we now have lots of information that
is more available and much easier to access than when I was a child. But
what does it all mean? And how do you know that what you read on the
internet is true? My father and I realized, as we wrote together, that we
could turn information into knowledge with the help of our ‘family’ of
experts and scientists.
 Unlocking the Universe brings all the wonderful essays and facts we
had collected together into one book – and includes some amazing new
content as well, on topics I’ve always wanted to explore, such as
genetics, the multiverse and a new essay on black holes. Our newest
writers also tackle the ethics of AI and the problem of science denial –
and our youngest ever contributor takes on climate change and how it
feels to be a teenager in a global-warming world.
It seems such a long time since my father and I rst had the idea to
write about what would happen to a boy if he fell into a black hole. That
rst book we wrote together was inspired by a question put to my father
at a birthday party. That question sent us on a mission to write a book to
answer it – and now, here at our seventh and nal book, I think we can
honestly say that if you ask a question, you never know what might
happen as a result. In George’s Secret Key to the Universe, scientist and
Annie’s dad Eric is writing a book for kids called ‘A User’s Guide to the
Universe’. And that’s what this book is.
It’s a pleasure and a privilege to embark on this journey with you. If
you’re a reader of ours already, thank you! And if you’re not – jump on
board the spaceship and prepare for lift o ! Good luck on all your
cosmic adventures and remember: don’t y too close to a black hole …

Lucy Hawking
 The Creation of the
Universe
Professor STEPHEN HAWKING

There are many di erent stories about how the world started o . For
example, according to the Bushongo people of central Africa, in the
beginning there was only darkness, water and the great god Bumba. One
day Bumba, in pain from a stomach ache, vomited up the Sun. The Sun
dried up some of the water, leaving land. Still in pain, Bumba vomited up
the Moon, the stars and then some animals – the leopard, the crocodile,
the turtle and nally man.
Other peoples have other stories. They were early attempts to answer
the Big Questions:
 • Why are we here?

• Where did we come from?

The rst scienti c evidence to answer these questions was discovered
about a century ago. It was found that other galaxies are moving away
from us. The Universe is expanding; galaxies are getting further apart.
This means that galaxies were closer together in the past. Nearly 14
billion years ago, the Universe would have been in a very hot and dense
state. The moment it started to move apart is called the Big Bang.
The Universe started o with the Big Bang expanding faster and
faster. This is called in ation, which also describes the way in which
prices in the shops can go up and up. In ation in the early Universe was
much more rapid than in ation in prices: we think in ation is high if
prices double in a year, but the Universe doubled in size many times in a
tiny fraction of a second.
In ation made the Universe very large and very smooth and at. But it
wasn’t completely smooth: there were tiny variations in the Universe
from place to place. These variations caused minute di erences in the
temperature of the early Universe, which we can see in what is known as
the cosmic microwave background. The variations mean that some
regions will be expanding slightly slower. The slower regions will
eventually stop expanding and collapse to form galaxies and stars. We
owe our existence to these variations. If the early Universe had been
completely smooth, there would be no galaxies or stars and so life
couldn’t have developed.

The Big Bang

The Big Bang is a theory – an idea or a group of ideas – about how the
Universe began. Scientists look for evidence to show that their ideas
are correct. Most scientists accept the Big Bang theory.
 A Voyage Across the
Universe
Professor BERNARD CARR
School of Physics and Astronomy,
Queen Mary University of London

Before setting out we must understand what we mean by the terms

‘voyage’ and ‘Universe’. The word ‘Universe’ literally means everything
that exists. However, the history of astronomy might be regarded as a
sequence of steps, and at each step the Universe has appeared to get
bigger. So what we mean by ‘everything’ has changed over time.
Nowadays most cosmologists accept the Big Bang theory – according
to which the Universe started in a state of great compression around 14
billion years ago. This means that the furthest we can see is the distance
that light has travelled since the Big Bang. This de nes the size of the
observable Universe.
So what is meant by a ‘voyage’? First we must distinguish between
peering across the Universe and travelling across it. Peering is what
astronomers do and, as we will see, involves looking back in time.
Travelling is what astronauts do and involves crossing space. Travelling
can also involve another kind of voyage. For as we travel from the Earth
to the edge of the observable Universe, we are essentially retracing the
history of human thought about the scale of the Universe. We will now
discuss these three journeys in turn.

The voyage back through time

The information astronomers receive comes from electromagnetic
waves that travel at the speed of light (300,000 km/186,000 miles per
second). This is very fast but it is nite and astronomers often measure
distance by the equivalent light travel time. Light takes several minutes
to reach us from the Sun, for instance, but years from the nearest star,
millions of years from the nearest big galaxy (Andromeda) and many
billions of years from the most distant galaxies.
This means that as one peers across greater distances, one is also
looking further into the past. For example, if we observe a galaxy 10
million light years away, we are seeing it as it was 10 million years ago. A
voyage across the Universe in this sense is therefore not only a journey
through space; it is also a journey back through time – right back to the
Big Bang itself.
We cannot actually observe all the way back to the Big Bang. The early
Universe was so hot that it formed a fog of particles that we cannot see
through. As the Universe expanded, it cooled and about 380,000 years
after the Big Bang the fog lifted. However, we can still use our theories to
speculate about what the Universe was like before then. Since the
density and temperature increase as we go back in time, our speculation
depends on our theories in an area called high energy physics, but we
now have a fairly complete picture of the history of the Universe.
One might expect that our voyage back through time would end at the
Big Bang. However, scientists are now trying to understand the physics
of creation itself, and any mechanism that can produce our Universe
could in principle generate others. For example, some people believe the
Universe undergoes cycles of expansion and collapse, giving us
universes strung out in time. Others think that our Universe is just one
of many ‘bubbles’ spread out in space. These are variants of what is
called the ‘multiverse’ proposal.
 The voyage across space
Travelling across the Universe physically is much more challenging
because of the time it would take. The physicist Albert Einstein proposed
two important theories about space and time. In his special theory of
relativity (1905) he suggests that no spaceship could travel faster than the
speed of light. This means it would take at least 100,000 years to cross
the Galaxy and 10 billion years to cross the Universe – at least as judged
by someone who stays on Earth. But special relativity also predicts that
time ows more slowly for moving observers, so the trip could be much
quicker for the astronauts themselves. Indeed, if one could travel at the
speed of light, no time at all would pass!
No spaceship can travel as fast as light, but one could still gradually
accelerate towards this maximum speed; the time experienced would
then be much shorter than that on Earth. For example, if one were
propelled with the acceleration with which bodies fall due to gravity on
Earth, a journey across our Milky Way Galaxy would only seem to take
about 30 years. One could therefore return to Earth in one’s own lifetime,
although one’s friends would have died long ago. If one continued to
accelerate beyond the Galaxy for a century, one could, in principle, travel
to the edge of the currently observable Universe!
Einstein’s other theory, the general theory of relativity (1915) could
allow even more exotic possibilities. For example, maybe astronauts
could one day use wormholes or space warp e ects – just like in Star
Trek and other popular science ction series – to make these journeys
even faster and get home again without losing any friends. But this is all
very speculative.
 The voyage through the history of
human thought about the Universe
To the ancient Greeks, the Earth was the centre of the Universe, with the
planets, the Sun and the stars being relatively close. This geocentric view
(geos = Earth) was demolished in the sixteenth century, when Copernicus
showed that the Earth and other planets move round the Sun (helios).
However, this heliocentric picture did not last very long. Several decades
later, Galileo used his newly invented telescope to show that the Milky
Way – then known only as a band of light in the sky – consists of
numerous stars like the Sun. This discovery not only diminished the
status of the Sun, it also vastly increased the size of the known Universe.
By the eighteenth century it was accepted that the Milky Way is a disc
of stars (the Galaxy) held together by gravity. However, most astronomers
still assumed that the Milky Way comprised the whole Universe and this
galactocentric view persisted well into the twentieth century. Then, in
1924, Edwin Hubble measured the distance to our nearest neighbouring
big galaxy (Andromeda) and showed that it had to be well outside the
Milky Way. Another shift in the size of the Universe!
Within a few more years Hubble had obtained data on several dozen
nearby galaxies. His data showed that the galaxies are all moving away
from us at a speed that is proportional to their distances from us. The
easiest way to picture this is to think of space itself as expanding, just
like the surface of an in ating balloon on to which the galaxies are
painted. This expansion is known as Hubble’s Law, and it has now been
shown to apply up to distances of tens of billions of light years, a region
containing hundreds of billions of galaxies. Yet another huge shift of
scale!
The cosmocentric (cosmos = universe) view regards this as the nal
shift in the size of the Universe. This is because the cosmic expansion
means that, as one goes back in time, the galaxies get closer together and
eventually merge. Before that, the density just continues to increase –
back to the Big Bang 14 billion years ago – and we can never see beyond
the distance travelled by light since then. However, recently there has
been an interesting observational development. Although one expects
the expansion of the Universe to slow down because of gravity, current
observations suggest that it is actually accelerating. Theories to explain
this suggest that our observable Universe could be a part of a much
larger ‘bubble’. And this bubble could itself be just one of many bubbles!

What next?
So the endpoint of all three of our journeys – the rst back through time,
the second across space, and the third retracing the history of human
thought – is the same: those unobservable universes which can only be
glimpsed through theories and visited in our minds!
 Albert Einstein
(1879–1955)

Albert Einstein, a physicist and mathematician, was born in Germany,

but his family then moved to Italy, then to Switzerland. He showed an
interest in science from an early age – at 5 he was fascinated by a
compass, and the way the needle kept pointing in the same direction.
At the age of 12, he taught himself algebra and geometry.
In 1905, when he was 26, he published three papers about science.
One of them, ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’, is better
known as ‘the special theory of relativity’. Ten years later, in 1915, he
produced his ‘general theory of relativity’.
Einstein was Jewish, and in December 1932, a month before Adolf
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Einstein gave up his German
citizenship. He moved to the USA, where he lived for the rest of his
life. He was a pacifist, and he was opposed to the atom bomb. He
wanted peace among all nations and a world government.
Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. He
is considered by many as the greatest mathematical physicist of all
time.
 Einstein’s Theories

The Theory of Special Relativity

Everything in the Universe is moving. Relativity describes the links
between space, time and movement. In his theory of special relativity,
Einstein proposed that the speed of light in a vacuum will be the same
for any observer, however much the source of light may be moving.
Also, the laws of physics are the same for all observers if they are in
uniform motion relative to one another. This theory produces some
interesting results, including the facts that energy and mass are
interchangeable and that nothing can travel faster than light. From
this theory comes Einstein’s famous theorem:

E = mc2
The Theory of General Relativity
This is about gravity. Einstein argued that matter in space distorts the
space around it – it curves it. The curving is what we think of as
gravity, but the sort of geometry we normally use only works on things
that are flat, so can’t be used to describe curved space. General
relativity describes how gravity affects time as well as space.
 Uniformity in Space

In order to apply general relativity to the Universe as a whole, we usually

make some assumptions:

Every location in space should behave in the same way

(homogeneity).
Every direction in space should look the same (isotropy).

This leads to a picture of the Universe which:

is uniform in space
starts with a Big Bang
and then expands equally everywhere.

This picture is strongly supported by astronomical observations –

what we can see in space through telescopes on the ground and in space.
Yet the Universe can’t be exactly uniform in space, because this would
mean that structures like galaxies, stars, solar systems, planets and
people couldn’t exist. A pattern of tiny ripples over the uniformity is
needed to explain how the rst patches of gas and dark matter could
begin to collapse, so that the laws of physics could go on to create stars
and planets.

Find out more about dark matter on pages 20 and 191.

 Because the gas and dark matter start out nearly uniform, and because
we believe the same laws of physics apply everywhere, we expect that all
galaxies form in a similar way. So distant galaxies should have similar
types of stars, planets, asteroids and comets to those that we can see in
our own Milky Way.
Where the initial tiny ripples came from is not yet completely
understood. The best theory at the moment is that they came from
microscopic quantum jitters that were magni ed by a very rapid early
expansion phase – called in ation – which took place during a very tiny
fraction of the rst second after the Big Bang.
Edwin Hubble was an American astronomer. At school, he was a star
athlete and had good grades in all subjects except spelling. As an
astronomer he worked in California, at the Mount Wilson Observatory.
In 1923, using the enormous 2.5m (100-inch) Hooker Telescope, he
gazed at the Andromeda Nebula. He found a special kind of star
called a Cepheid variable star that allowed him to work out that the
Andromeda Nebula was 900,000 light years from Earth. It could not
possibly be in our Milky Way Galaxy because our Galaxy’s radius is
52,850 light years – meaning the Andromeda Nebula was actually the
Andromeda Galaxy. This was the first time another galaxy had been
found and suggested the Universe was composed of many more,
some of which Hubble later found. He also worked out a way of
classifying galaxies by their shape, and that the further away a galaxy
was from the Solar System, the faster it would be travelling.
It’s since been calculated that Andromeda is 2 million light years
away, but nevertheless what Hubble discovered was groundbreaking
and proved that Andromeda was outside our Galaxy.
 The Theory of Everything
Throughout history, people have looked around and tried to understand
the amazing things they saw, asking:

• What are these objects?

• Why do they move and change

like that?

• Were they always there?

• What do they tell us about why

we’re here?
Only in the last few centuries have we started to nd scienti c answers.
In 1687 Isaac Newton, the great English mathematician and physicist,
published his Laws of Motion, describing how forces change the way
objects move, and the Law of Universal Gravitation, which says that every
object in the Universe attracts every other object with a force – gravity –
which is why we are stuck to the Earth’s surface, why the Earth orbits the
Sun, and how planets and stars were created. On the scale of planets,
stars and galaxies, gravity is the architect controlling the grand structure
of the Universe. Newton’s laws are still good enough to place satellites in
orbit and send spacecraft to other planets. But more modern theories,
including Einstein’s theories of relativity, are needed when objects are very
fast, or very massive, and yet another theory is needed to explain the
behaviour of very tiny things such as atoms and particles.
 The Laws of Motion
1. Every particle remains at rest, or in motion along a straight line
with constant velocity, unless acted on by an external force.

2. The rate of change of momentum of a particle is equal in

magnitude to the external force, and in the same direction as the
force.

3. If a particle exerts a force on a second particle, then the second

particle exerts an equal but opposite force on the first particle.

The Law of Universal Gravitation

Every particle in the Universe attracts every other particle with a force,
pointing along the line between the particles, which is directly
proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional
to the square of the distance between them.
 Sir Isaac Newton
(1642–1727)
Isaac Newton was an English mathematician and physicist. His father
died when he was a child and he was brought up by his grandmother.
When he was at school he enjoyed making sundials and water clocks.
There is a famous story that he saw an apple fall off a tree in an orchard at
home and he was inspired to work out the laws of gravity. He had
certainly worked out almost all of the universal laws of gravitation by the
time he was 23.
Newton also found that white light could be split into colours using a
prism. He invented a new kind of telescope. Although he was well known
among the scientists and mathematicians of his day, he did not publish
his work until quite late in his life. He was twice MP for Cambridge
University, and he was knighted in 1705.
 Quantum Theory
Classical theories are fine for big things, like galaxies, cars or even
bacteria. But they can’t explain how atoms work – in fact, they say atoms
can’t exist! In the early twentieth century, physicists realized they needed
to develop a completely new theory to account for the properties of very
small things like atoms or parts of atoms, such as electrons. This is
quantum theory. The version that sums up our current knowledge of
fundamental particles and forces is known as the Standard Model. It has
quarks and leptons (the component particles of matter), force particles
(the gluon, photon, W and Z), and the Higgs boson (which is needed to
explain part of the masses of the other particles). Many scientists think
this is too complicated, and would like a simpler model.
Also, where is the dark matter astronomers have discovered? And
what about gravity? The force particle for gravity is called the graviton, but
adding it to the Standard Model is difficult because gravity is very
different – it changes the shape of space–time.
A theory explaining all the forces and all the particles – a Theory of
Everything – might look very different to anything we have seen before,
because it would need to explain space–time as well as gravity. But if it
exists, it should explain the physical workings of the whole Universe,
including the heart of black holes, the Big Bang and the far future of the
cosmos. Finding it would be a spectacular achievement.
 Dark Matter
Dark matter is an idea. The Universe behaves in a way that cannot be
explained by the amount of material we can see. A galaxy would have
to be about ten times bigger than the galaxy we can see to explain its
behaviour. Scientists don’t know what else might be present – they
can’t see anything – so they call the missing part dark matter. It could
be particles, or very small dim stars, or black holes – some scientists
think dark matter could be hot, and some think it could be cold.
Discussions – and research – continue.
 Max Planck
(1858–1947)
Max Planck was a German mathematical physicist. He could have
been a musician – he was a good singer, and he played the piano,
organ and cello well – but he decided to be a scientist instead. He was
interested in thermodynamics – how objects take in, or absorb, heat
energy, and give it out, or emit it. In his quantum theory, which came
out in 1900, Planck proposed that energy was absorbed or emitted in
small bursts, called quanta. In 1905, Planck’s work led Albert Einstein
to independently produce a similar theory about light. Max Planck
won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
 The Big Bang
Imagine that you are sitting inside the Universe at this very early time
(obviously, you couldn’t sit outside it). You would have to be very tough
because the temperatures and pressures inside this Big Bang soup are so
tremendously high. Back then, all the matter that we see around us today
was squeezed into a region much smaller than an atom.
It’s a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and everything looks
much the same in all directions. There is no reball racing outwards;
instead, there is a hot blob of material, lling all of space.

What is this material? We aren’t certain – it may be particles of a type

we don’t see today; it may even be little loops of ‘string’; but it will
definitely be ‘exotic’ stuff that we couldn’t expect to see now, even in
our largest particle accelerators.

Find out about particle accelerators on page 91.

When the Big Bang occurs, this blob of very hot exotic matter is
expanding as the space it lls grows bigger – matter in all directions is
streaming away from you, and the blob is becoming less dense. The
further away the matter is, the more space is expanding between you and
it, so the faster the matter moves away.

The furthest material is actually moving away from you faster

than the speed of light!

A lot of complicated changes now happen very fast – all in the rst
second after the Big Bang. The expansion of the tiny Universe allows the
hot exotic uid to cool. This causes sudden changes, like when water
changes as it cools to form ice.
The early Universe is still much smaller than an atom. One of the
changes in the uid causes a stupendous increase in the speed of
expansion (in ation). The size of the Universe doubles, then doubles
again, and again, and so on until it has doubled in size around 90 times,
increasing from subatomic to human scale. Like pulling a bedspread
straight, this enormous stretching attens out any big bumps in the
material so that the Universe we eventually see will be very smooth and
almost the same in all directions.

On the other hand, microscopic ripples in the uid are also stretched
and made much bigger, and these will trigger the formation of stars and
galaxies later.
In ation ends abruptly and releases a large amount of energy, which
creates a wash of new particles. The exotic matter has disappeared and
been replaced by more familiar particles – including quarks (the building
blocks of protons and neutrons, although it is still too hot for these to
form), antiquarks, gluons (which y between both quarks and
antiquarks), photons (the particles light is made of), electrons and other
particles well known to physicists. There may also be particles of dark
matter, but although it seems these have to appear, we don’t yet
understand what they are.
 Where did the exotic matter go? Some of it was hurled away from us
during inflation, to regions of the Universe we may never see; some of
it decayed into less exotic particles as the temperature fell. The
material all around us is much less hot and dense than it was, though
still much hotter and denser than anywhere today (including inside
stars). The Universe is filled with a hot, luminous fog (known as
plasma) made mainly from quarks, antiquarks and gluons.

Expansion continues (at a much slower rate than during in ation), and
eventually the temperature falls enough for the quarks and antiquarks to
bind together in groups of two or three, forming protons, neutrons and
other particles, including a type known as hadrons. Still little can be seen
through the luminous foggy plasma as the Universe reaches one second
old.

When two particles with different numbers of electrons start

reacting to each other, something called an ionic bond is
formed, and the particle becomes charged – either positively or
negatively.

Over the next few seconds, there are reworks as most of the matter
and antimatter produced so far annihilate each other, producing oods of
new photons. The fog is now mainly protons, neutrons, electrons, dark
matter and (most of all) photons, but the charged protons and electrons
stop the photons travelling very far, so visibility in this expanding and
cooling fog is still very poor.

Antimatter
In antimatter, particles are the same as those that make up
ordinary matter, but everything about them, including their
electric charge, is reversed. If ordinary matter and antimatter
meet, they destroy each other.
 HYDROGEN ATOM

When the Universe is a few minutes old, the surviving protons and the
neutrons combine to form atomic nuclei, mainly of what will become
hydrogen and helium. These are still charged, so the fog remains
impossible to see through. At this point, the foggy material is not unlike
what you would nd inside a star today, but of course it lls the whole
Universe.
After the frantic action of the rst few minutes of existence, the
Universe stays much the same for the next few hundred thousand years,
continuing to expand and cool down, the hot fog becoming steadily
thinner, dimmer and redder as the wavelengths of light are stretched by
the expansion of space.
Then, after 380,000 years, when the part of the Universe that we will
eventually see from Earth has grown to be millions of light years across,
the fog nally clears – electrons are captured by the hydrogen and
helium nuclei to form whole atoms. Because the electric charges of the
electrons and nuclei cancel each other out, the complete atoms are not
charged, so the photons can now travel uninterrupted – the Universe has
become transparent.
After this long wait in the fog, what do you see? Only a fading red glow
in all directions, which becomes redder and dimmer as the expansion of
space continues to stretch the wavelengths of the photons. Finally, the
light ceases to be visible at all and there is only darkness everywhere – we
have entered the Cosmic Dark Ages.
 The photons from that last glow have been travelling through the
Universe ever since, steadily becoming even redder – today they can be
detected as what is called cosmic microwave background (CMB)
radiation, and they are still arriving on Earth from every direction in the
sky.
The Universe’s Dark Ages last for a few hundred million years, during
which time there is literally nothing to see. The Universe is still lled
with matter, but almost all of it is dark matter, and the rest is hydrogen
and helium gas, and none of this produces any new light. In the
darkness, however, there are quiet changes.
The microscopic ripples, which were magni ed by in ation, have
meant that some regions contain slightly more mass than average. This
increases the pull of gravity towards those regions, bringing even more
mass in, and the dark matter, hydrogen gas and helium gas already there
are pulled closer together. Slowly, over millions of years, dense patches of
dark matter and gas gather as a result of this increased gravity, growing
gradually by pulling in more matter, and more rapidly by colliding and
merging with other patches. As the gas falls into these patches, the
atoms speed up and become hotter. Every now and then, the gas
becomes hot enough to stop collapsing, unless it can cool down by
emitting photons, or is compressed by collision with another cloud of
matter.
If the gas cloud collapses enough, it breaks into spherical blobs so
dense that the heat inside can no longer get out – nally, a point is
reached when hydrogen nuclei in the cores of the blobs are so hot and
squashed together that they start to fuse (meaning that they merge) into
nuclei of helium and release nuclear energy. You are sitting inside one of
these collapsing patches of dark matter and gas (because this is where
the Earth’s Galaxy will be one day), and you may be surprised when the
darkness around you is broken by the rst of these nearby blobs bursting
into bright light – these are the rst stars to be born, and the Dark Ages
are over.
The rst stars burn their hydrogen quickly, and in their nal stages
they fuse together whatever nuclei they can nd to create heavier atoms
than helium: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and the other heavier types of
atom which are all around us (and in us) today. These atoms are
scattered like ashes back into the nearby gas clouds in great explosions
and get swept up in the creation of the next generation of stars. The
process continues – new stars form from the accumulating gas and ash,
die and create more ash. As younger stars are created, the familiar spiral
shape of our Galaxy – the Milky Way – takes form. The same thing is
happening in similar patches of dark matter and gas peppered across the
visible Universe.

The Sun
Nine billion years have passed since the Big Bang, and now a
young star surrounded by planets, built from hydrogen and helium
gas and the ash from dead stars, takes shape and ignites.

In another 4.5 billion years the third planet out from this star could
still be the only place in the known Universe where human beings can
comfortably exist. They – you – will see stars, clouds of gas and dust,
galaxies and cosmic microwave background radiation everywhere in the
sky – but not the dark matter, which is most of what lies there. Neither
will you be able to see anything of those parts that are so distant that
even the CMB photons from there have yet to arrive. Indeed there may
be parts of the Universe from which light will never reach our planet at
all.
 The Expansion of the
Universe
The astronomer Edwin Hubble used the 2.5m (100-inch) telescope on
Mount Wilson, California, to study the night sky. He found that some of
the nebulae – fuzzy, luminous specks in the night sky – are in fact
galaxies, like our Milky Way (although the galaxies could be of widely
varying sizes), each containing billions and billions of stars. And he
discovered a remarkable fact: other galaxies appear to be moving away
from us, and the further they are from us, the faster their apparent
speed. Suddenly humanity’s Universe became much, much larger.
The Universe is still expanding: distances between galaxies are
increasing with time. Think again of the Universe as the surface of a
balloon on which one has painted blobs to represent galaxies. If one
blows up the balloon, the blobs or galaxies move away from each other;
the further apart they are, the faster the distance between them
increases.
 The Red Shift
Very hot objects in space, like stars, produce visible light, but as the
Universe is constantly expanding, these distant stars and their home
galaxies are moving away from Earth. This stretches their light as it
travels through space towards us – the further it travels, the more
stretched it becomes. The stretching makes visible light look redder –
which is known as the cosmological red shift.
The Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t always been as it is today. Were we to
travel back 3.5 billion years (to when the Earth was about 1 billion
years old), we would not be able to breathe.
The atmosphere 3.5 billion years ago contained no oxygen. It was
mostly made of nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane, but
the exact composition is not known. What is known, however, is that
huge volcanic eruptions occurred around that period, releasing
steam, carbon dioxide, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide into the
atmosphere. Hydrogen sulphide smells like rotten eggs and is
poisonous when encountered in large amounts.
Today, our atmosphere is made of approximately 78% nitrogen, 21%
oxygen and 0.93% argon. The remaining 0.07% is mostly carbon
dioxide (0.04%) and a mixture of neon, helium, methane, krypton
and hydrogen.
 Did Life Come from Mars?

Dr BRANDON CARTER
Laboratoire de l’Univers et de ses Théories,
l’Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, France

Where and when did life as we know

it begin? Did it begin on Earth? Or
could it have come from Mars?

A couple of centuries ago, most people believed that humans and other
species had been present since the creation of the Earth. The Earth was
thought to be, essentially, the whole of the material world, and the
creation was described as a rather sudden event, like the Big Bang that
the majority of scientists believe in today. This was taught in creation
stories, like the one in Genesis, the rst book of the Bible, and other
cultures throughout the world have similar stories of a one-o moment
of creation.
Although some astronomers did think about the vastness of space, its
study only really began after Galileo (1564–1642) made one of the rst-
ever telescopes. His discoveries showed that the Universe contained
many other worlds – some of which could, like our own planet, be
inhabited. The immensity of the Universe – and the evidence that its
creation must have happened long before our own species arrived on the
scene – did not begin to be generally recognized until much later on, in
what is known as the Age of Enlightenment. This was the eighteenth-
century period in which there were many inventions, such as the
hydrogen balloon, and particularly the steam engine. These inventions
triggered the technological and industrial revolution of the nineteenth
century. During that innovative time, the study of rock formation by
sedimentation in shallow seas led geologists to understand that such
processes must have been going on not just for thousands or even
millions of years, but for thousands of millions of years – what we now
call gigayears.
 Modern humans appear to have arrived in the rest of the world from
Africa 50,000 years ago, but modern archaeology has shown quite
clearly that it was only about 6,000 years ago that early human societies
began to develop what we call civilization – economic systems with the
exchange of di erent kinds of goods. A very important factor in any
civilization is the exchange not just of goods but of information. But how
was this information stored or spread? Suitable recording mechanisms
were needed.

Modern geophysicists now believe that Planet Earth, and our

Solar System, was formed about 4.5 to 4.6 gigayears ago, when
the Universe – now aged about 14 gigayears – was just over 9
gigayears old.

Scratching a Stone
Before the invention of paper and ink, one of the earliest methods
humans used to record information was marks scratched on clay
tablets – the distant ancestors of modern computer memory chips.
This sharing and collecting of knowledge, particularly the kind we now
call scientific, became an objective in its own right.

The relatively recent development of civilization depended, of course,

on the emergence of what has been called intelligent life: beings with a
su cient sense of self-awareness to recognize themselves in a mirror.
There are several known examples on our own planet: elephants and
dolphins, as well as anthropoids – the group that includes chimpanzees
and other apes, Neanderthals, and modern human beings like us. So far,
no signs of intelligent life have been detected elsewhere in the Universe.

1,000,000,000 years = 1 gigayear

 How did these intelligent life forms
on Earth come into being?
Fossil remains had suggested the idea that modern plants and animals
could have arisen from other life forms present on Earth in earlier times,
but people couldn’t understand how the various species could be so well
adapted without having been designed in advance. The idea of
continuous evolution became generally accepted only after Charles
Darwin, in his book On the Origin of Species (published in 1859)
explained the principle of adaptation by a process he called natural
selection. Understanding how this actually works, however, only became
possible much more recently (in the late 1950s), when we discovered
DNA.
This modern DNA-based understanding of the evolutionary process is
supported by the fossil record – as far as it goes. The trouble is that the
record does not go very far back – less than a gigayear, which is only a
fraction of the total age of the Earth.

Turn to page 50 to find out more about Charles Darwin’s

theory of natural selection.

Early, simple life forms developed before what is known in geology as

the Cambrian era. This was a period of about 53 million years, and it was
the rst time period in what is known as the Paleozoic era. We can see
fairly clearly how (though not precisely why) what we should recognize
as intelligent life forms evolved from early life forms over the last 500
million years. But there is no proper record of how the pre-Cambrian life
forms evolved in the rst place.
One problem is that it is only since the Cambrian era that large bony
animals, which easily turn into fossils, have been present. Their largest
predecessors are believed to have been soft-bodied creatures (like
modern jelly sh); further back in time the only life forms seem to have
been microscopic single-celled creatures. These don’t leave clear fossil
records.

Going back even further, it is evident that evolution must have been
very slow. And tricky to achieve. Even if environmentally favourable
planets were fairly common in the Universe, the odds against the
evolution of advanced life on any single planet would have been very
high. This means that it would only occur on a very small fraction of
them. The planet on which we nd ourselves must be one of those rare
exceptions. And it could still have easily gone wrong. There is a
calculation by astrophysicists known as the solar-age coincidence. This
shows that, in the time taken by evolution on Earth to lead to intelligent
life, a large part of the hydrogen fuel reserves powering our Sun were
used up.

If our evolution had been just a little bit slower we would never
have got here at all before the Sun burned itself out!

So which of the essential evolutionary steps would be the hardest to

achieve in the available time?
 One di cult step on Earth may have been the beginning of what is
known as eukaryotic life – in which cells have an elaborate structure with
nuclei and ribosomes. Eukaryotes include large multi-cellular animals
like us, as well as single-celled species like the amoeba. The fossil record
shows that the rst eukaryotic life appeared on Earth at the beginning of
the Proterozoic aeon, about 2 gigayears ago, when the Earth was only
about half its present age. Before this period, more primitive prokaryotic
life forms, such as bacteria (with cells that are too small to contain
nuclei), are now thought to have been widespread. This was in what is
known as the Archaean aeon, which began when the Earth was less than
1 gigayear old.
There is evidence for the existence of this kind of primitive life right
back at the very beginning of the Archaean aeon – so we are now faced
with a puzzle, because this implies that the whole process by which life
actually originated must have occurred during the preceding epoch. The
era before the Archaean is known as the Hadean aeon – the earliest aeon
of the Earth’s history.
Why should this be a problem? Well, the Hadean aeon was certainly long
enough – nearly a gigayear – but conditions on Earth at that time would
have been literally infernal, as the name suggests (‘Hades’ is the ancient
Greek version of hell). This was when debris left over from the
formation of the Solar System was crashing into the Moon and forming
craters there. And the Earth, with its greater mass and gravitational
attraction, would at that time have been subject to even heavier
cratering. This bombardment would have caused frequent reheating of
our planetary environment. Life forms just beginning to develop could
hardly have avoided being nipped in the bud.
The planet Mars, however, has a lesser mass and is further away from
the Sun, so it has recently been proposed that the bombardment of Mars
could have become less intense sooner than that of the Earth. Chunks of
debris may also have been frequently knocked o Mars and in some
cases subsequently swept up by the Earth. This would mean that life
may have originated on Mars – before it could have survived here.
Analysis by electron microscope of a meteorite that did reach Earth
from Mars (meteorite ALH84001) has shown structures resembling
fossil microbes. This proves that fossil organisms may have reached the
Earth from Mars. But that would still not account for life then appearing
here unless living – not just fossil – organisms could survive the
necessary migration by meteor. This is a question that is currently being
very hotly debated.
An even more interesting question is whether the environment on
Mars at that time (in what is known as the Phyllocian period, roughly
coinciding with the Hadean era on the Earth) really would have been
suitable for primitive life.
Conditions on Mars nowadays are clearly unfavourable, at least on the
surface – a cold dry desert with hardly any atmosphere except for a little
carbon dioxide. Probes landing on Mars have, however, con rmed that
there is a considerable amount of frozen water at the poles. Additionally,
there are many observable features of the kind expected from erosion by
rivers or by surf at a seashore. This means that at some stage in the
Martian past there must have been a large amount of liquid water
present – exactly what is needed for our kind of life to begin. During that
early period the water would have formed an ocean. Initially this could
have been several thousand metres (or feet) deep with its centre near
what is now the Martian north pole.
So life could have originated at the edge of this ocean, way back in
Martian history.
 Objections
There are a couple of objections to this theory. One is that the
atmosphere would not have contained oxygen. However, primitive life
forms on Earth are believed to have been able to survive in an
atmosphere that was also very deficient in oxygen so that might not
have mattered.
Another objection is that the ancient Martian ocean would have
been too salty for known terrestrial life forms. But maybe Martian
life was originally adapted to very salty conditions, or perhaps it
developed in freshwater lakes?

Thus life may well have begun on Mars – at the edge of a huge ocean
there – then hitched a ride to the Earth on board a meteor. So our
ultimate ancestors may, in fact, have been Martians!
 Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642)

Galileo was an Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer. He

was born near Pisa, Italy, though his family came from Florence. At
first he studied medicine, then switched to mathematics and
philosophy. When he was 18, he noticed that a candelabrum in Pisa
cathedral was swinging, and that each swing took the same time
whatever distance it travelled. This allowed him to improve
pendulums in clocks. One story tells how he dropped stones from the
Leaning Tower of Pisa and discovered their velocity (the speed of their
fall in a straight line) was the same whatever the size and weight of
the stone. Galileo invented an early thermometer, and he improved on
a Dutch invention to produce a telescope that could magnify objects
by a power of 32. With this he made many important astronomical
observations and discoveries.
 James Watson
(1928–)
and
Francis Crick
(1916–2004)
The American scientist James Watson and the British scientist Francis
Crick were biologists who worked together at the Cavendish
Laboratory in Cambridge. They were interested in DNA, a material that
contains hereditary information that is passed on in the cells of a
living organism. They used the work of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind
Franklin to help in their research, which resulted in the discovery that
the structure of DNA is a double helix. Watson, Crick and Wilkins
together received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.
Sadly, Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958, and wasn’t included in the
prize, even though her work on DNA was crucial.
 How Did Life Begin?
Miller and Urey’s Experiment
In 1953 two American scientists named Stanley Miller and Harold Urey
were working on the origin of life on Earth. They believed the
ingredients for life could appear out of completely natural phenomena in
the Earth’s early atmosphere.
At that time scientists had an idea about the kind of chemical
compounds the early atmosphere probably contained. They also knew
that lightning was frequent. So Miller and Urey conducted an
experiment in which they stoked these chemical compounds with
electric sparks (to mimic lightning). Astonishingly, they discovered that
they had created special organic compounds.
Organic compounds are molecules that contain carbon and hydrogen.
Some of these molecules, like the ones called amino acids, are necessary
for life. Miller and Urey’s experiment produced amino acids and gave
hope to the scienti c community that it may be possible to create life in
a laboratory.
Today, however, more than 60 years after Miller and Urey, such a
creation has yet to be achieved and we still do not know how life
appeared on Earth. But we have been able to create, under special
circumstances that mimic conditions on Earth a long time ago, more
and more of the basic chemical building blocks of life.
 Stanley Miller
(1930–2007)
and
Harold Urey
(1893–1981)
Stanley Miller was an American chemist who followed his brother to
the University of California, Berkeley, and picked chemistry like his
brother because he thought his brother would be able to help him. He
received his doctorate in 1954, completed a one-year fellowship at the
California Institute of Technology, went to Columbia University, New
York City, for 5 years and then remained for the rest of his career at the
University of California, San Diego.
Harold Urey was an American chemist who had won the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium, also called
heavy hydrogen. He was also Director of War Research for the atomic
bomb project at Columbia University.
Miller heard Urey give a lecture about the origins of the Solar
System, and how very early life might have happened in such
conditions. He was so inspired that he went to Urey to discuss a
research project. After much persuasion, Urey agreed to work with
Miller to investigate electrical discharges in gases, which gave insight
into how amino acids could have come to be present on the early
Earth. Miller wrote an account of his experiment for a scientific
magazine and it was published within 3 months of being written
because Urey asked Science to quickly review the manuscript and
publish it as soon as possible.
 The History of Life
Professor MICHAEL J. REISS
Institute of Education, University College London

When we look at the animals and plants around us, the sheer diversity of
life seems amazing. Even in a busy city a single walk brings us into
contact with dozens of species, from insects so small we can hardly see
them, to trees and large animals like birds and mammals. In the
countryside there are literally thousands of species in even a small bit of
forest, grassland or marsh.
We still don’t know how many species there are in the world. About
1.2 million have so far been carefully identi ed by scientists, described,
classi ed and given a name – but the total gure is much bigger than
that. The best current estimate is that there are about 8 or 9 million
species in all, though some biologists think the gure could be much
higher than this. This means that the great majority of species on our
planet haven’t even yet been given a name. They could go extinct and we
wouldn’t even notice!

Where do all these species come from? This is a question that

humans have often asked. Many of the world’s religions have an
answer. They talk about God creating life. This answer isn’t enough for
scientists, though. Even if God did make species – including us – we
want to know when and how!

It was Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century who provided the

answer that we still think is correct.
 Darwin realized that just as farmers can produce new breeds of farm
animals by choosing to use only certain individuals to produce the next
generation, so nature can produce new species by what he called ‘natural
selection’. Suppose, for example, that a widespread species of seed-eating
bird occurs in some places where plants produce mainly small seeds and
in some places where plants produce mainly large seeds. Suppose too
that there is inevitably some variation in the size of the birds’ beaks and
that how large a bird’s beak is partly depends on the size of its parents’
beaks, so that birds with small beaks tend to produce o spring with
small beaks and birds with large beaks produce o spring that typically
also have large beaks.
 Charles Darwin
(1809–1882)

Charles Darwin was the son of a well-known doctor. He studied

medicine at Edinburgh, then decided he would train to become a
clergyman while pursuing biology. Before he could take a job as a
cleric, he was appointed as ‘gentleman naturalist’ to a naval survey
ship, HMS Beagle, which was going to sail round the world – this
allowed him to investigate plants, animals and geological formations
in many different places. The voyage lasted from 1831–1836, and
Darwin collected many specimens, and made many observations that
influenced his thinking for the rest of his life.
Darwin was a wealthy man and was happily married. He and his
wife, Emma, had servants and his wife ran the household. That gave
Darwin time to do his scientific work, even though he and Emma had
ten children, most of whom loved nothing more than to rush into
their father’s study and try to get him to play with them.
 Nothing very surprising, so far. But Darwin realized that if beak size is
important for a bird’s survival and reproduction – for example, because
food is sometimes in short supply – then natural selection would
gradually lead to changes in beak size. Over time, birds that live where
the plants have large seeds would come to have large beaks, and birds
that live where the plants have small seeds would evolve small beaks.
Given enough time, the original single bird species might evolve into
two new species, each one well adapted to its food source.

Darwin published his theory in 1859 in a book called On the Origin of

Species (the full title is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life – the
Victorians liked long book titles). This is one of the most important
scienti c books ever written. It changed the way we see our world and
has never been out of print. It is a long book but still very worth reading.
Darwin was the rst to admit that his theory didn’t explain everything.
In particular, how did the rst species come into existence? After all, his
theory may explain how species can change over time and evolve into
new species but it doesn’t say anything about how the whole process gets
going.
 Darwin was a bit of a genius. Actually, he was more than a bit of a
genius; he was a total genius. The tentative answer he came up with for
the origin of the very rst species is pretty much what many of today’s
scientists still think might be the case. On 1 February 1871 Darwin wrote
to his close friend and fellow scientist Joseph Hooker:

It is often said that all the conditions for the rst production of a living
organism are now present, which could ever have been present.— But
if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond
with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity
&c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to
undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd
be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the
case before living creatures were formed.

We still don’t know for sure how life started. It might well have been
in one or more of Darwin’s ‘warm little ponds’, much as he suggested.
But once it got going, there was no stopping life. As millions of years
went by, life gradually reached more and more of the Earth’s surface.
Species got bigger and hardier.
They colonized the land and took to the air. Eventually, 3 to 4 billion
years after the process started, we have whales and hummingbirds and
giant redwood trees and beautiful orchids and all the other 8 or 9 million
species there are today, including us.
And we are still discovering some of these species. Maybe you too
might one day nd yourself journeying to a part of our wonderful Earth
and being the rst person to identify a new species!
 Professor AMMAR AL CHALABI
Professor of Neurology and Complex Disease Genetics, Maurice Wohl
Clinical Neuroscience Institute

Do you have brown hair? Maybe it is black, ginger or blonde, or perhaps

some other colour? You might have the same hair colour as someone
else in your family. What about your tongue? Can you roll your tongue
into a tube? Not everyone can, even if they try very hard. And your
ngers – does anyone in your family have hair on the backs of their
ngers? Some people do and some do not – you might need to look
carefully to see it. So how does your body know what colour hair you
should have, or whether you should be able to roll your tongue into a
tube, or if it should put hair on the backs of your ngers? The answer is
that all these things are controlled by instructions carried in every cell of
your body, called genes. Genes tell your body how to make every part of
itself, how to repair itself, how tall it should be, how many ngers it
should have – in fact, almost anything you can think of, like a cookery
book for making a person. You can think of each gene like a page in the
cookery book, with a recipe for making a part of you.
 The gene cookery book is a very big book. There are more than
20,000 pages, but that is because you are a very complicated
thing to make!

We receive our genes from our parents. The pages in the cookery
book for making you were copied from the pages in your parents’
cookery books. Although everyone’s cookery book has recipes for the
same body parts, the recipes are not all exactly the same. For example,
the recipe on the gene page for hair colour might say to use black or it
might say to use ginger. If you have the black-hair recipe you will have
black hair, and if you have the ginger-hair recipe you will have ginger
hair. That is why we are all a little bit di erent, but we all look like
humans. Sometimes, the gene recipe can be missing something
important, or it might be changed in an important way. Imagine a recipe
for strawberries and cream. If it said to use straw instead of
strawberries, you probably would not want to eat it. If a big mistake like
this happens in a gene recipe, it can cause problems and make people
ill. On the other hand, if it said to use berries instead of strawberries, it
might be ne, or it might be even better than the original.
What do genes look like? See if you can nd some cotton thread. If
you have very sharp eyesight, you might notice it is really two threads
wound round each other very tightly. You can make this more obvious
by trying to untwist it. A special twisted double thread like this, made of
something called DNA, carries your genes. Now imagine the thread
becoming bigger and bigger, until it is the size of a rope ladder. There
are a lot of rungs on this ladder – 3 billion, in fact. That is so many that
the ladder stretches to the Moon and back twice, or 40 times round the
Earth. Remember, the ladder is your body’s cookery book. It is so long
because there are so many recipes.
 Not all the rungs on the ladder are the same. There are four di erent
types, and we name them with letters: G, A, T and C. Your body uses
these four letters to write the words of the gene recipes, spelling them
out on the ladder. So if you climb the ladder and the rungs read
GATTCCCTGGACC, it might just look like some letters to you, but in
fact it is a secret code. Your body can read the code easily and
understand the words written on the ladder. We have only cracked a tiny
bit of the genetic code. Even knowing that much is enough for doctors to
be able to make new types of medicine.
Your body is made of trillions of cells. Each one needs a copy of the
gene recipes written on the very long rope ladder. Now, let’s shrink the
ladder back down until it is the size of a thread again, and then down
still further, until it is so thin you cannot see it. Even at this scale, it is
still 2 metres (6 ft) long! That is much too long to squeeze into a cell, so
your body coils the tiny DNA ladder up very, very tightly. Now it ts! If
you stretched out all the tiny DNA ladders in your body and laid them
end to end, they would be twice as wide as the Solar System!
How does your body read a recipe from one of your genes?
Microscopic machines unwind the bit of DNA ladder containing the
gene recipe they need. The machines are not made by people. They are
made by your body from gene recipes! The machines know how to read
the genetic code, and they know what the order of letters means. They
can follow the instructions on the DNA ladder and build all the di erent
bits they need to make your body.
So, the book of recipes to make you is actually more than 20,000
genes, written in a genetic code, on a ladder called DNA, tightly coiled
up and stored in each cell of your body, and your book of recipes is
di erent from anyone else’s in the whole world.

You are unique.

 Earth: What’s It Made Of?

Earth is the third-closest planet to the Sun.

Liquid water covers 70.8% of the surface of the Earth and the rest is
divided into seven continents. These are: Asia (29.5% of the land surface
of the Earth), Africa (20.5%), North America (16.5%), South America
(12%), Antarctica (9%), Europe (7%) and Australia (5%). This de nition
of continents is mostly historical and cultural since, for instance, no
expanse of water divides Asia from Europe. Geographically, there are
only four continents that are not separated by water: Eurasia–Africa (57%
of the land surface), the Americas (28.5%), Antarctica (9%) and Australia
(5%). The remaining 0.5% is made up of islands, mostly scattered within
Oceania in the central and south Paci c Ocean.

Earth’s average distance to the Sun: 93 million miles (149.6

million km).
 Did you know?
A day on Earth is divided into 24 hours, but in fact it takes Earth 23
hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds to rotate once on its axis. There is a
discrepancy of 3 minutes and 56 seconds.
An Earth-year is the time it takes for the Earth to complete one
revolution (or orbit) round the Sun. It may vary very slightly over time,
but is around 365.25 days.
So far, the Earth is the only known planet in the Universe to harbour
life.
 How Long Is a ‘Day’ on
Earth?

Why is a day in winter shorter than

a day in summer?
It’s because the Earth is tilted on its axis as it orbits the Sun. If the Earth
stayed upright throughout its whole orbit, day and night would be
exactly the same length every day of the year. But as it rotates, the Earth
is at an angle of 23.5° to the Sun and this means that at one point in its
orbit, the North Pole and the region we call the Arctic Circle are angled
so far away from the Sun that they receive no daylight at all.
 In the northern hemisphere, this happens between 20 December and
23 December, otherwise known as the winter solstice.
At the same time, in the southern hemisphere, the South Pole is in
full daylight for the whole 24-hour period.
As the Earth turns round the Sun, the tilt changes the area that
receives sunlight until it is the other way round. At the summer solstice
(between 20 June and 22 June), it is daylight for the full 24 hours at the
North Pole, and it is completely dark at the South Pole. The rest of the
world in between the poles receives a varying amount of light,
lengthening or shortening the days.
Do you remember the story of Goldilocks, the little girl who didn’t like
extremes? Too hard, too soft, too hot, too cold – these didn’t suit her. She
liked things to be just right.
Our planet, Earth, is ‘just right’. We get light from the Sun, which
heats us up – but not so much that the atmosphere burns away and the
water evaporates, nor so little that Earth is a frozen desert in which no
life can exist.
Water is liquid between 0°C (32°F), when it freezes, and 100°C
(212°F), when it boils. Water is essential for life, because it can do so
many things. It dissolves and mixes and spreads chemicals, allowing
them to reform in many di erent ways, including as proteins and DNA,
both building blocks of life.
There are four rocky planets orbiting our Sun – Mercury, Venus,
Earth and Mars. Only Earth has liquid water and life – only Earth is in
the Goldilocks Zone.
Scientists have found several thousand rocky planets orbiting stars in
our Milky Way Galaxy, and they estimate that there are many more – at
least 100 billion. They are very interested in planets in the ‘Goldilocks
Zone’ – the distance from a planet’s sun for the temperature on that
planet to allow liquid water – and possibly life – to exist.

If you’d rather, you can call the area where the

temperature of a planet orbiting a star would be ‘just
right’ the Circumstellar Habitable Zone – CHZ –
instead.
 Professor ROS E. M. RICKABY
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford

Earth – our blue planet – is exceptional in our Solar System as almost

three quarters of its surface is covered by the oceans. But why are our
oceans here? Intriguingly, Earth’s oceans arrived from outer space. When
the Earth was forming, it was too hot for water to condense on the
planet. Just as tall mountains have snowy white tops above the
‘snowline’, where the cooling of the atmosphere with height allows snow
to persist, so too there was a gradient of cooling to a snowline away from
the ferociously hot early Sun.
Temperatures cold enough for ice grains to form were only reached
further out in the Solar System, in the asteroid belt somewhere between
Mars and Jupiter. Earth’s oceans, therefore, had to be imported: many
think this happened with a shower of comets or water-rich meteorites
from the asteroid belt bombarding the early Earth.
Since then, these extraterrestrial water molecules have been neither
created nor destroyed! For the subsequent 3.8 billion years (the rst
evidence for liquid water comes from sediments of this age found in
southwest Greenland), our oceans have been trapped on the Earth’s
surface, where they go round in two cycles.
 First, the warmth of the Sun in the tropics turns some of the ocean to
water vapour (just like you see coming from a boiling kettle or a steam
engine) which forms clouds. The vapour condenses into drops of water,
creating rain, which falls and trickles across the land into streams and
rivers before gushing back into the oceans.
Second, small amounts of water seep down into Earth’s interior,
through deep-sea trenches in the ocean crust. This water rapidly returns
to the surface through volcanoes or hydrothermal vents.
So the very same water molecules coming out of your taps at home
have witnessed every second of Earth’s history, from before the start of
self-reproducing life itself to the emergence of multicelled organisms.
Most probably, these water molecules passed through a dinosaur at some
point.

You could be making a cup of tea out of water that was

once slurped down by a thirsty T. Rex – and peed out
again!

Water, Water, Everywhere

What makes water so extraordinary, and the oceans so key to life, is its
ability to dissolve things. Put some salt in a glass of water, or sugar in
your tea, and those crystals will disappear, or dissolve. This is because of
the slight charge or ‘polarity’ of water molecules, which attracts elements
into solution.

A water molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom –
chemists write this as H2O. A hydrogen atom has a slight positive
charge and an oxygen atom has a slight negative charge, but this is
stronger than the charge of the hydrogen atoms. This means that
each molecule of water has a positive end and a negative end. This is
described as a ‘polar molecule’.
 Water is even better at dissolving things if it is made a little acidic, by
reacting with something like carbon dioxide to make carbonic acid.
When the water cycle takes water from the oceans to clouds, then to rain
and nally down rivers, water reacts with carbon dioxide in our
atmosphere and becomes a little acidic. As a result, this carbonated
rainwater dissolves elements out of the land (this is called erosion, or
weathering), takes them into the rivers, and the elements end up going
into the oceans. Have you ever seen reddish-brown rivers? These are full
of iron which has been leached – dissolved by water – out of the rocks.

Take a sip of fizzy water (those bubbles are carbon dioxide) and see if
you can taste the slight sourness. This is acidity; both my sons wrinkle
their noses on doing so.

The oceans accumulate all the elements dissolved from the land (and
from reaction with the deep ocean oor at hydrothermal vents, such as
spectacular black smokers). But only the water molecules themselves
keep on moving back to clouds – the elements are left behind. Some
elements get so concentrated in the ocean that they turn back into
minerals and fall down to the ocean oor as sediments, notably
limestone (calcium carbonate) and cherts (silica), a process which limits
their concentration in the sea.
Unlike most elements, however, the elements sodium and chlorine –
the two ingredients of salt – only fall out from the ocean occasionally and
in exceptional circumstances. For example, the entire Mediterranean
dried up to a puddle about 6 million years ago after movements in the
Earth’s crust caused it to be sealed o from the Atlantic Ocean, leaving
huge salt deposits. The lack of a continuous natural fall-out of sodium
and chlorine means that the sea is always salty.
The weathering of land by water is the very reason why life could appear
and remain on Earth: it acts as a thermostat for Earth’s temperature. The
speed of weathering depends on Earth’s temperature. So if, for any
reason, the temperature rises – because, for example, of the increase in
the light from the Sun over Earth’s history, or if there is an increase of
carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas which warms the Earth) in the planet’s
atmosphere – then the rocks on land dissolve more quickly. This leads to
a rush of elements, including carbon, into the oceans, which in turn
speeds up the formation of sediment. This locks additional carbon
dioxide into limestone, thus resetting the planet to its previous
conditions and stopping everything from overheating.

Acids and Alkalis

Acids and alkalis are chemical opposites. Adding an alkali to an acid
will neutralize the acid, and adding an acid to an alkali will neutralize
the alkali.
An acid is a chemical dissolved in water. Many acids can dissolve
metals. Mild acids taste sour, but strong acids are dangerous.
An alkali is a compound – a mixture of chemicals. Dissolved in
water, strong alkalis can burn or corrode.

While weathering maintained temperatures favourable for life to appear,

we do not know, and perhaps might never know, where life did begin on
our Earth (there’s a challenge for you!). Was it in some ‘warm little pond’,
as the great naturalist Darwin suggested, or in the depths of the ocean?
Whichever it was, one thing we do know is that life’s origins and
evolution depended on water. Elements are bound rigidly in rocks in the
Earth’s crust, but the ocean is a watery cocktail of all those rocky
elements (and organic molecules) highly available, all free to spread out
and react. This is the key to initiating life.

Something to Think About

How do you think weathering works to stop the Earth
completely freezing over?

Many scientists believe that the deeper oceans are most likely to have
provided a safe haven for life’s very rst stirrings – the surface of the
early Earth would have been a much harsher environment. Down in the
oceans, harmful radiation was ltered out. The seas also provided
bu ering against extreme temperatures, and protected the development
of life against bombardments of meteorites and intense volcanic
outpourings.
From uncertain origins perhaps 2.7 billion years ago, scientists believe
that the rst 2 billion years of life’s history almost certainly played out in
the ocean. But inescapable circumstances spurred life to become more
and more complex. The increasing success of microbes created more
chemical by-products (notably oxygen in the atmosphere), most of which
were initially toxic. So, to give more and better control of internal
chemistry, simple cells became compartmentalized (these kinds of cells
are called eukaryotes) and ended up taking many di erent forms.
The appearance of multicellular organisms coincided with the most
spectacular of life’s inventions – that of the skeleton. During this
‘Cambrian explosion’, 540 million years ago, the rock record of life
shows a change from faint ambiguous imprints to a diversity of robust
yet intricate shell fossils, undoubtedly sculpted by organisms of
complexity (indeed Darwin misread this explosion as the dawn of life).
 The Cambrian Era
Scientists divide up the known history of Earth into ages of geological
time called eras and periods. The Cambrian period lasted from about
590 million years ago to about 534 million years ago.

The number of Earth’s minerals dissolved in water and concentrated

in the ocean made making hard parts like shells relatively easy. Just as
the horned dinosaurs developed ever-more elaborate ornamentation
against the increasing ferocity of the Tyrannosaurs, these rst
‘biominerals’ gave armoured protection against forces, poisons and,
importantly, predators.
Skeletons – shells and bones – provided rigidity to support animal life
in its rst steps on to land!
Over Earth’s history, the weathering thermostat has maintained a
balance between the amount of acidity (the carbon dioxide) and the
amount of alkalinity (the dissolved ions in the ocean). As long as the
oceans have been present, they have always been slightly alkaline –
perfect for making skeletons.
But we – and future generations on Earth – face a growing problem.
The ever-growing population of the world and our thirst for fossil
fuels is adding carbon dioxide – and hence acidity – to the ocean at an
unprecedented rate. In a million years or so, the weathering of the land
masses of our continents will accelerate su ciently to start to neutralize
this great burp of carbon dioxide into our waters. But this weathering is
naturally slow, so in the meantime, the oceans are becoming a bit less
alkaline and a bit less saturated. This process is often termed ocean
acidi cation. ‘Ocean – slightly less alkalization’ would be a more
accurate description, though less headline-grabbing!

Think of the continents as an indigestion remedy or

‘antacid’ for the ocean!
 Vulnerable organisms such as coral reefs will nd making skeletons
increasingly challenging. This could have enormous rami cations across
the marine ecosystem. Unless organisms can adapt – and fast!
Some scientists believe we should intervene to redress global warming
and acidi cation by ‘geoengineering’ carbon dioxide removal. This could
include manipulating the weathering of the land to release more alkaline
elements into the seas.
But should we really embark on yet another global-scale experiment
with our Earth?
What do you think?
… and more than a drop to drink!
Just 1 litre of water on Earth contains around 30 million million million
million molecules! But a litre of water doesn’t look much like a pile of
particles – it appears to be a continuous material that can exist as a solid,
a liquid or a gas, depending on the temperature and pressure. Add
enough heat and water will boil and turn into steam; lower the
temperature su ciently and it will turn into ice.
This is normal behaviour for water; we can observe it easily. But why
should all of these 30 million million million million molecules behave
the same way? No rebel molecules?
A nineteenth-century Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, provided
a mathematical explanation of how the enormous number of particles
involved actually makes a particular behaviour pattern overwhelmingly
the most probable. For although the multitude of particles e ectively
move entirely at random – each one doing its own thing – it is most
likely to produce an average overall behaviour in which individual
molecules can be forgotten. In a litre of water, a small fraction of the
molecules may randomly and brie y deviate from this average, but the
probability that this fraction would be large enough to produce a
noticeable change in what we think of as the normal behaviour of water
is very, very small.
If the water were to be left alone forever, however, large random
uctuations would eventually take place – for example, all the molecules
could nd themselves moving for a short time in the same direction.
Now this is a very, very, very low probability, so if you leave a litre of
water in a jug, you wouldn’t expect to see it suddenly leap out. But if you
could leave it for an eternity, such uctuations would eventually occur –
and occur an in nite number of times.

What does this mean for the

Universe?
The Universe began 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang, and it is
expanding at an ever-increasing rate.
If we apply the same principles to our Universe as we just did to water,
we can see that a universe that carries on forever would contain every
possible random uctuation, an in nite number of times. This means
that a perfect copy of our Universe today – after all, it is a perfectly good
arrangement of particles – would eventually appear randomly
somewhere else.
A copy of our Universe would obviously include copies of all our
human brains, with all their memories too! But as creating all of that
randomly is much, much more di cult than forming just one working
brain on its own, it would be more probable that these random
uctuations would create single brains, complete with their memories,
much more frequently than whole people or copies of the entire Earth.
 Ludwig Boltzmann
(1844–1906)

Ludwig Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist and philosopher who

was interested in how gases work. Throughout his working life he had
a problem – he believed that atoms and molecules existed, and much
of his work depended on this. However, there were a large number of
scientists at the time who thought atoms and molecules were
nonsense. They would not listen when Boltzmann suggested that they
think of atoms as models or pictures. Poor Boltzmann spent a great
deal of time defending his ideas and proposals from the attacks of
these scientists.
 Professor TAMSIN A. MATHER
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford

To get volcanoes on any planet, you need a source of heat and something
to melt. On Earth the heat is its inner heat (mainly left over from its birth
and from ongoing radioactive decay within its rocks). The ‘something to
melt’ is Earth’s rocky mantle, the layer of rock under the thin outer crust
that we live on. It is mainly solid, but hot enough for it to be able to ow
slowly, or creep, a bit like a very sticky liquid. It gets hotter as you go
deeper, from a few hundred degrees Celsius (about as hot as or a bit
hotter than your oven) to over 4,000°C (7,230°F) (for comparison, the
surface of the Sun is about 5,500°C (9,930°F)) just before you reach the
outside edge of the molten core. Pressure also increases as you go
deeper inside the Earth, like an exaggeration of the pressure you feel
when you dive to the bottom of a swimming pool.
 Visiting a Volcano
Imagine what it would be like to visit an erupting volcano. Perhaps
you have? The ground shakes with tiny earthquakes as molten lava
forces its way from the Earth’s insides and hums as volcanic gases
struggle to escape. Booming explosions vibrate through your body
and ears. Acid fumes sting your eyes and nostrils, and even your skin
and sweat begin to smell of sulphur (which smells like rotten eggs
and struck matches). Red-hot rocks fly high into the air, turning black
as they cool and plummet to the ground. Some of them join the
growing cone of rubble. Others feed a lava flow that snakes, clinking
and fuming, downhill. This is what it was like for me visiting Mount
Etna in Sicily in 2006. It was actually quite a small eruption (otherwise
it would not have been safe to get so close!), but breathtaking, even
for a volcano scientist (known as a volcanologist).
 Earth’s Layers
Our planet, Earth, is made up of several layers. At the very centre is
the inner core, which might be solid. Around it is the outer core,
which may be liquid. Further out is the mantle, which is made of
molten rock. Above the mantle is the crust, which is covered by land
masses and oceans. The crust is divided into several large sections,
called tectonic plates. And all around the crust is the atmosphere.
 So the mantle is already very hot, but it is solid. On Earth there are two
ways that nature melts it. In some places, like Iceland, where tectonic
plates split apart from each other, or beneath Hawaii, where blobs of
deep, hot mantle ow slowly upward like a lava lamp, the pressure on
the mantle decreases. This makes the mantle’s melting point drop.

Did you know that kettles boil at a lower temperature up a

mountain as pressure drops?

In other places, like under Japan and Indonesia, things get added to
the mantle and make it melt, just as we add salt to roads and pavements
in winter to melt ice. This happens at ‘subduction zones’, where two
tectonic plates push together. One sinks below the other and into the
mantle, releasing water and other material into the mantle rocks above.

When the mantle melts, it produces a liquid rock called magma. This
magma is less dense than the surrounding rock, and so it starts to move
up towards the surface. This journey can be relatively quick, especially
beneath the oceans where the Earth’s crust is thin. Or it can take longer,
especially where the crust is thicker, like on the continents. The longer
this journey takes, the more time the magma has to cool and change,
becoming stickier and stickier.
But what makes magma explode out of the ground rather than just
oozing like jam out of a doughnut? Magma has gases like water vapour
and carbon dioxide dissolved in it. As magma rises and the pressure
drops, the gases can’t stay dissolved and they form bubbles. As they rise
further, these bubbles grow bigger and bigger until they reach the
surface and sometimes explode.
Something similar happens when you open a bottle of cola quickly,
especially if someone has been kind enough to shake the bottle rst!
Sticky magmas are better at trapping gas bubbles. This is one of the
reasons why some volcanic eruptions are much more explosive than
others.
That’s how we explain most volcanism on Earth. But Earth is not the
only place in our Solar System that has volcanoes. Just look at a full
moon on a clear night. The large dark patches you can see are solidi ed
lava beds. They are called maria, the Latin word for ʻsea’, because early
astronomers thought they really were seas.
On Mars there are huge volcanoes, including Olympus Mons, the
largest known volcano.
 The Martian Giant
Olympus Mons is about 600 km (370 miles) wide, and over 22
km (13.6 miles) high – two and a half times the height of Everest,
measured from sea level – and about the size of Italy, or of the
state of Arizona in the USA.
 Being smaller bodies than the Earth, both our Moon and the planet
Mars cooled more quickly, so their volcanoes are now dead. Venus is a
similar size to Earth, and the results from the Venus Express mission
show exciting new evidence of possible active lava ows on this planet.
Further out in the Solar System we see more exotic forms of
volcanism on moons orbiting the giant gas planets. The planet Jupiter
has volcanoes on several of its more than 60 con rmed moons. Io, the
innermost of the planet’s larger moons, is the most volcanically active
body we know of in the Solar System. Io heats up – like a squash ball in
your hand – as it is stretched and squeezed under immense tidal forces
from the giant planet it orbits. Io’s volcanoes are spectacularly alive,
sending plumes of gas and dust hundreds of kilometres into space.
Europa, Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, is also of great interest. It has a very
young surface, with very few craters. This suggests that ice volcanism is
continually covering the surface with watery magmas.
In 2005 the Cassini space probe spotted fountains of vapour and ice
shooting into space from one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. And even
further away from the Sun, in 1989 the Voyager 2 space probe saw dark
plumes rising high above one of Neptune’s moons, Triton, maybe made
of nitrogen ice and driven by heat from the distant Sun itself.
Recent discoveries of rocky planets outside our Solar System mean
that whole new types of volcanism might also exist in the Universe that
we and scientists of the future – like you, perhaps – have yet to discover.
Light that reaches Earth from these planets can hold clues about their
atmospheres. As volcanoes release distinctive gases, volcanism could be
the rst geological process that we con rm outside our Solar System.
I am often awestruck by how much remains to be understood about
volcanoes on our own planet. The idea of a whole universe of volcanism
still out there to explore is mindboggling!
 What Is the Earth Made
Of?

Every material on Earth is made of tiny objects called atoms. These

atoms are constantly knocking each other about by exchanging even
smaller particles of electromagnetic radiation called photons, some of
which we feel as heat, others we see as light, and others we use for
communication by deliberately pulsing them out of radio antennae.
Photons and subatomic particles produced by the Sun – and from more
distant parts of the Universe – are also constantly ying in from space.
So the Earth, other planets, stars and even space are all swirling soups of
tiny particles. How can a scientist possibly understand the behaviour of
anything when they have to consider such an incredibly large number of
microscopic moving parts?
An atom is not an elementary particle because it is made of electrons
going round a nucleus in the centre, like the planets go round the Sun.
The nucleus is made of protons and neutrons packed tightly together.
Protons and neutrons were previously thought to be elementary
particles but we now know they are made of smaller particles, called
quarks, held together by gluons, which are the particles of a strong force
that acts on quarks but not on electrons or photons.
Elementary particles are the smallest possible things that, as far as we
know, cannot be divided up into anything tinier. Examples include the
electron, which carries electricity, and the photon, which carries light.
 Matter
Matter is made of atoms of various types. The type of atom or
element, as it is called, is determined by the number of protons
in the nucleus. This can be up to 118, with mostly an equal or
greater number of neutrons.
The simplest atom is hydrogen, whose nucleus contains just
one proton and no neutron. Scientists think that 90% of the total
number of all atoms in the Universe are hydrogen atoms.
The largest naturally occurring atom, uranium, has a nucleus
that contains 92 protons and 146 neutrons.
Before stars are born, only the simplest molecules can be
found in space. The most common is the hydrogen molecule,
which is inside the huge clouds of gas in outer space where stars
are born. It consists of two hydrogen atoms joined together.
Scientists study particles and how they behave in machines such as the
Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The LHC can do things like make
particles travel very fast or collide with each other.
If there were no forces, particles colliding inside machines like the
LHC would come out the same as they went in. Forces allow
fundamental particles to in uence each other in collisions (even to
change into di erent particles!) by emitting and absorbing special force-
carrying particles called gauge bosons.
Physicists can represent a collision by using Feynman diagrams. Such
diagrams show the ways in which it is possible for particles to scatter o
each other. One Feynman diagram is one part of describing such a
collision and the diagrams need to be summed up for a complete
description of a single collision.
Here is the simplest kind, in which two electrons approach, exchange
a single photon, and then continue on their way.
Time goes from left to right, the wiggly line is a photon, and the solid
lines show the electrons (marked as ‘e’). This diagram includes all the
cases where the photon travels up to down or down to up (which is why
the wiggly line is drawn vertically):

More complicated processes have more than one virtual particle in

more complex Feynman diagrams. For example, here is one with two
virtual photons and two virtual electrons:

An in nite number of diagrams is needed to fully describe each kind

of particle reaction, though thankfully scientists can often obtain very
good approximations by only using the simplest ones. Here’s one that
could represent what might happen at the Large Hadron Collider when
protons collide! The letters ‘u’, ‘d’ and ‘b’ are quarks; while ‘g’ shows
gluons.
 Richard Feynman
(1918–1988)

Richard Feynman was an American physicist who was interested in the

way light and matter interact – known as quantum electrodynamics.
His work allowed scientists to better understand the nature of
particles and waves. As part of his revolutionary work on quantum
mechanics, he devised a way of drawing how a particle might move.
Feynman diagrams are easy to read and understand. Many of the
calculations made about particles and their interactions became much
simpler because of Feynman diagrams. He was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics along with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger in
1965, and became one of the best-known scientists in the world.
Richard Feynman also enjoyed playing bongo drums.
CERN – properly known as the European Organization for Nuclear
Research – is an international particle physics laboratory on the border of
France and Switzerland, near Geneva.
Founded in 1954, CERN has been operating colliders for well over 50
years as part of its research into fundamental particles.

The initials CERN stand for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche

Nucléaire. There are 23 member countries.

How We Got to the LHC

In 1983, the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) collided protons and
antiprotons (the antimatter version of the proton) together and
discovered the W and Z particles, which carry the weak nuclear force.
The SPS is built inside a circular tunnel 7 km (4.35 miles) in
circumference, and today feeds protons to the LHC.

In 1990 a CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the World

Wide Web as a way of allowing particle physicists to share
information easily – now it’s used every day by many people
for a plethora of reasons!

After 3 years of digging, a new circular tunnel was completed in 1988.

It was 27 km (16.77 miles) in circumference and 100 metres (328 feet)
underground. It housed the Large Electron Positron collider (LEP). The
LEP collided electrons with positrons (the antimatter version of the
electron).
In 1998, work began on digging the detector caverns for the LHC. The
LEP was turned o in November 2000 to make way for the new collider
in the same tunnel.
The LHC was fully turned on for the rst time in September 2008.

The LHC Itself

The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator.
Two beam pipes run along the circular tunnel of the LHC, each
carrying a beam of protons, travelling in opposite directions. It’s like a
huge electromagnetic racetrack!
Inside the pipes, almost all the air has been pumped out to create a
vacuum like there is in outer space, so that the protons can travel without
hitting air molecules.
Because the tunnel is curved, more than 1,200 powerful magnets
around the tunnel bend the protons’ course so that they don’t hit the
walls of the pipe. The magnets are superconducting, which means they
can generate very large magnetic elds with very little loss of energy.
This requires them to be cooled with liquid helium down to -271.3°C
(-456.3°F) – colder than outer space!

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest machine in the world.

At full power, each proton will perform 11,245 laps of the ring per
second, travelling at more than 99.99% of the speed of light. There will
be up to 600 million head-on collisions between protons per second.
As well as colliding protons, the LHC is also designed to collide lead
ions (nuclei of lead atoms).
The core of the LHC is the most lifeless place on Earth!
All in all, there are around 9,300 magnets at the LHC.

The Grid
With about 1 MB of data generated per collision, the LHC detectors
produce entirely too much data for even the most modern storage
equipment. Computer algorithms select only the most interesting
collision events – the rest, more than 99% of the data, are discarded.
Even so, the data from collisions at the LHC in 1 year (2012) reached 15
million gigabytes (which would ll 75,000 PCs, each with a 200GB hard
drive). This creates a massive storage and processing problem, especially
since the physicists who need the data are based all over the world.
The storage and processing is shared by sending the data rapidly over
the internet to computers in other countries. These computers, together
with the computers at CERN, form the worldwide LHC Computing Grid.

The Detectors
The LHC has four main detectors situated in underground caverns at
di erent points around the circumference of the tunnel. Special magnets
are used to make the two beams collide at each of the four points along
the ring where the detector caverns are situated.
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) is the biggest particle detector
ever built. It is 46 m (51 ft) long, 25 m (80 ft) high, 25 m (80 ft) wide and
weighs 7,000 tonnes. It identi es the particles produced in high-energy
collisions by tracing their ight through the detector and recording their
energy.
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) uses a di erent design to study
similar processes to ATLAS (having two di erent designs of detector
helps to con rm any discoveries). It is 21 m (68.9 ft) long, 15 m (49.2 ft)
wide and 15 m (49.2 ft) high, but weighs more than ATLAS at 14,000
tonnes.
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is designed speci cally to
search for quark–gluon plasma produced by colliding lead ions. This
plasma is believed to have existed very soon after the Big Bang. ALICE is
26 m (85.3 ft) long, 16 m (52.5 ft) wide, 16 m (52.5 ft) high and weighs
about 10,000 tonnes.
LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) – the ‘beauty’ in the name of
this experiment refers to the beauty, or b quark, which it is designed to
study. The aim is to clarify the di erence between matter and antimatter.
It is 21 m (68.9 ft) long, 10 m (32.8 ft) high, 13 m (42.6 ft) wide and
weighs 5,600 tonnes.

New Discoveries?
The Standard Model of particle physics describes the fundamental forces
(except for gravity), the particles which transmit those forces and three
generations of matter particles.
But …
Only approximately 5% of the Universe is made from the type of
matter we know. What is the rest made of – dark matter and dark energy?
 Why do elementary particles have masses? The Higgs boson could
explain this. It is a particle predicted by the Standard Model, and its
existence was proved in 2012 by ATLAS and CMS.
Why does the Universe contain so much more matter than antimatter?
For a very brief time, just after the Big Bang, quarks and gluons were so
hot that they couldn’t yet combine to form protons and neutrons – the
Universe was lled with a strange state of matter called quark–gluon
plasma.

The Higgs Boson

In 1964, the British physicist Peter Higgs, who was working on
particles at Edinburgh University, predicted that in addition to the
particles the scientists already knew about there must be another one.
This would give mass to particles, and make sense of all the theories
about them. Scientists looked for the new particle, named the ‘Higgs
boson’ for years. In 2012, LHC physicists noticed an interesting signal,
which they thought might be the missing particle. It was confirmed as
the Higgs boson in 2013.
 Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics is the name given to a branch of physics that
studies atoms and the particles that make up atoms. It studies the
movement of particles and atoms, and the way that atoms take in and
give out energy in the form of light. Atoms and particles don’t seem to
follow the rules that govern bigger things that we can see.

The LHC has recreated this plasma, and the ALICE experiment has been
studying it. In this way, scientists hope to learn more about the strong
nuclear force and the development of the Universe.
New theories are trying to bring gravity (and space and time) into the
same quantum theory that already describes the other forces and
subatomic particles. Some of these ideas suggest there may be more than
the familiar four dimensions of space–time. Collisions at the LHC could
allow us to see these ‘extra dimensions’, if they exist!
 Uncertainty and
Schrödinger’s Cat

The quantum world is the world of atoms and subatomic particles; the
classical world is the world of people and planets. They seem to be very
di erent places!:
But cats (classical!) are made of atoms (quantum!). Erwin Schrödinger
imagined what this might mean for a cat – though don’t do this to
your pet cat (Schrödinger didn’t actually do it either)! He imagined
shutting a cat inside a completely lightproof and soundproof box with
some poison, a radiation detector and a small amount of radioactive
material. When the detector bleeps (because an atom produces
radiation when it decays), then the poison is automatically released.
After a while in the box, is the cat still alive? The atoms in the box
(including the cat’s) take all possible paths: in some, radiation is
produced and the poison released; but not in others. Only when we
make an observation by opening the box do we discover if the cat has
survived. Before that, the cat is neither definitely dead nor definitely
alive – in a way, it’s a combination of both!
 Werner Karl Heisenberg
(1901–1976)

Werner Heisenberg was a German scientist who worked in atomic

physics. From his work in quantum mechanics, he developed his
‘uncertainty principle’, which states that the position and momentum
of a particle cannot both be determined at the same time. If one has
been worked out precisely (or very nearly), the other will be
correspondingly less precise, It is therefore better to work on
statistical probabilities than to try to work out general laws.
In 1944, Heisenberg gave a lecture in Switzerland, which was
neutral in World War II. The Americans sent a special agent with a
pistol – and instructions to shoot Heisenberg if it seemed from his
lecture that Germany had, or was about to get, an atom bomb. Luckily
for Heisenberg, Germany was not even close to creating an atom
bomb.
Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.
 Erwin Schrödinger
(1887–1961)

Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian theoretical physicist. He studied

quantum mechanics, and he worked out an important equation
relating to particles sometimes behaving like waves. Schrödinger did
not support Hitler and the Nazis. He escaped Germany before the
war, and lived and taught in Ireland, eventually becoming an Irish
citizen.
He is most famous for his thought experiment, known as
‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ – scientists are still arguing about what might
happen to the cat! In the garden of a house he once lived in in Zurich,
there is a life-sized cat – in some lights it is upright and ‘alive’ and in
other lights it is lying down, apparently ‘dead’. Schrödinger won the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.
 M-Theory – Eleven
Dimensions!

How can we combine Einstein’s classical theory of general relativity,

which describes gravity and the shape of the whole Universe, with the
quantum theory explaining tiny fundamental particles and all the other
forces?
The most successful attempts all involve extra space dimensions and
supersymmetry.
The extra dimensions are rolled up very tightly so that large objects
don’t notice them!
 String Theory
Today we know of three – or possibly four – dimensions. They are
length, breadth, depth and possibly time. Some scientists think
that particles aren’t like minute dots (which have zero
dimensions), but little lines, like tiny pieces of string, which have
one dimension. We can’t measure them because we haven’t yet
invented instruments to do so. However, if particles are string-
shaped, they could vibrate and interact and it would be possible to
have more dimensions in space – maybe up to 11! – than the ones
we know.
We canʼt experience them because they are all bunched up in
small spaces.

Supersymmetry would mean more fundamental particles: e.g.

photinos to go with photons, and squarks to go with quarks! (The LHC
may see these and perhaps even detect extra dimensions.)
The theory of superstrings (supersymmetric strings) replaces particles
(dots) with tiny ‘strings’ (lines). By vibrating in di erent ways – like
di erent notes on a guitar string – strings behave like di erent types of
particle. Although this sounds strange, strings can explain gravity!
Superstrings must exist in ten dimensions – so six extra space
dimensions must be hidden away. We don’t understand yet exactly how
this happens.
In 1995, Edward Witten suggested that the varied types of superstring
theories are all di erent approximations to a single theory in 11
dimensions, which he called M-theory.
Scientists disagree on what the ‘M’ means: is it magic, mystery,
master, mother or perhaps membrane? Future generations of physicists
will discover the truth!
Scientists have studied M-theory very hard since then but still don’t
know exactly what it is, or if it really is the Theory of Everything that
Albert Einstein spent many years trying to work out.
 Dr TOBY BLENCH
Research Chemist

Life (plants, animals and humans) is based around the element carbon.
Carbon is better at forming very complex and stable molecules than any
other element. There is also a lot of it in the Universe – it’s the fourth
most abundant element. These facts mean that, apart from hydrogen,
there are more known molecules containing carbon than all the other
elements put together.
However, you need more than just carbon to create life. Another
essential is water. Around 60% of the human body is water. It is so
important because it is involved in many of the processes that make the
body work and also it is involved in, and makes a very good solvent for,
the reactions that are needed to make the complex molecules that life is
made from.

A very important set of these complex molecules from which life is

made are called amino acids, which contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
nitrogen and sulphur. There are only 20 di erent amino acids in the
human body but they combine in lots of di erent ways to make much
larger molecules, called proteins. These are found throughout the body
and have many di erent jobs: they help make hair, muscles and
ligaments; they help provide structure to the cells in your body; they are
in blood; they help you digest your food and they do all sorts of other
important jobs in your body.
So this is how, in just a few steps, very simple things like atoms can
become something as complex as life.
 Temperature

Average temperature on Earth’s surface: 15°C (59°F)

Lowest temperature ever recorded on -89°C (-128.2°F), Vostok,

Earth: Antarctica, 21 July 1983

Highest temperature ever recorded on 70°C (159.3°F), Lut

Earth: Desert, Iran, 2005

Temperature on the surface of the 110°C (230°F) 150°C

Moon: daytime average: night-time (-240°F)
average:

Average temperature on the surface of 5,500°C (9,932°F)

the Sun:

Average temperature at the core of the 15,000,000°C

Sun: (27,000,000°F)

Average temperature of space: -270.4°C (-454.72°F)

 What are chemical elements and
where do they come from?
Very simply, a chemical element is a pure substance made from a single
type of atom. Why is that interesting? Well, there are only 118 known
elements and everything in the world is made from a combination of
one or more of these elements. The study of how the known elements
behave and make compounds is the science of chemistry.
If everything is made from these elements, where do they come from?
The two smallest elements, hydrogen and helium, were formed at the
start of the Universe in the Big Bang and some time after they came
together in large quantities to form stars. In stars, like the Sun, hydrogen
burns at very high temperatures in a process called fusion to make
helium. As stars get older, the amount of helium builds up and hydrogen
runs out, and so the stars start to use helium as fuel, leading to larger
elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Since these elements are the
basis of human life, you could say that we are made of stars!
Depending on how big and hot the star is, larger and larger elements
are made in a number of di erent fusion processes until iron is reached.
After that, one of the major ways of forming elements happens when a
star explodes. This is called a supernova. A supernova releases the huge
amounts of energy that are required to make the heavy elements
(elements with atoms that weigh more than an atom of iron).

Atoms are given numbers according to how many protons there are in
the nucleus. Atoms of each element have a different number. An atom
can also have a weight: it is weighed against a carbon atom. Scientists
can use these numbers and weights to make useful lists of atoms.

All these processes account for 94 of the elements, and they all occur
naturally on Earth. The other 24, called ‘transuranic’ as they are heavier
than uranium, are man-made with special equipment like nuclear
reactors or particle accelerators. These elements are not very stable and
fall apart to form smaller, more stable elements in a process called
ssion. Elements that fall apart in this way are called ‘radioactive’. When
radioactive compounds fall apart, they also release energy, and that can
be used to generate electricity, which is what happens in a nuclear power
station.
 Why do we weigh different amounts
on different worlds?
• Your weight is the amount of gravitational force
between you and the Earth.

• Your mass is the amount of matter that you

contain.

Mass is measured in kilos (kg). But isn’t weight measured in kilos too?
Isn’t that confusing? Yes, it is.
Weight is commonly described in kilos on Earth but it really should be
given in newtons (N). A newton is a unit of force.
A mass of 1 kg on Earth is about 10 N.
When you travel across the Solar System, your mass doesn’t change.
But your weight does.
When you land on a planet or moon with weaker gravity than the
Earth, your weight changes although your mass stays the same. What
does this mean in practice?
 If you weigh 34 kg on Earth, here is your weight in kilos on other
bodies in our Solar System!
Mercury: 12.8 kg Jupiter: 80.3 kg

Venus: 30.6 kg Saturn: 36.1 kg

The Moon: 5.6 kg Uranus: 30.2 kg

Mars: 12.8 kg Neptune: 38.2 kg

So you could jump over really high bars with ease on the Moon or
Mercury – but nd it hard to even take a step over a bar on the ground
on Jupiter! (That is, if Jupiter had solid ground – itʼs made of gas that
gets denser as you get closer to the core!)
 Flat-Earthers, Moon-
Hoaxers and Anti-
Vaxxers:
Why Do Some People Reject Scientific
Information?
Dr SOPHIE HODGETTS
Lecturer in Psychology, University of Sunderland

Science is an incredible thing, right? By studying biology, chemistry,

physics and human behaviour, scientists have made incredible advances
in many aspects of life. It is thanks to science that we have been able to
destroy certain diseases, travel to the Moon and take incredible images of
the Earth. But it might surprise you to learn that there are some people
who ask: did we really do all that? There are many people who believe
that we have never been to the Moon, and there are many people who
believe that the Earth is actually at! In psychology, the study of the
human mind and behaviour, we call this type of belief a conspiracy
theory.

A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or

situation that relies on sinister actors and motivations,
rather than hard evidence.

There are many di erent conspiracy theories, but some subjects are
more likely to generate conspiracy theories than others. Among the
more common topics associated with conspiracy theories are new
technologies and scienti c achievement. For example, people who
believe that we have not been to the Moon argue that NASA staged the
whole event, creating fake images and video footage. Similarly, many
people who believe the Earth is at also incriminate NASA, suggesting
that evidence showing a at Earth has been suppressed while evidence
showing that the Earth is a globe is actually fake. In many cases,
conspiracy theorists state that the reasons for the fakery are money-
related; essentially, it’s cheaper to fake missions to space than it is
actually to do them.

Echo Chambers
In recent years, many scientists have noticed that conspiracy theories are
no longer limited to small corners of the internet, but can be found in
mainstream news media, on YouTube and social media. This has led
some psychologists to believe that the availability of the internet has
increased the commonness of conspiracy theories. Although more
research is needed in this area, there is some evidence to suggest that
social media may have a role to play. For example, if someone joins a
Facebook group for people who believe in a speci c conspiracy theory,
Facebook algorithms will direct that person to more sources of
information on that particular topic. Similarly, online groups often
become echo chambers for conspiracy theories. An echo chamber is
de ned as an environment in which someone can only nd information
that supports their beliefs, as all other information is rejected. In our
example, someone in a Facebook group speci cally for people who
believe in a certain conspiracy theory is likely to become part of an echo
chamber for that particular theory.
People have believed in conspiracy theories since before we had the
internet, and there are many reasons for this. Psychology studies show
that people who are naturally very paranoid or suspicious of others are
more likely to believe in at least one conspiracy theory. There is also
evidence suggesting that people who are generally very anxious are more
likely to believe in a conspiracy theory. This may be because being part
of a group of people with similar beliefs can help us to feel less anxious
and more supported by the people around us. Conspiracy-theory belief
can help someone to feel important, as if they have access to special,
unique knowledge that not everybody can have. Because of this, it is also
thought that conspiracy-theory belief leads to an ‘us versus them’
attitude, and this can make a group very strong and more likely to stick
together and support each other. Interestingly, there is evidence
suggesting that times of social or political unrest are linked to increased
belief in conspiracy. It is likely that this is due to the positive e ects that
being in a group can have on our anxiety levels. It also seems likely that
part of the reason that conspiracy theories are more popular these days is
the current political unrest and global sense of uncertainty.

Do conspiracy theories matter?

So why does it matter that some people believe in conspiracy theories?
Well, let’s think about some other examples of science-based conspiracy
theories. In a recent survey, one in ve Britons stated that they think
vaccinations are harmful. Some scientists refer to this as an example of
‘science denial’, a harmful rejection of science that appears to be
increasing in popularity. The evidence that these beliefs are damaging is
clear. For example, many parents do not get their children vaccinated to
protect them from measles, because they believe the vaccine is
dangerous. Recent gures from Public Health England show that
between January and October 2018, there have been 913 laboratory-
con rmed cases of measles in England alone (compared to 259 such
cases in 2017).
 Measles
Measles is a very infectious disease. The virus is carried in the air.
Symptoms take 10 days or a fortnight to appear after you’ve picked up
the virus, and it takes another 10 or 14 days before the illness passes.
People who suffer from measles have very high temperatures and
become covered with a red rash. You could also have a cough, runny
nose and inflamed eyes. You might develop diarrhoea or pneumonia,
or infections of the ears, eyes or brain. These can leave you with
permanent damage to your sight, hearing or brain. Your ability to
resist other infections could be affected. Some people – especially
those who suffer from malnutrition – die from measles. So far as we
know, only humans catch it. There has never been a case involving
animals.

What can we do to help stop the spread of damaging conspiracy

theories? This is a di cult question, because many people who believe a
conspiracy theory are thinking like scientists! Thinking critically and
questioning what we see is a key skill for any researcher, so perhaps
‘science denial’ is not the right way to think about people who believe a
conspiracy theory. Instead, it seems likely that labelling someone in this
way will only alienate them. As scientists, we should seek to engage with
people who have doubts, or are disappointed by and suspicious of
science. It is also very important for scientists to communicate their
work e ectively, by making it clear how what they do is relevant to other
people. Finally, and perhaps most di cult of all, scientists should seek to
build trust with their audience. This involves actively speaking out about
science, but also resisting any urge to ridicule people who do not share
our beliefs as this will not foster trust. Instead, it is important that we
listen to them, nd out where they got their information from, and
consider why they might believe in it. This way, we can start to develop a
positive relationship between scientists and the public, and prevent the
spread of damaging misinformation.
 Space Diving
When you go up into space in a spacecraft, you pass through a line
which seems to divide the blue of the Earth’s atmosphere from the black
of space. This is called the Kármán line and it is 100 km (62.1 miles)
above the surface of the Earth. It marks the start of space!

Where does space start?

The Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just suddenly stop and then you’re in
space – it’s not like putting your head out of a window! No, it gets
thinner and thinner the further from Earth you are; but the Kármán
line marks the point where ‘space’ officially begins.

The Kármán Line

Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963), a Hungarian-American engineer
and physicist, was interested in aeronautics and astronautics. He tried
to work out at what point the atmosphere was too thin to support an
aircraft – his answer was 83.6 km (51.9 miles) above Earth. This was
changed later to 100 km (62 miles). As well as being important for
aircraft and spacecraft, the Kármán line is useful for lawyers – the laws
that govern space are not the same as the laws that govern Earth’s
atmosphere!

To do a space dive or a space jump, you jump out of a spacecraft or

hot-air balloon from above the Kármán line, then freefall down through
space into the Earth’s atmosphere, where you eventually open a
parachute to land on the ground.
 This is incredibly dangerous! Several space jumps have ended
extremely badly indeed.
 Is the Kármán line really that high
up?
Yes, Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain, is about 8.85 km
(5.5 miles) high. It would need to be almost ten times bigger to
reach the Kármán line!
An average aircraft ies at just under 11 km (6.8 miles) of altitude.
So, if you were looking out of the window of a plane, one of these
astronauts could have come falling past you!
A space-travel company is now working on a special suit that would
allow space diving from even higher altitudes!
But these suits are not for stunts or record breaking – they are being
developed as an emergency exit route for astronauts who need to bail out
of their spacecraft and return to Earth in freefall.
Truly life-saving.
Who has the record for the longest
space dive?
1960: The record was set by an American, Colonel Joseph Kittinger.
Colonel Kittinger was part of a research project into high-altitude
bail-outs for pilots. He did three jumps from a helium balloon at
over 31 km (19.26 miles) above the Earth! Later, Colonel Kittinger
would write that the speed he travelled at was unimaginable.
1962: A Soviet colonel called Yevgeni Andreyev set a new record by
freefalling further to Earth before opening his parachute than
anyone had previously managed. But Joseph Kittinger still kept the
record for the longest skydive as Yevgeni Andreyev leaped out of his
capsule at 25.48 km (15.83 miles) – not so high up.
2012: Joseph Kittinger’s record for the longest dive and Yevgeni
Andreyev’s record for the longest freefall were not broken until this
century, when Felix Baumgartner broke them both in one go,
jumping from 39 km (24 miles)!
2014: He didn’t have long as world champion, as a computer
scientist called Alan Eustace stole his thunder by completing the
highest-altitude jump with the longest freefall only a couple of years
later. Eustace fell over 41.419 km (26 miles) in just 15 minutes, his
speed peaking at 1,323 km/h (822 mph). People on the ground
heard the boom as he went through the sound barrier!
 The Night Sky
During the day there is only one star that can be seen in the sky. It is the
star that is the closest to us, the star that has the most e ect on our daily
lives and for which we have a special name: the Sun.
The Moon and the planets do not shine on their own. They appear
bright at night because the Sun lights them up.
All the other shining dots in the night sky are stars, like our Sun.
Some are bigger, some are smaller, but they are all stars. With the naked
eye, on a clear night, away from sources of light like cities, we can see
hundreds of them.
In the night sky there are a few objects that can be seen that are not
stars – the Moon and the planets, like Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn.
 Our Moon
A moon is a natural satellite of a planet.
A satellite is an object that goes round a planet, like the Earth goes
round the Sun, and natural means that it is not man-made.
The most obvious e ect the Moon’s gravity has on the Earth is the
tides of the oceans. The sea on the side of the Earth facing the Moon is
pulled harder towards the Moon because it is nearer. This raises a bulge
in the sea on that side. Similarly, the sea on the side away from the
Moon is pulled towards the Moon less because it is further away. This
creates another bulge in the sea on the other side of the Earth.

Average distance from 384,399 km (238,854 miles)

the Earth:

Diameter at equator: 3,476 km (2,160 miles), which is 27.3% of

Earth’s diameter

Surface area: 0.074 x Earth’s surface area

Volume: 0.020 x Earth’s volume

Mass: 0.0123 x Earth’s mass

Gravity at equator: 16.54% of Earth’s gravity at Earth’s

equator

Even though the Sun’s gravitational pull is much stronger than the
Moon’s, it has only about half the Moon’s e ect on the tides because it is
so much further away. When the Moon is roughly in line with the Earth
and the Sun, the Moon and the Sun tides add together to produce the
large tides (called ‘spring tides’) twice a month.
 There is no atmosphere on the Moon, so the sky there is black, even
during the day. And there hasn’t been an earthquake or volcanic
eruption there since around the time life began on Earth. So all living
organisms that have ever been on the Earth have seen exactly the same
features on the Moon.
From Earth, we always see the same side of the Moon. The rst
pictures of the Moon’s hidden side were taken by a spacecraft in 1959.
The Moon circles the Earth in 27.3 days. The way the Moon shines in
the night sky is the same every 29.5 days.
 A Moon Quiz
Q: When did our Moon form?
A: It’s estimated that the Moon formed over 4 billion years ago.
Q: How did it form?
A: Scientists think that a planet-sized object struck the Earth, causing a
dusty hot cloud of rocky fragments to be catapulted into Earth’s orbit.
As this cloud cooled down, its component bits and pieces stuck
together, eventually forming the Moon.
Q: How big is it?
A: The Moon is much smaller than the Earth – you could t around 49
Moons into the Earth. It also has less gravity. If you weigh 45.36 kg
(100 lb) here on Earth, you would weigh around 7.5 kg (less than 17
lb) on the Moon!
Q: Does it have an atmosphere?
A: No. This explains why the sky is always dark on the Moon, meaning
that, if you stay in the shade, the stars are visible all the time.
Q: What explanations did people have for the Moon before scientists
discovered how it was formed?
A: A long time ago, people on Earth believed that the Moon was a
mirror, or perhaps a bowl of re in the night sky. For centuries,
humans thought the Moon had magical powers to in uence life on
Earth. In one way, they were right – the Moon does a ect the Earth,
but not by magic. The Moon’s gravity exerts a pull on the oceans,
which creates the tides.
Q: Could life exist on the Moon?
A: The Moon cannot support life – unless it’s someone wearing a
spacesuit. But as a consolation prize, evidence is mounting that the
Moon contains much more water – the prime ingredient for life as
we know it – than scientists thought just a few years ago. It’s frozen,
 though, and any Earth emigrants to the Moon will need to put
substantial e ort into transforming it into its life-friendly liquid
form.
Q: Has our Moon ever been visited by other civilizations?
A: The Moon has been visited 12 times by astronauts from Earth.
Between 1969 and 1972, 12 NASA astronauts walked on the surface
of the Moon. Could the Moon have been visited before human
civilization even began on Earth, by extraterrestrials who left deposits
behind them? Could aliens have got as far as ‘next door’ to us? It’s a
very, very long shot, but some scientists on Earth are looking again at
moon rock to see whether it holds any clues.
Everything in our Universe takes time to travel, even light.
In space, light always travels at the maximum speed that is
possible: 300,000 km (186,000 miles) per second. This speed is
called the speed of light.
It only takes light about 1.3 seconds to travel from Earth to the
Moon. Our Sun is further away from us than our Moon is.
When light leaves the Sun, it takes about 8 minutes and 30
seconds to reach us on Earth.
The other stars in the sky are much, much further away from
Earth than the Sun. The closest one after the Sun is called
Proxima Centauri and it takes 4.22 light years for light from it to
reach Earth.
All other stars are even further away. The light of almost all the
stars we can see in the night sky has been travelling for
hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of years before
reaching our eyes. Even though we see them, some of these stars
may not exist any more, but we do not know it yet because the
light of the explosion that occurs when a star dies has yet to reach
us.
Distances in space can be measured in terms of light years,
which is the distance light travels in a year. A light year is around
9,500 billion km (almost 6,000 billion miles).
 The Solar System
The Solar System is the cosmic family of our Sun. It comprises all the
objects trapped by the Sun’s gravity: planets, dwarf planets, moons,
comets, asteroids and other small objects yet to be discovered. An object
trapped by the Sun’s gravity is said to be in orbit round the Sun.

Closest planet to the Sun: Mercury

Mercury is 57.9 million km (36 million miles) away from the
Sun on average. Mercury has no moons.

Furthest planet from the Sun: Neptune

Neptune is 4.5 billion km (2.8 billion miles) away from the Sun
on average.

Number of planets: 8

From closest to the Sun, the planets are: Mercury, Venus,

Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune

Distance of the Earth from the Sun: 149.6 million km (93

million miles) on average.

Number of dwarf planets: 6

From closest to the Sun, the dwarf planets are: Ceres,

Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Eris and Sedna.

Number of known planetary and dwarf planetary moons:

194
Mercury: 0; Venus: 0; Earth: 1; Mars: 2; Jupiter: 79; Saturn:
82; Uranus: 27; Neptune: 14

Number of known comets: 1,000 (estimated real number:

1,000,000,000,000,000)

Moons of asteroids: 190

Moons of dwarf planets orbiting beyond Neptune: 63

Furthest distance travelled by a man-made object: more

than 21.7 billion km (13.5 billion miles). This is the distance
reached by Voyager 1 on 3 June, 2019. Voyager 1 continued
to travel away from the Solar System, transmitting data to
Earth.
 Step One:
A cloud of gas and dust began to collapse – possibly triggered by shock
waves from a nearby supernova.

Step Two:
A ball of dust formed, spinning round and attening into a disc as it
attracted more dust, gradually growing larger and spinning faster.

Step Three:
The central region of this collapsed cloud got hotter and hotter until it
started to burn, turning it into a star.

Step Four:
As the star burned, the dust in the disc around it slowly stuck together to
form clusters, which became rocks, which eventually formed planets, all
still orbiting the star – our Sun – at the centre. These planets ended up
forming two main groups: close to the Sun, where it is hot, the rocky
planets; and further out, beyond Mars, the gas planets, which consist of a
thick atmosphere of gas surrounding a liquid inner region with, very
probably, a solid core.

Step Five:
The planets cleaned up their orbits by gobbling up any chunks of
material they came across.

Step Six:
Hundreds of millions of years later, the planets settled into stable orbits
– the same orbits that they follow today. The bits of stu left over ended
up either in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, or much further
out beyond Pluto in the Kuiper belt.
 The Kuiper Belt
From the outer edge of Neptune’s orbit to about 50 astronomical units
(AU) from the outer Solar System, there is a disc of material left from
when the Solar System formed. It is made up of scattered icy chunks
of frozen gas – some big enough to form small bodies that can be
classified as dwarf planets, such as Pluto.

Read more about AUs on page 175.

 Did you know?
Our Solar System was formed around 4.6 billion years ago.

Stars with a mass like our Sun take around 10 million years to
form.

As Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System, it may have

done most of the cleaning up on its own.

An exoplanet is a planet in orbit round a star other than the

Earth’s Sun.

Are there other solar systems like

ours?
For several hundred years astronomers suspected that other stars in the
Universe might have planets in orbit round them. However, the rst
exoplanet was not con rmed until 1992, orbiting the corpse of a massive
star. The rst planet around a real, brightly shining star was discovered
in 1995, orbiting the star 51 Pegasi. Since then, over 4,000 exoplanets
have been discovered – some around stars very similar to our Sun!
This is just the beginning. Even if only 10% of the stars in our Galaxy
had planets in orbit round them, that would still mean more than 200
billion solar systems within the Milky Way alone.
Some of these may be similar to our Solar System. Others might look
very di erent. Planets in a binary solar system, for example, might see
two suns rise and set in the sky. Knowing the distance from the planets
to their star – and the size and age of the star – helps us to calculate how
likely it is that we might nd life on those planets.
Most of the exoplanets we know about in other solar systems are huge
– as big as Jupiter or larger. Large exoplanets are easier to detect than
smaller ones. But astronomers are beginning to discover smaller, rocky
planets orbiting at the right distance from their star that might be more
like Planet Earth.
In early 2011, NASA con rmed their Kepler mission had spotted an
Earth-like planet around a star 500 light years away! At only 1.4 times the
size of our home planet, this new planet, Kepler-10b, is similar to Earth
in size, but it lies very close to its star, and is too hot to sustain any kind
of life that we know.

Some of the very big planets that have been discovered may
actually be the kinds of small stars known as ‘brown dwarfs’.

The Kepler Mission

Kepler was the name given to a space telescope launched by NASA in
2009. It was designed to look for Earth-sized planets orbiting stars in
a particular section of the Milky Way. Kepler looked at 530,506 stars
and found 2,662 planets. It was in operation for 9 years and was
retired when it ran out of fuel in 2018.
 Mercury
Vital Statistics

Average distance from the Sun: 57.9 million km (36 million miles)

Diameter at equator: 4,878 km (3,029 miles)

Surface area: x 0.147 Earth’s surface area

Volume: x 0.156 Earth’s volume

Mass: x 0.055 Earth’s mass

Hottest temperature: 430°C (806°F)

Coldest temperature: -170°C (-274°F)

Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun.

Mercury rotates on its axis very slowly – each ‘day’ lasts
59 Earth-days.
Mercury orbits the Sun once in 88 Earth-days – a very quick year
compared to its slow day!
 Structure
Mercury is the smallest planet. For many years little was known about it,
because it orbits so close to the Sun that it was hard for astronomers to
see it with telescopes.
Mercury is rocky, and the second-densest planet after Earth in the
Solar System. To explain this, scientists think that its core must be iron,
and take up 70% of its mass.
Mercury’s surface is very similar to that of the Moon, with craters,
plains, mountains and valleys. It has the biggest impact crater in the
Solar System, the Caloris Basin – which has a diameter of 1,550 km (963
miles). Whatever hit the planet to make the crater produced shock waves
so great that on the other side of the planet, opposite the Basin, is an
area of very strange hills astronomers call the ‘Weird Terrain’.
Between 2011 and 2015 the probe MESSENGER (short for MErcury
Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) orbited
Mercury. Among its discoveries was the presence of water ice at
Mercury’s north pole.
 Venus
Vital Statistics

Average distance from the Sun: 108.2 million km (67.2 million miles)

Diameter at equator: 12,000 km (7,452 miles)

Surface area: x 0.902 Earth’s surface area

Volume: x 0.866 Earth’s volume

Mass: x 0.815 Earth’s mass

Average surface temperature: 462°C (864°F)

Venus is the second-nearest planet to the Sun.

Venus rotates slowly on its axis – once in 243 Earth-days.
Venus orbits the Sun once in 225 Earth-days. It ‘overtakes’ the Earth every
584 days as it orbits.
 Structure
Venus is not much smaller than Earth, and as it orbits it comes closest
to us of any planet. It is the second-brightest object in the night sky after
the Moon. Venus is a rocky planet, surrounded by a very thick, dense
atmosphere mostly made of carbon dioxide and drops of sulphuric acid.
This re ects light, so it is easy for us to see.
The atmosphere produces a greenhouse e ect. The heat on the
planet’s surface cannot escape, which is why it is the hottest planet in
the Solar System. The atmospheric pressure is enormous – over 90
times that of Earth. There is no life and no water on Venus.
Space probes have discovered that much of Venus is covered by
volcanic plains. There are two highland areas like continents, one in the
northern hemisphere and one just south of the equator.
One unusual feature is that Venus orbits the Sun in a clockwise – or
retrograde – direction. Most planets orbit in an anti-clockwise direction.

Venus was the first planet to be visited by a probe

(Mariner 2), and the first heavenly body on which a
spacecraft landed (Venera 7).
 Mars

Vital Statistics

Average distance from the 227.9 million km (141.6 million miles)

Sun:

Diameter at equator: 6,805 km (4,228.4 miles)

Surface area: 0.284 x Earth’s surface area

Volume: 0.151 x Earth’s volume

Mass: 0.107 x Earth’s mass

Gravity at equator: 37.6% of Earth’s gravity at Earth’s

equator

Mars is the fourth-closest planet to the Sun.

Mars orbits the Sun once 1.88 Earth-years.
 Structure
Mars is a rocky planet with an iron core. In between its core and its red
crust there is a thick rocky layer. Mars also has a very thin atmosphere,
mostly made of carbon dioxide (95.3%), which we cannot breathe. The
average temperature on Mars is very cold: around -60°C (-76°F).
The largest volcanoes in the Solar System are on the surface of Mars.
The largest one of all is called Olympus Mons. From one side to the
other, it spreads over a disc-shaped area 600 km (370 miles) wide and is
22 km (13.6 miles) high. On Earth, the largest volcano is on Hawaii. It is
called Mauna Loa and reaches 4.1 km (2.54 miles) in height from sea
level – though if one measures it from where its base starts at the
bottom of the ocean, it rises 17 km (10.5 miles) high.
Mars has two small moons: Phobos (named after the Greek god of
fear) and Deimos (the Greek god of terror).

Conditions on Mars
We know that Mars is now a cold desert planet with no signs of life,
simple or complex, on its surface. But was it once a wet, warm world
where life ourished? Clues found by man-made Martian rovers, sent
out to the red planet to investigate, tell us that Mars was once a very
di erent place.
But could Mars become a fertile, oxygen-rich planet once more, where
we could grow crops, breathe the atmosphere and enjoy a balmy Martian
summer? Could we ‘terraform’ Mars so that its atmosphere, its climate
and its surface would be suitable for life as we recognize it?
In the case of Mars, we would need to build an atmosphere and
increase the temperature of the planet.
To heat up Mars, we would need to add greenhouse gases to the
atmosphere to trap energy from the Sun – it’s almost the opposite of the
problem we have on Earth, where we have too many greenhouses gases
in the atmosphere and we want the planet to cool down a little rather
than heat up!

Terraforming means making enormous changes to a

whole planet in order to create an environment
habitable by humans, plants and animals.

But does Mars have enough gravity to retain an atmosphere thick

enough for us? Once, it had a magnetic eld, but that decayed 4 billion
years ago, meaning that Mars was stripped of most of its atmosphere,
leaving it with only 1% of the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere. Much
lower gravity, then.
In the past, the atmospheric pressure – which means the weight of
the air above you in the atmosphere – must have been higher, though,
because we can see what appear to be dried-up channels and lakes.
Liquid water cannot exist on Mars now as it would just evaporate. To live
there, we would need water – and there is lots of water in the form of ice
at the planet’s two poles. If we went to live on Mars, we could use this.
We could also use the minerals and metals that volcanoes have brought
to the planet’s surface.
So there is enormous potential out there on the red planet, but it’s
going to be a very di cult job for the rst astronauts. Before they can
even think about the long-term task of terraforming – if that is even
possible – they will have a huge amount of work to do to survive in the
red dusty world of our rocky neighbour, Mars. It would be very much
like living in some kind of dome with a controlled atmosphere – going
out would only be possible with a respirator!
Those astronauts are going to need to be clever, resourceful, brave and
persistent in order to build the foundations of a colony or a human
habitation on Mars.
Does that sound like you?
 Jupiter
Vital Statistics

Average distance from 778.3 million km (483.6 million miles)

the Sun:

Diameter at equator: 142,984 km (88,846 miles), which is 11.2 x

greater than
Earth’s diameter at its equator

Surface area: 120.5 x Earth’s surface area

Volume: 1,321.3 x Earth’s volume

Mass: 317.8 x Earth’s mass

Gravity at equator: 236% of Earth’s gravity at Earth’s equator

Jupiter is the fifth-closest planet to the Sun.

Jupiter orbits the Sun once in 11.86 Earth-years.
 Structure
Jupiter has a small (compared to the overall size of the planet) rocky core
surrounded by a liquid metal layer which smoothly turns into a liquid
hydrogen layer as height increases. This liquid then turns into an
atmosphere made of hydrogen gas that surrounds the planet. Even
though it is bigger, Jupiter’s overall composition is similar to Saturn’s.
The Great Red Spot on Jupiter’s surface is a giant hurricane-type
storm – a hurricane that has lasted for more than three centuries (it was
rst observed in 1655), but it may have been there for even longer. The
Great Red Spot storm is huge: more than twice the size of the Earth.
Winds on Jupiter often reach 1,000 km/h (620 mph).
So far, Jupiter has 79 con rmed moons. Four of them were big
enough to be seen by the Italian scientist Galileo in 1610. These are
collectively known as the Galilean moons. They are: Io, Europa,
Ganymede and Callisto, and they are about the same size as our Moon.
 Europa

Is there really life on Europa, the ‘blue’ moon of Jupiter? Right now, we
don’t know! Thanks to the Galileo mission, launched in 1989, which
sent back lots of new information about Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon,
we think there is a subsurface ocean under the thick icy crust, which
could contain a form of life.
But whether we would actually nd sh swimming about if we could
land on Europa and drill down through the several-kilometres-thick
carpet of ice is anyone’s guess! It is far more probable – and, actually,
equally exciting to scientists – that any life found would be more like
microbes.
But we may get some clearer answers in the next decade! A new
mission called JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) is planned to set o
in 2022 to take a closer look at this mysterious moon. JUICE is a robotic
spacecraft designed by the European Space Agency. It will take around 8
years to reach Jupiter, arriving in 2030, and will spend about 3 years
looking at the giant gas planet and three of its largest moons, Callisto,
Ganymede and Europa. Hopefully JUICE and a simultaneous NASA
mission, Europa Clipper, will tell us much, much more about Europa.
What do we know now?
Well, we know that:
Europa is an icy moon in orbit round Jupiter, the largest planet in
our Solar System.
 Jupiter has a total of 79 moons found so far, but the four largest of
them – including Europa – are called the Galilean moons, because
they were discovered in 1610 by the astronomer Galileo Galilei.
When Galileo spotted these moons orbiting Jupiter, he realized that
not everything in the Solar System went round the Earth, as
previously thought! This completely changed perceptions of our
place in the Solar System and the Universe itself.
Europa is only slightly smaller than our Moon but has a much
smoother surface. In fact, Europa may have the fewest lumps and
bumps of any object in the Solar System as it doesn’t seem to have
mountains or craters!
It has an icy crust. Scientists believe the ocean underneath could be
100 km (62 miles) deep. Compare this to the deepest part of the
ocean on Earth, the Marianas Trench in the Paci c Ocean, which is
about 11 km (6.8 miles) deep!
The crust has distinctive markings in the form of dark stripes,
which may be ridges formed by eruptions of warm ice at an earlier
stage in Europa’s life.

Naming Jupiter’s Four Big Moons

Although he discovered them, Galileo didn’t name Jupiter’s four
biggest moons. It was another astronomer, Simon Marius, who did
that. He also discovered the moons – the day after Galileo did – but
didn’t publish information about what he had found until 1614.
 Saturn
Vital Statistics

Average distance 1,430 million km (888 million miles)

from the Sun:

Diameter at 120,536 km (74,898 miles), which is 9.5 x greater

equator: than Earth’s diameter at its equator

Surface area: 83.7 x Earth’s surface area

Volume: 763.59 x Earth’s volume

Mass: 95 x Earth’s mass

Gravity at 91.4% of Earth’s gravity at Earth’s equator

equator:

Saturn is the sixth-closest planet to the Sun.

Saturn orbits the Sun once in 29.46 Earth-years.
 Structure
Saturn has a hot rocky core that is surrounded by a liquid metal layer,
which is itself surrounded by a liquid hydrogen and helium layer. Then
there is an atmosphere that surrounds the planet.
Winds have been recorded at speeds up to 1,795 km/h (1,116 mph) in
Saturn’s atmosphere. By comparison, the strongest wind ever recorded
on Earth is 400 km/h (253 mph) at Barrow Island o the coast of
Western Australia, on 10 April 1996, though it was not o cially
recognized until 2010. It is believed that wind speeds can sometimes
reach 480 km/h (over 300 mph) inside tornadoes. However devastating
these winds are, they are still very slow compared to Saturn’s winds.
So far, Saturn has 82 con rmed moons. Seven of them are round.
Titan, the largest, is the only known moon within the Solar System to
have an atmosphere. In volume, Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury
and more than three times bigger than our Moon.
 Titan

Titan is the largest of Saturn’s moons and the second-largest moon in

the Solar System. Only Ganymede – one of Jupiter’s moons – is bigger.
Titan was discovered on 25 March 1655 by Dutch astronomer
Christiaan Huygens. Huygens was inspired by Galileo’s discovery of four
moons round Jupiter. The discovery that Saturn had moons in orbit
round it provided further proof for astronomers in the seventeenth
century that not all objects in the Solar System travelled round the Earth,
as was previously thought.
It takes 15 days and 22 hours for Titan to orbit Saturn – the same time
as it takes for this moon to rotate once on its own axis, which means that
a year on Titan is the same length as a day!
Titan is the only moon we know of in the Solar System that has a
dense atmosphere. Before astronomers realized this, Titan itself was
thought to be much larger in mass. Its atmosphere is mostly made up of
nitrogen with a small amount of methane. Scientists think that it may be
similar to the atmosphere of the early Earth, and that Titan could have
enough material to start the process of life. But this moon is very cold
and lacks carbon dioxide, so the chances of life existing there at the
moment are slim.
Titan may show us what conditions on Earth were like in the very
distant past and help us understand how life began here.
Titan is the most distant place on which a space probe has landed. On
1 July 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reached Saturn. It ew by
Titan on 26 October 2004 and the Huygens probe detached from the
Cassini spacecraft and landed on Titan on 14 January 2005.
Huygens took photographs of Titan’s surface and found out that it
rains there!
The probe also observed dry riverbeds – ‘traces of once- owing liquid’
– on the surface. Cassini imaging later found evidence of hydrocarbons.
In billions of years’ time, when our Sun becomes a red giant, Titan
might become warm enough for life to begin!
 Enceladus

It’s just a tiny white dot orbiting the enormous frozen gas planet Saturn
within the densest part of Saturn’s rings. It’s only one out of Saturn’s 82
moons. It’s not the biggest or the most visible in the night sky. And yet
scientists now think that Enceladus, named after a giant in Greek legend
who was buried under the volcano Mount Etna, may be one of the most
habitable places in our Solar System! Why? The answer is simple …

Water
This snooker ball of a moon – white, round, with an icy smooth surface
– seems to have liquid water, one of the most important ingredients for
life as we know it. Discovered as long ago as 1789 by the famous
astronomer William Herschel, Enceladus remained pretty much a
mystery until two Voyager spacecraft passed it in the early 1980s.
Voyager 2 revealed that, despite the small size of this little moon, it had
all sorts of di erent landscapes. In some parts, Voyager 2 saw ancient
craters; in others, ground that had recently been disturbed by volcanic
activity.
Enceladus endures frequent eruptions. But whereas Mount Etna
sends hot ashes, lava and gas into the Earth’s atmosphere, on Enceladus,
cryovolcanoes shoot out plumes of water ice into the atmosphere, some
of which oat down to the surface as snow. The Cassini space probe,
which studied Saturn and the moons and rings around it for 13 years,
has taken many photos of the ice fountains of Enceladus. So if you could
visit there, you could build a real snowman in space!
 A Very Special Place
As well as liquid water, Enceladus may boast all sorts of other useful
ingredients for life, such as organic carbon, nitrogen and an energy
source, and scientists who study Enceladus recently stated that it makes
this moon a very special place. Could it mean there are extraterrestrial
life forms on Enceladus? Could there be aliens living deep within this
secretive world? Maybe one day you will design a robotic spacecraft
which can visit Enceladus and nd out if an alien giant is sleeping under
the surface of this distant and fascinating little moon!

Planetary Rings
When Galileo looked through his telescope at the sky in 1610, he
discovered that Saturn did not look like other planets. For a while, he
thought it had ears! Eventually astronomers realized it was surrounded
by rings. In the centuries since, we have found out a great deal about
them.
They are mostly made from water ice, with a tiny amount of rocky
dust, ranging from minute specks up to 10 m (33 ft) chunks. The rings
stretch out 6,630 km (4,120 miles) away from Saturn’s equator to
120,700 km (75,000 miles), and are on average 20 m (66 ft) thick.
Some of Saturn’s moons, like Pandora and Prometheus, orbit within
the rings and keep them from spreading out. These moons are called
shepherd moons.
There are two theories about the origin of the rings. One is that they
may come from a moon of Saturn that was destroyed. The other is that
they are material left over from the formation of Saturn.
Saturn is not the only planet to have rings. Jupiter, Uranus and
Neptune also have rings, but they are not so numerous and cannot be
seen as easily.
 Uranus
Vital Statistics

Average distance from the Sun: 2,871 million km (1,782 million miles)

Diameter at equator: 50,800 km (31,547 miles)

Surface area: x 15.91 Earth’s surface area

Volume: x 63.086 Earth’s volume

Mass: x 14.536 Earth’s mass

Average temperature: -197.2°C (-323°F)

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun.

Uranus rotates on its axis once in 17 hours, 14 minutes.
Uranus orbits the Sun once in 84 Earth-years.
 Structure

Uranus has the coldest atmosphere of any planet in the

Solar System, and very high winds have been recorded:
900 km/h (560 mph).

Uranus was known to astronomers in the ancient world, but they

thought it was a star. It may have been recorded in 128 BCE by the Greek
Hipparchus in his star catalogue – this was taken over and expanded by
Ptolemy in the second century AD. Sir William Herschel recorded and
described it in 1781, but at rst he thought it was a comet!
The spacecraft Voyager 2 ew by Uranus in 1986: photographs show
a bluey-green planet with no markings at all. Scientists think there
might be a small rocky core at the centre. This is surrounded by a thick
layer of frozen water, ammonia and methane. The outer layer of the
atmosphere is mostly hydrogen and helium.
Uranus is one of the two planets called ‘ice giants’, and its axis is tilted
at such an angle that the planet seems to be lying on its side. Like
Venus, Uranus orbits the Sun in a clockwise, or retrograde, direction.
Uranus has 27 known moons, and at least 13 dark rings, which cannot
be seen from Earth.
 Neptune
Vital Statistics

Average distance from the 4,486 million km (2,786 million

Sun: miles)

Diameter at equator: 48,600 km (30,199 miles)

Surface area: x 14.98 Earth’s surface area

Volume: x 57.74 Earth’s volume

Mass: x 17.147 Earth’s mass

Average temperature: -201°C (394°F)

Neptune is the eighth planet from the Sun.

Neptune rotates on its axis once every 18 to 20 hours.
Neptune orbits the Sun once in 164.8 Earth-years.
 Structure
In many ways, Neptune is very like Uranus. It is also an ice giant, and
scientists think it too has a small rocky core, surrounded by frozen
water, ammonia and methane, with an atmosphere mostly of hydrogen
and a little helium. Tiny amounts of methane in the atmosphere make
the planet look blue.
Voyager 2 ew by Neptune in 1989, and information from this, as
well as more recent information from the Hubble Space Telescope and
powerful telescopes on Earth, have shown weather patterns, including
the Great Dark Spot, an enormous storm system, the Small Dark Spot
(another storm), and the Scooter, a storm marked by a group of white
clouds moving very fast.
Winds on Neptune have been measured at almost supersonic speeds:
2,200 km/h (1,300 mph). Mostly the winds blow in a retrograde
direction, against the planet’s rotation.
Neptune has 14 known moons, and four very faint rings.

One of Neptune’s moons, Triton, is the only moon in

the Solar System to have a clockwise (retrograde) orbit.
 PLUTO

Before August 2006 there were said to be nine planets that revolved
round the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune and Pluto. These nine celestial bodies still exist, of course, and
are exactly the same as they were before, but in August 2006 the
International Astronomical Union decided not to call Pluto a planet any
more. It is now called a dwarf planet.
This is because of a change in the de nition of what a planet is. There
are now three rules that need to be ful lled by any object in space in our
Solar System in order to be called a planet:
 1) It has to be in orbit round the Sun.
2) It has to be big enough for gravity to make it almost round and stay
that way.
3) Its gravity has to have attracted almost everything that is next to it
in space as it travels round the Sun, so that its path is cleared.
According to this new de nition, Pluto is not a planet. Is it in orbit
round the Sun? Yes. Is it almost round and will it stay so? Yes. Has it
cleared its path round the Sun? No: there are many rocks around in its
orbital path. So because it failed the third rule, Pluto has been
downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet.
The other eight planets ful l the three rules and so they remain
planets. For planets and stars other than the Sun, an additional
requirement has been agreed upon by the International Astronomical
Union: the object should not be so big as to become a star itself at a later
stage.
As well as the planets and their moons, there are other objects orbiting
the Sun. Asteroids are bodies ranging in size from dust particles to
dwarf planets. One very large group of asteroids formed of rock and
metal is the asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter. Here,
there could be nearly 2 million asteroids bigger than 1 km (0.6 miles) in
diameter. Some of the asteroids are large enough to have names, and
one, Ceres, is classed as a dwarf planet. It is nearly 1,000 km (600
miles) across. Scientists think asteroids are remnants left over from the
formation of planets in the Solar System.
Far out in the Solar System, beyond Neptune, lies the Kuiper belt.
This is very much bigger than the asteroid belt – at least 20 times as
wide, and possibly 200 times more massive! The small objects found
here are mostly made of ice – frozen water, ammonia and methane.
They are also considered to be left over from the formation of the Solar
System. The dwarf planet Pluto lies in the Kuiper belt.
 Exoplanets
Planets around stars other than our Sun are called exoplanets. As of
2019, 4,071 exoplanets have been seen. Most of them are huge – much
bigger than the Earth.

CoRoT
In December 2006 a satellite named CoRoT (short for Convection,
Rotation and planetary Transits) was sent into space. It was a space
telescope. The mission lasted until 2013, when CoRoT had to be retired
because a computer failed and no information could be received from its
telescope. CoRoT made many discoveries, including 32 exoplanets that
could be con rmed by using ground-based telescopes. Several hundred
more possibilities are being investigated. CoRoT 7b, discovered in 2009,
was the rst exoplanet that could be proved to be made of metal or rock.
At just over 4 light years away, Alpha Centauri is the closest star system
to our Sun. In the night sky it looks like just one star, but is in fact
triplets. Two Sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B –
separated by around 23 times the distance between the Earth and the
Sun – orbit a common centre about once every 80 years. There is a
third, fainter, star in the system, Proxima Centauri, which orbits the
other two but at a huge distance from them. Proxima Centauri is the
nearest of the three to Earth.
Alpha B is an orange star, slightly cooler than our Sun and a bit less
massive. It is thought that the Alpha Centauri system formed around
1,000 million years before our Solar System. Both Alpha A and Alpha B
are stable stars, like our Sun, and like our Sun may have been born
surrounded by dusty, planet-forming discs.
In 2008 scientists suggested that planets may have formed around
one or both of these stars. From a telescope in Chile, they are now
monitoring Alpha Centauri very carefully to see whether small wobbles
in starlight will show us planets in orbit in our nearest star system.
Astronomers are looking at Alpha Centauri B to see whether this bright,
calm star will reveal Earth-like worlds around it.
Alpha Centauri can be seen from Earth’s southern hemisphere, where
it is one of the stars of the Centaurus constellation. Its proper name –
Rigel Kentaurus – means ‘centaur’s foot’. Alpha Centauri is its Bayer
designation (a system of star-naming introduced by astronomer Johann
Bayer in 1603).
Alpha A is a yellow star and very similar to our Sun but brighter and
slightly more massive.
Alpha A and Alpha B are binary stars. This means that if you were
standing on a planet orbiting one of them, at certain times you would
see two suns in the sky!
Proxima Centauri is a small star – a red dwarf. Scientists think it takes
about a million years to orbit the other two Centauri stars.
So far the only planet found in the Alpha Centauri system is one that
orbits Proxima Centauri. It is a little bit bigger than Earth, and lies in the
habitable zone, where water might exist.
 55 Cancri
55 Cancri is a star system 41 light years away from us in the direction of
the Cancer constellation. It is a binary system: 55 Cancri A is a yellow
star; 55 Cancri B is a smaller, red dwarf star. These two stars orbit each
other at 1,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
This star system is a good example of one that has been found to have
a family of planets. On 6 November 2007, astronomers discovered what
was then a record-breaking fth planet in orbit round the star Cancri A.
The rst planet around Cancri A was discovered in 1996. Named
Cancri b, it is the size of Jupiter and orbits close to the star. In 2002, two
more planets (Cancri c and Cancri d) were discovered; in 2004, a fourth
planet was found, Cancri e, which is the size of Neptune and takes just
three days to orbit Cancri A. This planet would be scorchingly hot, with
surface temperatures up to 1,500°C (2,732°F).
The fth planet, Cancri f, is around half the mass of Saturn and lies in
the habitable – or Goldilocks – zone of its star. This planet is a giant ball
of gas, mostly made of helium and hydrogen, like Saturn in our Solar
System. But there may be moons in orbit round Cancri f or rocky planets
within Cancri’s Goldilocks Zone, where liquid water could exist on the
surface.

Learn more about the Goldilocks zone on page 66.

Cancri f orbits its star at a distance of 0.781 astronomical units (AU).

An astronomical unit is the measure of distance that astronomers use to
talk about orbits and distance from stars.
Given that there is life on Earth and liquid water on the surface of our
planet, we can say that 1 AU or 150 million km (93 million miles) from
our Sun is within the habitable zone of our Solar System. So, for stars of
roughly the mass, age and luminosity of our Sun, we can guess that a
planet orbiting its star at around 1 AU might be in the Goldilocks Zone.
Cancri A is an older and dimmer star than our Sun, and astronomers
calculate that its habitable zone lies between 0.5 AU and 2 AUs away
from it, which puts Cancri f in a good position!

1 AU = the average distance from the Earth to the Sun

It is very di cult to spot multiple planets around a star because each

planet produces its own stellar wobble. To nd more than one planet,
astronomers need to be able to spot wobbles within wobbles!
Astronomers in California have been monitoring 55 Cancri for over 20
years to make these discoveries.

Kepler-90
More exoplanets are regularly discovered. The record for the most
exoplanets is currently held by Kepler-90, a star in the constellation
Draco. It has eight planets, the same number as our Sun. The eighth
planet was discovered in 2017. Which star will break the record next?
 Andromeda
The Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31) is the nearest large galaxy
to our own Milky Way, and together they are the largest objects in our
Local Group of galaxies. The Local Group is a number – at least 40 – of
nearby galaxies which are strongly in uenced by each other’s gravity.

The Messier Catalogue

The French astronomer Charles Messier (1730–1817) was interested in
comets. He kept finding objects in the sky that weren’t comets – they
got in his way as he hunted – so he made a list of them. Now we know
they were such things as galaxies, nebulae and star clusters. Messier’s
list of 110 objects – with ‘M’ for Messier in front of them, is a handy
way to refer to them, and scientists have added many more to the
original list.
 At 2.5 million light years away, Andromeda is not actually the closest
galaxy to us (that title probably goes to the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy),
but is the closest with a comparable size and mass.
Current estimates suggest that the Milky Way has more mass
(including dark matter), but Andromeda has more stars.
Andromeda has a spiral shape, like the Milky Way.
 Like the Milky Way, Andromeda has a supermassive black hole at its
centre.
Also like the Milky Way, Andromeda has several (at least 14) satellite
dwarf galaxies in orbit round it.
Unlike most galaxies, light received from Andromeda is blue-shifted.
This is because the expansion of the Universe – which makes galaxies
move away from each other – is being overcome by gravity between the
two galaxies, and Andromeda is falling towards the Milky Way at around
300 km (186 miles) per second. The two galaxies may collide in around
4.5 billion years, and eventually merge – or they may just miss.
Collisions between galaxies are not thought to be unusual – the small
Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy appears to be merging with the Milky Way
right now!
 Satellites in Space

A satellite is an object that orbits (or revolves) round another object, like
the Moon round the Earth. The Earth is a satellite of the Sun. However,
we tend to use the word ‘satellite’ to mean the man-made objects that are
sent into space on a rocket to perform certain tasks, such as navigation,
weather monitoring or communication.
Rockets were invented by the ancient Chinese in around 1000 AD.
Many hundreds of years later, on 4 October 1957, the Space Age began
when the Russians used a rocket to launch the rst satellite into orbit
round the Earth. Sputnik, a small sphere capable of sending a weak radio
signal back to Earth, became a sensation.
At the time, it was known as the ‘Red Moon’ and people all over the
world tuned their radios to pick up its signal. The Mark I telescope at
Jodrell Bank in the UK was the rst large radio telescope to be used as a
tracking antenna to chart the course of the satellite. Sputnik was quickly
followed by Sputnik II – also called ‘Pupnik’ because it had a passenger
on board! Laika, a Russian dog, became the rst living being from Earth
to travel into space.
 Did you know?
The first person to publish a study of the mathematics for an artificial
satellite was Sir Isaac Newton. ‘Newton’s Cannonball’ was described
in his book A Treatise of the System of the World, published in 1687. His
idea is a thought experiment.

The Americans tried to launch their own satellite on 6 December 1957

but the satellite only managed to get 1.2 m (3.9 ft) o the ground before
the rocket exploded. On 1 February 1958, Explorer I was more successful,
and soon the two superpowers on Earth – the USSR and the USA – were
also competing to be the greatest in space. At that time, they were very
suspicious of each other and soon realized that satellites were good for
spying. Using photographs taken from above the Earth, the two
superpowers hoped to learn more about activities in the other country.
The satellite revolution had begun.
Satellite technology was originally developed for military and
intelligence reasons. In the 1970s the US government launched 24
satellites, which sent back time signals and orbital information. This led
to the rst global positioning system (GPS). This technology, which
allows armies to cross deserts by night and long-range missiles to hit
targets accurately, is now used by millions of ordinary people to avoid
getting lost! Known as satellite navigation – or satnav – it also helps
ambulances to reach the injured more promptly and coastguards to
launch e ective search-and-rescue missions.
 Other Uses for Satellites
Communication across the world was also changed forever by satellites.
In 1962 a US telephone company launched Telstar, a satellite that
broadcast the rst-ever live television show from the US to Britain and
France. The British saw only a few minutes of fuzzy pictures but the
French received clear pictures and sound. They even managed to send
back their own transmission of Yves Montand singing ‘Sous le ciel de
Paris’ (‘Relax, You Are in Paris’)! Before satellites, events had to be
lmed and the lm taken by plane to be shown on television in other
countries. After Telstar, major world events – such as the funeral of US
President John F. Kennedy in 1963, or the football World Cup in 1966 –
could be broadcast live across the globe for the rst time. Mobile phones
and the internet are other ways in which you might be using a satellite
today.
Satellite imaging isn’t only used by spies! Being able to look back at
the Earth from space has enabled us to see patterns, both on the Earth
and in the atmosphere. We can measure land use and see how cities are
expanding and how deserts and forests are changing shape. Farmers use
satellite pictures to monitor their crops and decide which elds need
fertilizer.
 And satellites have transformed our understanding of the weather.
They have made weather forecasts more accurate and shown the way
weather patterns emerge and move around the world. Satellites cannot
change the weather but they can track hurricanes, tornadoes and
cyclones, giving us the ability to issue severe-weather warnings.

In the late 1990s NASA’s TOPEX/Poseidon satellite, which maps the

oceans, provided enough information for weather watchers to spot the El
Niño phenomenon. And a new series of NASA satellites, all named
Jason, have been launched in this century to gather data about the
ocean’s role in determining the Earth’s climate. This in turn will help us
to better understand climate change, showing us detailed images of the
melting polar ice caps, disappearing inland seas and rising ocean levels –
information we now need urgently!
Just as satellites can look back at the Earth and transform our
understanding of our own planet, so they have also changed our
perception of the Universe around us. The Hubble Space Telescope was
the rst large-scale space observatory. Orbiting the Earth, Hubble has
helped astronomers to calculate the age of the Universe and has shown
that it is expanding at an accelerated pace.
There are at present about 5,000 satellites in orbit round the Earth,
with a total coverage of every square centimetre of the planet. It is getting
quite crowded out there and can be dangerous. Satellites in low Earth
orbit move very fast – around 29,000 km/h (18,000 mph). Collisions are
rare but when they happen, they make a mess! Even a eck of paint
moving at that speed could cause damage if it hit a spacecraft. There may
be a million pieces of space junk orbiting the Earth, but only about
9,000 of these are bigger than a tennis ball. Now, there are scientists
working on ways of collecting space junk and getting rid of it.
 The Multiverse
Professor THOMAS HERTOG
Theoretical Physics, KU Leuven University

Is it possible that our Universe is part of a vastly larger physical reality,

made up of countless other universes lying far beyond the one we know?
The idea of a multiverse profoundly challenges our understanding. After
all, we usually think of our Universe as all there is. Everything.
But today’s leading scienti c cosmological theories predict the
existence of a multiverse. Like our planet, star, and Galaxy, our Universe
may be just one of many. At the same time, the multiverse idea remains
deeply controversial among scientists. This is because the idea of a
multiverse seems to limit what science has to say about our world.
In short, understanding the basic nature of the multiverse and our
place within this enigmatic whole is one of the great science questions of
our time.

Some scientists even argue that the idea of a multiverse

should not be regarded as science at all, since we can’t hop
from one universe to another.

How the Idea Started

The idea that we may be living in a multiverse emerges from the
revolutionary insights in cosmology in the twentieth century, starting
with the discovery in the 1920s that our Universe is expanding. The
expansion means more space is created as time goes on, causing galaxies
to recede from each other. But cosmic expansion also implies that the
Universe must have been in a radically di erent state in the distant past.
Tracing its evolution backwards in time, Einstein’s theory of general
relativity predicts that our expanding Universe must have had a
beginning, about 13.8 billion years ago, when the exceedingly high
densities of matter destroyed the basic fabric of space and time. This
cosmic origin became known as the Big Bang.
The nite speed of light, and the nite age of the Universe, mean that
astronomers can peer at stars and galaxies only within a limited distance.
This distance is our cosmic horizon, which takes us as far as we can go
in our observable Universe. Were space static, the cosmic horizon would
be 13.8 billion light years away, but because of the expansion of space it is
42 billion light years away.

Read more about the Big Bang on page 23.

Quantum Theory Again

At the Universe’s origin, the macroscopic world of stars and galaxies
merges with the microscopic world of atoms and particles. Whereas
Einstein’s theories of relativity governs the former, the behaviour of
particles is described by quantum theory. At the Big Bang, the entire
Universe must have been something like a giant particle. Therefore to
describe the extreme conditions at the Big Bang, we ought to combine
the Einsteinian view of the world with quantum theory to make a single
overarching framework that is both quantum and gravity.
But quantum theory predicts probabilities for di erent outcomes. In
the quantum theory of particles, these could be the probabilities of
nding an electron in one place or another. Applied to the Universe as a
whole, however, the outcome is an entire separate universe! From the
quantum fuzz at the beginning, widely di erent universes can evolve.
Quantum theory predicts not a single Big Bang but many Big Bangs,
giving birth to a variety of di erent universes, each with its own history.
The multiverse emerges as an almost inescapable consequence of our
Universe’s quantum origin.
 Where – and what – are they?
Where are the universes making up the multiverse? Some scientists
argue the other universes are simply very far away. These are models of
the cosmos in which space stretches well beyond our cosmic horizon
and perhaps even to in nity. If that were true, there might be an in nite
number of Earths with readers reading this book on them. These other
Earths would be like isolated universes, lying beyond each other’s cosmic
horizon. Others argue that di erent universes are hovering only
millimetres away from us, but in some extra dimension where light
cannot penetrate. String theory – today’s most promising quantum
gravity theory – predicts the existence of such extra dimensions,
providing ample space for universes to hide.
Alternatively, any notion of location of other members of the
multiverse relative to us may have no meaning. This is the most radical
vision of the multiverse and it is the one most fundamentally implied by
quantum theory. In this vision, the multiverse is like a branching tree, in
which each branch corresponds to a di erent universe representing an
entire cosmic evolution. ‘There are many histories, and the universe
lives them all,’ Stephen Hawking once said.

There’s more about string theory on page 108 in Part Two.

What kind of universes can come into existence? Are the laws of
physics the same across the entire multiverse tree? Probably not. The
laws of physics are a concise set of rules describing gravity and the
elementary particles, and how they interact. In string theory, these laws
are speci ed by the shape of the extra curled-up dimensions. Since string
theory allows for a vast range of di erent shapes of the extra dimensions,
it naturally predicts a multitude of widely di erent universes. String
theorists are currently investigating what physical features can vary from
one universe branch to another in the multiverse. The laws of physics in
each of the universes are forged in the heat of their Big Bang. The matter
around us as well as the overall architecture of our Universe are to some
extent the accidental outcomes of how our particular Universe came into
existence.
Why should we care at all about the multiverse if we can’t see
universes other than our own? Why can’t we simply cut out a single
universe – ours – and forget about all other universes? The quantum
theory behind the multiverse does not allow us to prune the multiverse
tree! The physically distinct universes that make up the multiverse are
mathematically united in a single overarching framework that tells us
how widespread one kind of universe is, relative to another. This gives us
the grip on the multiverse that will be crucial to turn the idea into a
scienti c model that could be proved.

Our Own Improbable Universe

I hasten to add that we may not live in the most probable of all
universes! We must nd ourselves in a realm of the multiverse where
the laws of physics favour the emergence of complexity and life. This
requires a delicate balance between the various particle forces and
gravity, selecting the habitable branches of the multiverse. We evolved
together with the multiverse, and I predict that when the multiverse idea
is eventually put on solid scienti c ground, it will reveal a profound
connection between our existence as observers within one of its
universes and the laws of physics which led to our being here.

It’s not just scientists who theorize about multiverses. Many story
tellers write about them, often calling them ‘parallel universes’ or
‘parallel worlds’. Have you ever come across a parallel world in a book
or a comic? What things are the same as our world and Universe –
and what things are different?
The Dark Side of the Moon
It sounds like it should always be night on the dark side of the Moon, but
that’s not true, as any friendly astronomer will tell you. First of all,
astronomers don’t talk about the dark side. They call it the far side of the
Moon, because the far side of the Moon has night and day, just like we
do on Earth.
When we look up at the Moon in the night sky, it looks familiar to us,
no matter where we are on the Earth. We see the same features each
time because we are always looking at the same side of the Moon. So
how come we never get to see the other side of our old friend the Moon?

Why can’t we see the far

side?
The Moon orbits the Earth while rotating on its axis. It takes the Moon
the same amount of time to complete one orbit of the Earth as it does
for our rocky satellite to rotate – about 29 days. If the Moon didn’t
rotate, we would see all of its faces or sides, near and far, as the Earth
rotates while orbiting the Sun. But because the Earth is turning and
the Moon is turning – and the gravity of the Earth has slowed down
the Moon’s rotation to its current speed – it means we always see the
same face of the Moon.
 Phases of the Moon
The positions of the Earth as it orbits the Sun and the Moon as it orbits
the Earth give us the phases of the Moon.
When the Moon is between the Earth and the Sun, we call it a new
moon. The Moon looks dark to us from Earth as it is lunar night-
time on the near side of the Moon (the side nearest to us).
When the Earth is between the Sun and the Moon, that’s a full
moon. If you were standing on the near side of the Moon, we might
be able to see you from Earth as you would be standing in the
midday sunshine of a lunar day!
Even though we can’t see the far side of the Moon, it has been visited by
astronauts. One of them said it reminded him of his kids’ sandpit!
 The Dark Side of the
Universe
Dr PAUL DAVIES
Department of Physics, Arizona State University, USA

We’ve already looked at atoms, but let’s see how they work in more detail
…

What is the world made of?

One of the simplest questions we can ask is: what is the world made of?
Long ago, the Greek Democritus hypothesized that everything is made
of indivisible building blocks he called atoms. He was right – and over
the past 2,000 years we have lled in the details.
All the stu in our everyday world is made of combinations of the 94
di erent types of atoms: the elements of the periodic table – hydrogen,
helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the
way up to uranium, number 94. Plants, animals, rocks, minerals, the air
we breathe and everything on Earth is made of these 94 building blocks.
We also know that our Sun, the other planets in our Solar System and
other stars far away are made of the same 94 chemical elements. We
understand atoms very well, and we are masters at rearranging them
into all kinds of di erent things. The science of chemistry is all about
building di erent things with atoms, a kind of ‘Lego with atoms’.
 The Periodic Table
The periodic table is a list of all the elements in order of the
weight of their atoms. Hydrogen is the lightest element, and
plutonium is the heaviest. As well as the 94 elements that
occur naturally, scientists have created another 24 in
laboratories.
 Dmitri Mendeleev
(1834–1907)

Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist. He was born in Siberia, the

youngest of about 17 children, but his family had to move right across
Russia to St Petersburg when his father, a schoolteacher, went blind.
He studied chemistry in Russia and Germany, eventually becoming a
professor at St Petersburg University, where he taught inorganic
chemistry. By 1870, the university was internationally recognized for
chemical research.
In 1867, Mendeleev started writing a chemistry textbook. While he was
working on the 65 known chemical elements, he wrote each one, with its
properties, on a card. Moving the cards around, he noticed that they
seemed to form patterns. After working on the cards for hours, he fell
asleep at his desk, but his mind went on working. ‘I saw in a dream a
table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I
immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a
correction later seem necessary.’ When he woke up, he arranged the cards
in a table according to their atomic weights.
Studying his table, Mendeleev was able to predict the existence of eight
elements that hadn’t been discovered. He presented his work, which he
called the periodic system, to the Russian Chemical Society in 1869. What
we now call the periodic table had arrived.
Mendeleev was interested in many aspects of life in Russia. He
introduced the metric system and also helped found the first oil refinery
in the country, though he is said to have commented that burning
petroleum as a fuel ‘would be akin to firing up a kitchen stove with bank
notes’.
He received many honours for his work, but not the Nobel Prize –
when he was proposed for the prize, one person with whom he’d
disagreed argued so fiercely against him that the prize was awarded to
another scientist. Now, element 101 is named Mendelevium after him.

His name is pronounced ‘Men-de-LAY-ev.’

 Today, we know there is a whole lot more out there than just our Solar
System – a mindbogglingly large Universe, with billions of galaxies, each
made of billions of stars and planets. So what is the Universe made of?
Surprise – while our Solar System and other stars and planets are made
of atoms, most of the stu in the Universe is not; it is made of very
strange stu – dark matter and dark energy – that we do not understand
as well as we understand atoms.
 Did you know?
In the Universe as a whole, atoms account for around 5% of what’s
there, and dark matter for approximately 27%, while dark energy
comes in at about 68%.
Only about one in ten of those atoms is in the form of stars, planets
or living things, with the rest probably existing in a gaseous form too
hot to have made stars and planets.
 Dark
Matter
and
Dark
Energy

Dark Matter
Let’s begin with dark matter.
How do we know it is there? What is it? And how come we don’t nd
it on Earth or even in our Sun?
We know it is there because the force of its gravity holds together our
Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy and all the other big structures in the
Universe. The visible part of the Andromeda Galaxy, and all other
galaxies, sits in the middle of an enormous sphere of dark matter (it’s
ten times larger than the galaxies, and astronomers call it the dark halo).
Without the gravity of the dark matter, most of the stars, solar systems
and everything else in the galaxies would go ying o into space, which
would be a very bad thing.
At the moment, we don’t know exactly what the dark matter is made of
(not unlike Democritus, who had an idea – atoms – but didn’t have the
details). But here is what we do know.
Dark matter particles are not made of the same particles that atoms
are (protons, neutrons and electrons); it is a new form of matter! Don’t
be too surprised – it took nearly 200 years to identify all the di erent
kinds of atoms, and over the course of time, many new forms of atomic
matter were discovered.
Because dark matter is not made of the same material as atoms, it is
pretty much oblivious to atoms (and vice versa). Moreover, dark matter
particles are oblivious to other dark matter particles. A physicist would
say that dark matter particles interact with atoms and with themselves
very weakly, if at all. Because of this fact, when our Galaxy and other
galaxies formed, the dark matter remained in the very large and di use
dark matter halo, while the atoms collided with one another and sank to
the centre of the dark halo, eventually forming stars and planets made
almost completely of atoms.
The ‘shyness’ of dark matter particles, then, is why stars, planets and
all living things are made of atoms and not of dark matter.
Nonetheless, dark matter particles are buzzing around our
neighbourhood – at any given time scientists think there is about one
dark matter particle in a good-sized teacup. And this is key to testing this
bold idea. Dark matter particles are shy, but can occasionally leave a
telltale signature in a very, very sensitive particle detector. For this
reason, physicists have built large detectors and placed them
underground (to shield them from the cosmic rays that bombard the
surface of the Earth) to see if dark matter particles really do make up our
halo.

Even more exciting is creating new dark matter particles at a particle

accelerator by turning energy into mass, according to Einstein’s famous
formula, E = mc².
 The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, the most powerful
particle accelerator ever built, is trying to create and detect dark
matter particles.

You can find out more about the LHC on page 95.

Satellites in the sky are looking for pieces of atoms that are created
when dark matter particles in the halo occasionally collide and produce
ordinary matter (the reverse of what particle accelerators are trying to
do).
If one or more of these methods is successful, we will be able to
con rm that something other than atoms makes up the bulk of the
matter in the Universe. Wow!
And now we are ready to talk about the biggest mystery in all science:
dark energy.
This is such a big puzzle that solving it might even topple Einstein’s
theory of gravity, general relativity!

We all know that the Universe is expanding, having grown in size for the
past 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. Since Edwin Hubble discovered
the expansion more than 80 years ago, astronomers have been trying to
measure the slowing of the expansion due to gravity. Gravity is the force
that holds us to the Earth, keeps all the planets orbiting the Sun, and is
generally nature’s cosmic glue. Gravity is an attractive force – it pulls
things together and slows down everything from balls to rockets that are
launched from Earth – and so the expansion of the Universe should be
slowing down due to all the stu attracting all the other stu .
In 1998, astronomers discovered that this simple but very logical idea
couldn’t be more wrong. They discovered that the expansion of the
Universe is not slowing down, but instead it is speeding up. (They did
this by using the time-machine aspect of telescopes: because light takes
time to travel from across the Universe to us, when we look at distant
objects we see them as they were long ago. Using powerful telescopes,
including the Hubble Space Telescope, they were able to determine that
the Universe was expanding more slowly long ago.)
How can this be? According to Einstein’s theory, some stu – stu
even weirder than dark matter – has repulsive gravity. (‘Repulsive
gravity’ means gravity that pushes things apart rather than pulling them
together, which is very strange indeed!) It goes by the name of ‘dark
energy’ and could be something as simple as the energy of quantum
nothingness, or as weird as the in uence of additional space–time
dimensions! Or there may be no dark energy at all, and we need to
replace Einstein’s theory of general relativity with something better.
Part of what makes dark energy such an important puzzle is the fact
that it holds the fate of the Universe in its hands. Right now, dark energy
is stepping on the accelerator and the expansion of the Universe is
speeding up, suggesting that it will expand forever, with the sky
returning to darkness in about 100 billion years.
Since we don’t understand dark energy, we can’t rule out the
possibility that it will put its foot on the brake at some time in the future,
perhaps even causing the Universe to collapse.
These are all challenges for the scientists of the future – you, maybe? –
to explore and understand.
What You Need to Know
About Black Holes
Professor STEPHEN HAWKING
 What is a black hole?
A black hole is a region where gravity is so strong that any light that tries
to escape gets dragged back. Because nothing can travel faster than light,
everything else will get dragged back too. So if you fell into a black hole
youʼd never get out again. A black hole has always been thought of as the
ultimate prison from which there’s no escape. Falling into a black hole is
like falling over Niagara Falls: there’s no way of getting back out the
same way you came in.
The edge of a black hole is called the ‘horizon’. It is like the edge of a
waterfall. If you are above the edge, you can get away if you paddle fast
enough, but once you pass the edge, you are doomed.
As more things fall into a black hole, it gets bigger and the horizon
moves further out. It is like feeding a pig. The more you feed it, the
larger it gets.
How is a black hole made?
To make a black hole, you need to squash a very large amount
of matter into a very small space. Then the pull of gravity will
be so strong that light will be dragged back, unable to escape.
Scientists think that one way black holes are formed is when
stars that have burned up their fuel explode like giant hydrogen
bombs. These explosions are called supernovas. The explosion
will drive off the outer layers of the star in a great expanding
shell of gas and it will push the central regions inwards. If the
star is big enough (at least three times the size of our Sun), a
black hole will form.
Much larger black holes are formed inside clusters and at
the centre of galaxies. These regions will contain black holes
and neutron stars as well as ordinary stars. Collisions
between black holes and the other objects will produce a
growing black hole that swallows anything that comes too
close. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, has a black hole several
million times the mass of our Sun at its centre.
 Neutron Stars

When massive stars run out of fuel, they usually expel all their outer
layers in a giant explosion called a supernova. Such an explosion is so
powerful and bright it can outshine the light of billions and billions of
stars put together.
But sometimes not everything is expelled in such an explosion.
Sometimes the core of the star can remain behind as a ball. After a
supernova explosion, this remnant is very hot: around 100,000°C
(180,000°F), but there is no more nuclear reaction to keep it hot.
Some remnants are so massive that under the in uence of gravity they
collapse in on themselves until they are only a few dozen kilometres –
miles – across. For this to happen, these remnants need to have a mass
that is between around 1.4 and 2.1 times the mass of the Sun.
The pressure is so intense inside these balls that they become liquid
inside, surrounded by a solid crust about 1.6 km (1 mile) thick. The
liquid is made of particles that normally remain inside the core of the
atoms – the neutrons – so these balls are called neutron stars.
There are also other particles inside neutron stars, but they really
consist mostly of neutrons. To create such a liquid on Earth is beyond
our present technology.
Many neutron stars have been observed by modern telescopes. Since
the cores of stars are made of the heaviest elements forged inside stars
(like iron), they are extremely heavy (about the mass of the Sun).
Remnants more massive than 2.1 times the size of the Sun never stop
collapsing on themselves and become black holes.

Stars Like the Sun

Stars like the Sun do not explode in supernovas but become red giants,
whose remnants are not massive enough to shrink under their own
gravity. Some outside layers are dispersed into space. The inner core will
cool and shrink. These inner remnants are called white dwarfs.
Star remnants that are less heavy than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun
become white dwarfs, although white dwarfs can be quite small (about
the size of the Earth).
 White dwarfs cool down over a period of billions of years, until
they are not hot any more.

How can you see a black hole?

Until very recently the answer was you couldn’t! No light can get out of a
black hole. It was like looking for a black cat in a black cellar. Scientists
detected a black hole by the way its gravity pulled on other things. They
saw stars that were orbiting something they couldn’t see, but which they
knew could only be a black hole. They also saw discs of gas and dust
rotating about a central object they couldn’t see, but which they knew
could only be a black hole.

The First Picture

Then, in April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope provided the rst
photo of a black hole! The team behind the telescope included 29-year-
old Katherine Bouman, who wrote one of the key algorithms that
resulted in the rst black-hole photo. The supermassive black hole
pictured is at the core of the enormous galaxy Messier 87. It looks rather
like a luminous fuzzy ring doughnut on a black background.

The Event Horizon Telescope

The Event Horizon Telescope isn’t a single instrument. It is a
series of radio telescopes, positioned all around the world.
Different countries came together to set it up in 2009. Now
there are 20, and more countries are joining. Working together,
these telescopes can make an aperture that is equal to the
diameter of the entire Earth.
 Falling into a Black Hole
You can fall into a black hole just as you can fall into the Sun. If you fall
in feet rst, your feet will be nearer to the black hole than your head and
will be pulled harder by the gravity of the black hole. So you will be
stretched out lengthwise and squashed in sideways. This stretching and
squeezing is stronger the smaller the black hole is. If you fall into a black
hole made by a star only a few times the size of our Sun, you will be torn
apart and made into spaghetti before you even reach the black hole.
But if you fall into a much bigger black hole, you will pass the horizon
– the edge of the black hole and the point of no return – without noticing
anything in particular. However, someone watching you fall in from a
distance will never see you cross the horizon because gravity warps time
and space near a black hole. To them, you will appear to slow down as
you approach the horizon and get dimmer and dimmer. You get dimmer
because the light you send out takes longer and longer to get away from
the black hole. If you cross the horizon at 11:00 according to your
wristwatch, someone looking at you would see the watch slow down and
never quite reach 11:00.

Getting Out of a Black Hole

People used to think nothing could ever get out of a black hole. After all,
that’s why they were called black holes! Anything that fell into a black
hole was thought to be lost and gone forever; black holes would last until
the end of time. They were eternal prisons from which there was no
hope of escape.
But then it was discovered that this picture wasn’t quite right. Tiny
uctuations in space and time meant that black holes couldn’t be the
perfect traps they were once thought to be; instead, they would slowly
leak particles in the form of Hawking Radiation. The rate of leakage is
slower the bigger the black hole is.
Hawking Radiation causes black holes to evaporate gradually. The rate
of evaporation will be very slow at rst but it will speed up as the black
hole gets smaller. Eventually, after billions and billions of years, the black
hole will disappear. So black holes aren’t eternal prisons after all. But
what about their prisoners – the things that made the black hole or that
fell in later? They will be recycled into energy and particles. But if you
examine what comes out of the black hole very carefully, you can
reconstruct what was inside. So the memory of what falls into a black
hole is not lost forever, just for a very long time.
You can get out of a black hole!
 Singularities

A singularity is a place where the mathematics used by physicists goes

horribly wrong! For example, as you approach the centre of a black hole –
one type of singularity – space-time curvature grows to in nity and the
normal rules of mathematics fail at the exact centre (they say to divide by
zero, which everyone knows isn’t allowed!).
Sometimes a physics calculation makes an assumption which turns
out to be wrong at a particular point, and a singularity is found. Once
this is understood, the calculation can be adapted so that the error is
xed, the maths works properly, and the singularity disappears. Result!
The more interesting singularities are harder to get rid of and suggest
that a new theory is needed. For example, black hole and Big Bang
singularities occur in the maths of general relativity. Perhaps a theory
with very di erent maths is needed to understand what is really going
on, and to get sensible results at such places in the Universe.
This is a busy area of research for scientists who hope that a Theory of
Everything will get rid of these singularities.
 The Big Bang
The space–time curvature becomes

infinite

the density of matter becomes

infinite

the temperature becomes

infinite

the space containing all we see around us in the Universe

reaches zero size

and all paths going back in time come …

to an end.

This singularity is also known as an initial singularity because it sits at

the beginning of time.
 Going Dark

What Would Happen If the Lights

Went Out

What would it be like if all the lights suddenly went out? Can you
imagine living in darkness because there was no more electricity?
Imagine if you had to go to bed when the Sun went down – in some
parts of the world, you would be tucked up by 4.00 p.m. in the winter!
Astronomers might be thrilled that a lack of electric light would mean no
light pollution spoiling their view of the night sky – but they might nd
day-to-day life a bit more tricky than usual!

Why We Might Lose Power

There are all sorts of reasons why a huge power cut could strike the
Earth.
Terrorist acts – or events in a war – could knock out power stations.
 We are likely to face problems with supplies as more and more
people on Earth want to use lots and lots of electricity.
Already bad weather on Earth regularly causes thousands of homes
to lose their power supply.

The Importance of the Sun

But it’s not just Earth weather that could make your home go dark –
experts now think that space weather could drastically a ect our
electricity supply over the next few years. We get most of our light, of
course, from our Sun. But the Sun can also disturb our weather. A
coronal mass ejection (CME) – when the Sun throws out a great bolt of
solar matter and energy – can cause magnetic storms or a rise in
radiation levels. These can disrupt electrical power grids and radio
communications on Earth.
CMEs happen most often during a solar maximum – the time of
greatest solar activity during the Sun’s 11-year cycle. Scientists who study
the Sun believe that the Earth was in a solar maximum between 2013
and 2015. This was great for viewing the Northern Lights, a spectacular
night-time show of coloured lights in the northern sky, caused by
electrons and protons from the solar wind interacting with gas in the
atmosphere. But the solar maximum always has potential to cause
problems on Earth with our power supplies.
So … what might life be like if the lights went out?

Human beings existed on the Earth long before the invention of the
electric light bulb! So we should be ne without electric light. We could
light our homes with candles or lamps.
 Modern technology has also provided us with battery or solar-powered
lamps which we could use in a power cut. But we would have far less
light than we are used to once the Sun has set. And we would have to be
careful not to run down our supplies, especially if we had no idea how
long the power cut might last.

Heat
Many of us rely on electricity for warmth. Even people with gas boilers,
which need electricity to ignite, would nd themselves with no heat in
their homes. Many of us use electricity to cook – so we’d have to think
again about how to make a hot meal. And keeping food fresh, even in
cold temperatures, would become a challenge without a working fridge
or freezer. With a wood-burning stove and plenty of logs, we could
huddle around it to keep warm. We would have to wear more clothes and
go to bed much earlier.

Water
You might not have any water at all! And even if you did still have
running water, very quickly that water would not be clean enough to
drink. Without electricity, our vast water puri cation plants and sewage
plants would stop working. So you would have to lter and then boil
water before it was pure enough to drink. You would have to heat water
to wash yourself and your clothes – which you would have to do by hand
as machines wouldn’t be working.

Entertainment
We could play Scrabble (the board game, not the online version) by
torchlight, wearing our winter coats, sitting round a wood or coal re in
the evenings, eating food that we’d heated up over the re! But we
wouldn’t be able to watch television or play computer games. Your
mobile phone would lose its charge quite fast, unless you have a solar-
powered charger. You might be able to use the landline as the telephone
system works o a di erent grid to mains electricity. And if you had a
wind-up radio, you could listen to it, which would be a good way of
getting news and updates.
Life without electricity would be very di erent for most people on
Earth! How do you think your life would change if electricity didn’t ow
at the ick of a switch?

Did you know that there was once a TV powered by a

bicycle in a science museum in Bristol? The faster you
pedalled, the better the picture on the TV. Would you
want to have a go?
Gravity acts between any two objects, between the ground and your feet,
between your body and this book, and even between the pages of this
book! The strength of the gravity depends on how massive the objects
are. The pages of this book are so light that the gravity between them is
unnoticeably tiny. But when there are objects as big as the Earth or the
Sun, we start to feel the e ects of gravity. The gravity between the Sun
and the Earth is what keeps the Earth in its orbit round the Sun. It is the
gravitational pull of the Earth that keeps us obediently xed on its
surface – if we jump up in the air, we always come back down again. If
we throw a ball up into the air, it also falls back down. But if we throw it
hard enough (really, really hard!), it will travel so fast as to escape from
the Earth’s gravity and never return. This is how we can get rockets to
the Moon – we have to launch them extremely fast into space.
There is a special speed required for an object to leave the Earth’s
gravity, called the escape velocity. It is dependent on the mass of the
Earth: objects more massive than the Earth have a higher escape velocity
– we’d have to launch the rocket even faster in order to stop it falling
back down. When the object is really huge, so that the gravity is
extremely strong, the escape velocity can reach the speed of light.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light – it is our universal
speed limit. This means that nothing, not even light, can escape from
these enormous objects – they suck in everything around them. These
massive objects are called black holes. The distance all around the black
hole at which light gets ‘too close’ and so gets pulled in is called the
event horizon of the black hole. So, in a way, the name ‘black hole’ is a
bit strange: it isn’t really a hole at all, it is actually full of a huge amount
of matter!

What do black holes look like?

We see things by light bouncing o them and entering our eyes. But the
problem is, light can’t bounce o black holes, because as soon as the
light crosses the event horizon, it gets sucked in and doesn’t come out.
This means that we can’t directly see black holes! And this is the reason
that black holes have their name – it’s because, to us, they just look like
black empty space.

If we can’t see black holes, how can

we know they exist?
As explained earlier by Stephen Hawking, we can detect the presence of
black holes by looking at how objects move round them. The huge tug
of the black hole’s gravity means that objects (such as stars close by)
travel along di erent paths than they would if the black hole wasn’t
there. We can observe how these stars move, and detect that there must
be a black hole nearby even if we cannot directly see it. This indirect
evidence has meant that some people questioned the existence of black
holes – until a few years ago. There has been a major development since
Hawking’s original essay: black holes can now be observed directly!
About 1.3 billion years ago (that’s 1,300,000,000 years ago!) two black
holes collided with each other. This resulted in an enormous explosion,
sending shock waves hurtling outwards into space. Just as when you
drop a pebble into a pond you can watch how the water ripples
outwards, these gravitational waves rippled outwards from the black
holes, and have been travelling through the Universe ever since. On 14
September 2015, these waves nally passed by Earth and created a tiny
ripple in space. This minute change was picked up by a detector in the
United States, telling us about this extraordinary event all those years
ago. So, as of 2015, we have direct evidence of black holes.
Our ability to observe black holes became even more exciting only
recently in 2019, when an image of a black hole was produced. The
image shows a dark circle surrounded by a bright halo of light. The
bright ring is caused by light bending from the extreme gravity close to
the black hole. The dark circle is a huge black hole, one that is bigger
than the size of our entire Solar System. It took eight telescopes on
Earth, all working together, to produce this image, and it is a remarkable
achievement.

Can anything get out of a black hole?

Stephen Hawking wrote in his earlier essay that even though black holes
pull everything in, there is the possibility that they also ‘slowly leak
particles in the form of Hawking Radiation’. This was one of Hawking’s
greatest discoveries. Over time, energy leaks from the black hole in the
form of this radiation. This means that if we wait long enough, a black
hole will evaporate. The idea of black holes evaporating has caused a
huge amount of debate among scientists. Eventually, once the black hole
has evaporated, there will be nothing left but empty space. But what
happened to all the stu that falls in? Hawking explained in his chapter
that everything that falls in is contained within this Hawking Radiation.
He says: ‘So black holes aren’t eternal prisons after all … the memory of
what falls into a black hole is not lost forever, just for a very long time.’
This is actually rather controversial! The problem is, no one knows this
for sure. It was just Hawking’s inspired thinking. For the last decade of
his life, Hawking worked extremely hard to show that this is true. He
published some famous papers over his last few years, making great
progress to explain what happens to all the information about
everything that originally made up the black hole. Nothing is proven yet,
but it’s looking likely that Hawking was right.
Why Do We Go Into Space?

Professor STEPHEN HAWKING

Why do we go into space? Why go to all that e ort and spend all that
money just for a few lumps of moon rock? Aren’t there better things we
could be doing here on Earth?
But spreading out into space will have an incredible e ect. It will
completely change the future of the human race. It could decide
whether we have a future at all.
It won’t solve any of our immediate problems on Planet Earth, but it
will help us look at them in a di erent way. The time has come when we
need to look outwards across the Universe rather than inwards at
ourselves on an increasingly overcrowded planet.
 Moving the human race out into space won’t happen quickly. By that,
I mean it could take hundreds, or even thousands, of years. We could
have a base on the Moon within 30 years, reach Mars in 50 years, and
explore the moons of the outer planets in 200 years. By reach, I mean
with manned – or should I say personed? – ight. We have already
driven rovers on Mars and landed a probe on Titan, a moon of Saturn,
but when we’re dealing with the future of the human race, we have to go
there ourselves and not just send robots.
But go where? Now that astronauts have lived for months on the
International Space Station, we know that human beings can survive
away from Planet Earth. But we also know that living in zero gravity on
the space station doesn’t only make it di cult to have a cup of tea! It’s
not very good for people to live in zero gravity for a long time, so if we’re
to have a base in space we need it to be on a planet or moon.
 Zero Gravity
Zero gravity is a term often used to describe a condition of
weightlessness. Being weightless for any length of time can affect
people’s health. Some people suffer from space sickness (this
includes being sick, feeling dizzy and having headaches), though
this doesn’t last longer than 3 days at most. Muscles can waste
away, so astronauts all exercise when in space for any length of
time. Blood flow slows down, and body fluids are redistributed so
astronauts’ faces look puffy: a condition called ‘moon-face’. These
changes all disappear quickly when astronauts return to Earth.

So which one shall we choose? The most obvious is the Moon. It is

close, and quite easy to get to. We’ve already landed on it, and driven
across it in a buggy. On the other hand, the Moon is small, and without
an atmosphere or a magnetic eld to de ect solar wind particles, like on
Earth. There is no liquid water, but there may be ice in the craters at the
north and south poles. A colony on the Moon could use this as a source
of oxygen and water, with power provided by nuclear energy or solar
panels. The Moon could be a base for travel to the rest of the Solar
System.

What about Mars? That’s our next obvious target. Mars is further from
the Sun than Planet Earth is, so it gets less warmth from the sunlight,
making temperatures much colder. Once, Mars had a magnetic eld, but
that decayed 4 billion years ago, meaning that it was stripped of most of
its atmosphere, leaving it with only 1% of the pressure of the Earth’s
atmosphere.
In the past, the atmospheric pressure – the weight of the air above you
in the atmosphere – must have been higher because we can see what
appear to be dried-up channels and lakes. Liquid water cannot exist on
Mars now as it would just evaporate.
But there is lots of water in the form of ice at the two poles. If we went
to live on Mars, we could use this. We could also use the minerals and
metals that volcanoes have brought to the surface.
So the Moon and Mars might be quite good for us. But where else
could we go in the Solar System? Mercury and Venus are far too hot,
while Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants, with no solid surface.
We could try the moons of Mars, but they are very small. Some of the
moons of Jupiter and Saturn might be better. Titan, a moon of Saturn, is
larger and more massive than our Moon, and has a dense atmosphere.
The Cassini-Huygens mission of NASA and ESA, the European Space
Agency, has landed a probe on Titan, which sent back pictures of the
surface. However, it is very cold, being so far from the Sun, and I
wouldn’t fancy living next to a lake of liquid methane!

Find out more about Titan on page 159.

What about beyond our Solar System? From looking across the
Universe, we know that quite a few stars have planets in orbit round
them. Until recently we could see only giant planets the size of Jupiter
or Saturn. But now we are starting to spot smaller Earth-like planets too.
Some of these will lie in the Goldilocks Zone, where their distance from
their home star is in the right range for liquid water to exist on their
surface. There are maybe a thousand stars within 10 light years of Earth.
If even 1% of these have an Earth-sized planet in the Goldilocks Zone,
we have ten candidate new worlds.
At the moment we can’t travel very far across the Universe. In fact, we
can’t even imagine how we might be able to cover such huge distances.
But that’s what we should be aiming to do in the future, over the next
200 to 500 years. The human race has existed as a separate species for
about 2 million years. Civilization began about 10,000 years ago, and
the rate of development has been steadily increasing. We have now
reached the stage where we can boldly go where no one has gone before.
And who knows what we will nd and who we will meet?

Remember the Goldilocks Zone, where things are ‘just right’?

If not, go to page 66 to refresh your memory!
 Life on Mars – For Real?
What does this mean for the
existence of Martians?
NASA scientists revealed that on Mars in the summer months water
ows down canyons and crater walls before drying up in the cooler
autumn temperatures. We don’t yet know where this water comes from
– perhaps it rises up from the ground or maybe it condenses from the
thin Martian atmosphere. But excitingly this takes our journey of
discovery to nd life in the Solar System onward by another step.

Where there is liquid water, scientists think we will find life!

Our Future Colonies

This discovery also means that it might be much easier to found a
colony of human life on Mars! If water could be collected from a local
supply that would solve one major headache for future missions to the
red planet.

Life on Mars just got a step closer!

Building Rockets for Mars

ALLYSON THOMAS
Aerospace Engineer, NASA

When I was growing up, I was interested in maths and science, but my
passion was actually ballet. When I was in high school, I enrolled in a
very challenging curriculum for maths and science – it had a heavy
workload that made it nearly impossible to dedicate the time required to
study ballet. But I still wanted to do both! After a di cult year I chose a
curriculum that allowed me the exibility to study ballet too. It was a
fantastic decision, because I was able to continue dancing while still
preparing myself to study engineering at university.
Now I work at NASA, but I still practise and perform ballet on nights
and weekends, so I enjoy the best of both worlds!
As a NASA engineer, I am helping develop the Space Launch System
(SLS) rocket that will eventually travel to Mars. This is so exciting, to be
part of this great project.
Right now, NASA is preparing to launch Artemis 1, the second
planned ight of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, on a mission to
orbit the Moon. NASA hopes to use the SLS for the launch. It is my
responsibility to ensure that a part of the rocket called the volume
isolator is properly designed for the loads and conditions of this ight.
 Volume isolators are used in rockets to contain purge gases within
certain sections. These purge gases keep each section at the right
temperature and humidity conditions for the sensitive instrumentation
inside. This is important because the rocket has cryogenic fuel – this
makes it very cold in places, but instrumentation nearby needs to be
warmer in order to function properly.

The Artemis programme was originally called Exploration

Mission-1 (EM-1). The name was changed in 2019.

The volume isolator I am responsible for is called the MSA

diaphragm. It is located near the top of the rocket, just below the crew
vehicle in a section of the rocket called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle
Stage Adapter, or the MSA for short. It is located there to make sure that
the environment below the isolator is properly conditioned by the purge
gas.
The MSA diaphragm will need to endure the force of lift-o , so it
needs to be strong.
But it also needs to be as lightweight as possible to reduce the amount
of fuel needed to launch the crew vehicle into outer space.
A challenge, right?
Here’s how we deal with that.
The MSA diaphragm is dome-shaped, with a 5 m (16.4 ft) diameter,
and it is made from a high-strength and lightweight material called
carbon composite.
Carbon composite is created by layering pieces of carbon fabric with
epoxy glue. In the case of the MSA diaphragm, the layers of carbon
fabric are placed inside a large bowl-shaped mould. Each layer of fabric
is laid down at a di erent angle in order to create a nal product that has
quasi-isotropic properties. This means that the dome will have the same
strength no matter the orientation – this is important. If the angle of the
fabric stayed the same in each layer, the nal product would be strong in
one orientation, but comparatively weak in any other orientation.
 After every layer of the MSA diaphragm has been placed in the
mould, the entire mould is rolled into an enormous oven to cure and
harden. Once the MSA diaphragm has hardened, it is pried from the
mould and machined to add bolt holes that will be used to connect it to
the MSA.
This method of creating a strong yet lightweight structure by layering
fabric is also used when creating the shoes that allow me as a ballet
dancer to dance on my toes! Each shoe is designed with a strong yet
lightweight box that surrounds my toes and provides the support needed
to balance, spin and even jump on the very tips of my toes. This box is
created by layering fabric and glue, much like in the MSA diaphragm.
 Not everyone who looks at a rocket part sees a ballet shoe, but my life
experiences have given me the perspective to see the world in a unique
way. Through following your passions in life, you will begin to see the
world from your own unique viewpoint.
At NASA, we aim to build teams of people who have unique
perspectives so that we can see problems from multiple angles. This
diversity helps us to overcome the many challenges associated with
building a rocket – a rocket that will travel all the way to Mars.
 Mars Astronaut
Normally I enjoy sleeping late, but every year on the morning of my
birthday, my eyes seem to pop right open with excitement. Last year was
no di erent, and on the morning of 16 February, I jumped out of bed.
Except something was di erent. There were no birds chirping outside
my window, no scent of my favourite breakfast wafting in from the
kitchen, and I couldn’t hear the familiar sounds of my family moving
around downstairs.
Then I remembered that I wasn’t at home for my birthday this year.
In fact, I wasn’t even on Planet Earth! I was on Mars with six other
scientists from around the world, studying what it’s like to live on
another planet.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live on another
world? It’s easy to forget that Earth is not the only planet in the Solar
System. Seven other planets whiz round the Sun just like we do! This is
lucky for us, because some day humans might need to nd a new home.
We haven’t always taken very good care of our planet, and one day the
Earth will be overheated and unable to support us. Besides global
warming, we also have to remember the dinosaurs! Those magni cent
creatures ruled the planet for over 165 million years, until an asteroid
struck Earth and ruined their home, driving the dinosaurs to extinction.
Today we have special software to track asteroids from far away, but if
we want the human species to survive for a million years, we need to
spread out and learn how to live in space.
But we can’t live just anywhere! We need to nd a planet that’s not too
hot and close to the Sun, like Venus or Mercury, and not too cold and far
away, like Uranus or Neptune, and it can’t be made of gas like Jupiter
and Saturn! That leaves Mars – our rocky red neighbouring planet. Lots
of astronauts have visited space, but except for a few short trips to the
Moon, they’ve never been far from Earth. No human has ever travelled
to Mars, but we’re now starting to prepare for this trip. Imagine a car
ride that lasts for more than 200 days with no rest stops. That’s how
long it would take a crew of astronauts to travel to Mars, 225 million km
(140 million miles), or 1.4 AU, away from Earth! When you’re that far
away from home, no one can send you extra food or water, so you have
to bring as much as you can with you, and learn to produce the rest
yourself.
Before we send astronauts on such a big journey, we need to
understand as many of the challenges they might face as possible. One
way we research what life will be like on Mars is by living and working
in Martian research stations right here on Earth. These special
laboratories, or ‘habitats’, are designed to look and feel exactly like a
house on Mars, with a kitchen, a bathroom, a ‘greenhab’ to grow food, a
laboratory with microscopes and other science tools, and tiny bedrooms
for crew members. On the morning of my twenty-sixth birthday, that’s
exactly where I woke up.
Usually my birthday would be lled with phone calls from friends and
hugs from family, but there are no phone calls on Mars, because the
signal would take too long to reach Earth! When we want to speak to our
families, we can send an email over the internet, but it can still take
more than 20 minutes for the message to reach them. That also means
we can’t watch TV. Instead, we can store digital versions of our favourite
books, movies and television programmes on a small computer to read
or watch whenever we’re bored.
There’s almost no time for boredom, though. There’s a lot to be done
every day, like checking and cleaning equipment, growing crops like
potatoes, cooking for the crew, recording videos for students and
classrooms, and even venturing outside to collect samples of soil and
rocks. Mars doesn’t have nearly as much oxygen as Earth, so you need a
spacesuit to help you breathe whenever you go outside. When you come
back, sticky and sweaty from a long walk in a heavy spacesuit, you can’t
even take a shower! Water is a precious resource on Mars, and we have
to save as much as possible. Instead of taking showers, we clean our
bodies with baby wipes!
 Baby Wipes
Baby wipes, or wet wipes, are pieces of cloth
moistened with liquids such as water and some forms
of alcohol. They usually also contain chemicals that
stop fungus or bacteria growing on them. They can be
kept in packets until they are needed. Though many
companies still use plastics to make wet wipes,
biodegradable (planet-friendly!) wet wipes are gradually
becoming more popular.

My six crewmates must have known that I would miss my family on

my birthday, because when I came out from my room, they were waiting
with a handmade birthday card. Instead of ‘26’, the card said ‘13.8’,
because that’s how old I would be on Mars, where years are almost twice
as long as Earth-years! They also cooked me a special breakfast of heart-
shaped pancakes. Meals can get very boring on Mars. Because fresh food
would go rotten quickly, almost all of the food is in a powdered form
that you mix with water – even the meat! My favourite Martian meal is
macaroni cheese.

I thanked all of my crewmates for such a nice birthday surprise, and I

realized that I’m lucky to have such great friends here. Getting along
with your crew is very important, especially when you’re stuck in a small
space together for a long time!
After 3 weeks of living and working in a Mars habitat, I know life
won’t be easy for the rst astronauts who travel there. I would miss all of
my friends and family, my favourite foods, warm showers, and even just
being able to breathe fresh air outside without a helmet on. Still, I would
choose to go, and I’m lucky to have a family who encourages me to
reach for the stars. We might be years away from the rst ight, but I
know we’ll see footprints on Mars in our lifetime. I certainly hope
they’re mine!
But even if they’re not, I’ll always remember a birthday that was out of
this world. Maybe you too will one day spend a birthday of yours in a
Mars habitat – or even on the distant red planet itself.
 ‘The Eagle has landed!’
This is the message US astronaut Neil Armstrong radioed back from the
Moon to mission control in Houston, Texas, USA, on 20 July 1969. The
Eagle was the lunar module, which had detached from the spacecraft
Columbia, in orbit 96.5 km (60 miles) above the surface of the Moon.
While astronaut Michael Collins remained on board Columbia, the
Lunar Excursion Module touched down on an area called the Sea of
Tranquility – but there is no water on the Moon so it didn’t land with a
splash! Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the two astronauts inside the
Eagle, became the rst human beings ever to visit the Moon.
 Astronaut Armstrong was the rst to step out of the capsule on to the
Moon (with his left foot). Buzz Aldrin followed him and looked around –
at the totally black sky, the impact craters, the layers of moondust – and
commented: ‘Magni cent desolation.’ As they’d been instructed, they
quickly put moon rocks and dust into their pockets, so that they would
have some samples of the Moon, even if they had to leave in a hurry.
In fact, they stayed for nearly a day on the Moon and covered nearly a
kilometre (0.6 miles) on foot. This epic voyage of Apollo 11 remains one
of the most inspirational journeys into the unknown that mankind has
ever undertaken, and three craters to the north of the Sea of Tranquility
are now named after the astronauts on the mission – Collins,
Armstrong and Aldrin.
 Walking on the Moon
Including Apollo 11, a total of 12 astronauts have now walked on the
Moon. But each mission was still a dangerous business, as was clearly
shown on the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970 when an explosion on
board the service module meant that not only the astronauts but also the
people on the ground had to make heroic e orts to return the spacecraft
safely to Earth.
Astronauts are highly trained specialists with backgrounds in aviation,
engineering and science. But to launch and operate a space mission
needs people with a wide variety of skills. The Apollo missions – like all
space missions before and since – were the result of work by tens of
thousands of people who built and operated the complex hardware and
software.
The Apollo missions also brought back 381 kg (840 lb) of lunar
material, like moon rock, to be studied on Earth. This allowed scientists
on our planet to gain a much better understanding of the Moon and
how it relates to the Earth.
The last mission to the Moon was Apollo 17, which landed on the
Taurus-Littrow highlands on 11 December 1972 and stayed for 3 days.
When they were 29,000 km (18,000 miles) from the Earth on their way
to the Moon, the Apollo 17 crew took a photo of the complete Earth, fully
lit. This photo is known as ‘the Blue Marble’ and may be the most widely
distributed photo ever. Since then, no human being has been far enough
away from the Earth to take such a picture.

The First Man in Space

The Apollo missions were not the rst time that a human had own into
space. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth on 12 April
1961 in the Vostok spacecraft, was the rst-ever human being in space.
Six weeks after Gagarin’s historic achievement, US President John F.
Kennedy announced that he wanted to land a man on the Moon within
10 years, and the newly created NASA – the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration – set to work to see if they could match the
Russian-manned space programme, even though at that time NASA had
only 16 minutes of space- ight experience. The space race – to be the
rst on the Moon – had begun!

Mercury, Gemini – and Walking in

Space
Project Mercury, a US single-astronaut programme, was designed to see
if human beings could survive in space. In 1961, astronaut Alan
Shepard became the rst American in space with a suborbital ight of 15
minutes, and the following year John Glenn became the rst NASA
astronaut to orbit the Earth.
 NASA’s Project Gemini followed. Gemini was a very important project
as it taught astronauts how to dock vehicles in space. It also allowed
them to practise operations such as spacewalks, also called EVAs (Extra-
Vehicular Activity). But the rst spacewalk ever performed was by a
Russian cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, in 1965. The Russians didn’t make it
to the Moon rst, however, with this honour going to the USA in 1969.

The First Space Stations

After the race to land on the Moon was over, many people became less
interested in space programmes. However, both the Russians and the
Americans still had big plans. The Russians were working on a super-
secret programme called Almaz – or Diamond. They wanted to have a
manned space station orbiting the Earth. After a doomed rst attempt,
the next versions, Salyut-3 and then Salyut-5, were more successful but
neither of them lasted for much more than a year.
The Americans developed their own version, Skylab – an orbiting
space station which was in operation for 8 months in 1973. Skylab had a
telescope on board that astronauts used to observe the Sun. They
brought back solar photographs including X-ray images of solar ares
and dark spots on the Sun.

A Handshake in Space
At this time on Earth – the mid 1970s – both the USSR and the USA
were locked into what was known as the Cold War. This meant the two
sides were not actually ghting a war but they disliked and distrusted
each other very strongly. However, in space the two countries began to
work together. In 1975, the Apollo–Soyuz project saw the rst
‘handshake in space’ between the two opposing superpowers. Apollo,
the US spacecraft, docked with Soyuz, the Soviet one, and the American
astronaut and Russian cosmonaut – who would have had di culty
meeting in person on Earth – shook hands with each other.

The Shuttle
The space shuttle was a new type of spacecraft. Unlike the craft that
went before it, it was reusable, designed to y into space like a rocket but
also to glide back to Earth and land like an aeroplane on a runway. The
shuttle was also designed to take cargo as well as astronauts into space.
The rst US shuttle to y in space – Columbia – was launched in 1981.
The last ight was made by Atlantis, in July 2011.

The first shuttle of all was Enterprise, which was used for
testing but couldn’t orbit the Earth.

The International Space Station

In 1986, the Russians launched the space station Mir, which means
World or Peace.
Mir was the rst elaborate, large space station ever to orbit the Earth.
It was built in space over 10 years and designed as a ‘space laboratory’ so
that scientists could carry out experiments in a nearly gravity-free
environment. Mir was about the size of a double-decker bus and was
home to between three and six astronauts at a time.
The International Space Station (ISS) was built in space, with its
construction beginning in 1998. Orbiting the globe every 90 minutes,
this research facility is a symbol of international cooperation with
scientists and astronauts from many countries involved both in running
it and spending time there. The ISS was serviced by the space shuttle
from NASA, the Soyuz spacecraft from Russia and the European Space
Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicles. Now only the Russian and
European rockets y there. The crew also have permanent escape
vehicles, in case they need to make an emergency exit!
 The Overview Effect
An Astronaut’s Journey Through
Space

Dr RICHARD GARRIOTT DE CAYEUX

ISS Astronaut

I think almost everyone dreams of going into space at some point in

their lives. Sadly, though, most give up on that dream when they
determine that the odds of going seem so small. In my case, however,
my father and both my next-door neighbours’ fathers were astronauts.
In my neighbourhood, it seemed normal to believe that all of us would
go into space some day.
When I found out that I did not qualify to be a NASA astronaut,
because of my poor eyesight, I decided I must build a private space
agency, so that I could y. I invested the money I earned making
computer games in companies that eventually made it possible for me
and others to y to space privately. In October 2008, I ew to the
International Space Station and became the rst second-generation
American astronaut – and I ew with the rst second-generation
Russian cosmonaut, Sergey Volkov!
Preparing for and making a trip to space is an amazing experience!
Many of the details were very di erent from what I expected, or the
impression you get from watching television or movies about space.
Before you y, you must train to operate the spacecraft. Training was a
great deal of fun, and I was amazed that most of it was very similar to
activities students do at school, or in some after-school clubs. For
example, many people like to scuba dive, as I do. When you get a scuba-
diving licence, you learn about air pressure and gases like oxygen and
carbon dioxide, expanding on what you learn in school in chemistry and
physics. This is almost exactly the same as the life support on board a
spacecraft. If you can get a scuba licence, you can operate life support in
space! Similarly, if you can get an amateur radio-operator licence on
Earth, you can operate the radios on a spacecraft. Learning to be a
quali ed astronaut was more fun and less di cult than I had imagined
… as long as you are a good student in school!
Then there is the space ight itself. When you watch a rocket launch
into the sky, it is very loud, and you can feel the massive vibration.
However, when I launched into space, inside the rocket it was quite the
opposite. When the engines lit up, we could barely feel or hear it. When
the rocket began to lift o , it was very gentle. I have often described it as
feeling like a con dent ballet move, lifting us ever faster into the sky. For
just over 8 minutes you feel about three times the force of gravity, then
the engines cut o … and you are oating weightlessly in orbit over
Earth.
The view is, of course, spectacular, but I was immediately struck by
how close we remained to Earth. Aeroplanes can y almost 16 km (10
miles) above Earth, and we were orbiting about 25 times higher than
that. However, that is still close enough to see many of the same details
you see from a plane, yet far enough to see the whole Earth below you. It
is a strange feeling to be both unexpectedly near Earth, but also totally
isolated from anyone down there on the surface. You clearly understand
that if an emergency arises, you and your crewmates must solve it, for
there is little help that can come from the surface. Learning to be both
self-reliant and to be a reliable team member is also essential
preparation for a space ight, and for life in general!
 Many astronauts are deeply moved by seeing the Earth from space.
There is even a term called ‘the Overview E ect’, which refers to how
people are changed by this experience of seeing Earth from space. I too
experienced this, and I think it is worth sharing.
When orbiting on board the ISS, you are travelling round Earth at
about 27,690 km/h (17,210 mph). At that speed you go all the way round
our planet about every 90 minutes. That means you see a sunrise or a
sunset every 45 minutes, and you cross entire continents in 10–20
minutes. Yet you are close enough to Earth to see clearly more detail
than you might expect, even things as small as the Golden Gate Bridge
in San Francisco (though you cannot see the Great Wall of China, as
many have believed). Looking out of the window at the Earth, seeing it
in great detail while it smoothly rolls by, was like having a re hose of
information shooting into your mind about the Earth itself.
One of the rst things you notice about the Earth from space is its
weather. This is because a large portion of the Earth is always covered by
clouds. From space you notice things like how over the Paci c Ocean
large smooth or geometric patterns of weather form, as the ocean is free
from large islands or surface-temperature variations. On the other hand,
the Atlantic Ocean is lled with more chaotic weather patterns. This is
because of the highly varied surface temperatures, and shapes of nearby
continents that interrupt the smoothness you see in the Paci c.
The next thing I noticed was how beautiful the deserts of the Earth
are, as they are generally not covered by clouds. Sand and snow on Earth
is blown into small drifts, then bigger dunes, then even bigger ridges,
and from space you can see the rolling hills of sands that make similar
patterns that scale all the way up to being seen from space! It was
amazing to see these ‘great fans’ caused only by the winds blowing
across the deserts of the Earth.
From space, it also became clear how completely humanity now
occupies the whole surface of the Earth. Every desert I saw had roads
across it, and often farms growing crops with water pumped up from
deep within the Earth. Every forest, even in the Amazon basin of Brazil,
had roads and cities within it. Every mountain range had roads through
passes and dams along its rivers. I saw very little ‘open space’ left on the
Earth.
Finally, I saw an area I knew very well, the area of Texas, USA, I grew
up in. I saw my hometown, and nearby towns I had driven to many
times, as well as the long Texas coastline where I used to visit beaches.
And in the same view I could see the whole Earth, which I had now
orbited many times. Suddenly it hit me … I now knew the true scale of
the Earth by direct observation.
I had a huge physical reaction to this moment! It was like watching a
movie, where they might zoom in the camera lens while moving the
camera backwards. It creates an e ect where the hallway seems to
collapse and shorten while the actor stays the same size. It was like that
as I looked at the Earth; it remained the same size out of the window,
but the reality of scale around it collapsed. Suddenly to me, the Earth,
which had been unimaginably large, became nite … and, in fact, rather
small.
Since my return from space, I have learned that many astronauts
express a similar epiphany from this ‘Overview E ect’. Many astronauts,
including myself, come home with a renewed sense of the importance of
environmentalism to protect this fragile world we have. It seems to me
that if more people had the chance to see the Earth from space, we
would all take better care of our precious planet and of each other.
If space travel is a dream of yours, as it was a dream of mine, I hope
you will ful l it some day. The opportunities to do so are increasing
every year. However, space will always be more di cult to reach than the
next town, country or continent. You will still have to work hard to earn
a place on a team that is expanding human knowledge of and presence
in locations ever further from our home planet. You won’t have to be as
lucky to be selected as many early astronauts were though. Work hard,
and I believe each one of you reading this can build your own destiny in
space!
 The Drake Equation
The Drake Equation isn’t really an equation; it’s a series of questions that
help us to work out how many intelligent civilizations with the ability to
communicate there might be in our Galaxy. It was formulated in 1961 by
Dr Frank Drake of the SETI Institute, and is still used by scientists today.
This is the Drake Equation:

N = N* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
N* represents the number of new stars born each year in the Milky Way
Galaxy.
Question: What is the birth rate of stars in the Milky Way
Galaxy?
Answer: Our Galaxy is about 12 billion years old, and contains
roughly 300 billion stars. So, on average, stars are born at a rate of
300 billion divided by 12 billion = 25 stars per year.
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets around them.
Q: What percentage of stars have planetary systems?
A: Current estimates range from 20% to 70%.

ne is the number of planets per star that are capable of sustaining life.
Q: For each star that does have a planetary system, how many
planets are capable of sustaining life?
A: Current estimates range from 0.5 to 5.

fl is the fraction of planets in ne where life evolves.

Q: On what percentage of the planets that are capable of sustaining
life does life actually evolve?
A: Current estimates range from 100% (where life can evolve, it
will) down to close to 0%.
fi is the fraction of habitable planets with life where intelligent life
evolves.
Q: On the planets where life does evolve, what percentage evolves
intelligent life?
A: Estimates range from 100% (intelligence has such a survival
advantage that it will certainly evolve) down to near 0%.
fc is the fraction of planets with intelligent life capable of interstellar
communication.
Q: What percentage of intelligent races have the means and the
desire to communicate?
A: 10% to 20%.

L is the average number of years that a communicating civilization

continues to communicate.
Q: How long do communicating civilizations last?
A: This is the toughest of the questions. If we take Earth as an
example, we’ve been communicating with radio waves for less than
100 years. How long will our civilization continue to communicate
with this method? Could we destroy ourselves in a few years, or will
we overcome our problems and survive for 10,000 years or more?
When all these variables are multiplied together we come up with:
N, the number of communicating civilizations in the Galaxy.

SETI
SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The SETI
Institute listens for radio waves that might be a message from
intelligent beings elsewhere in space. lt has also sent radio messages
into space on the Pioneer and Voyager space probes.
 Zero-Gravity Flights

A zero-gravity ight is a way to experience microgravity, or the same

kind of gravitational conditions as the astronauts on the International
Space Station! That means being able to push o the ceiling with your
feet or throw droplets of water around and see them oat!
There is a serious point to zero-gravity ights – NASA and other space
agencies use zero-gravity ights to train astronauts so they can be better
prepared for their work on the space station.
But in 1994 a man called Peter Diamandis decided to o er ights to
ordinary passengers as well. He wanted to open up the space-travel
experience to everyone, not just professional astronauts. He has own
lots of famous people on his zero-gravity ights, including the second
man on the Moon – Buzz Aldrin – and Stephen Hawking, one of the
authors of this book.
When you go on a zero-gravity, or zero-G, ight, your plane doesn’t
leave the Earth’s atmosphere. You don’t actually go into space.
When taking a zero-G ight, everyone gets on a normal-looking plane,
like the sort of plane you might board to go on holiday. But this plane
doesn’t y like a normal plane! Instead, it ies in long curves called
parabolas.
What happens is this:
The aeroplane, own by special, highly quali ed pilots, ascends
sharply upward. But then it nosedives back to Earth again.
While the plane is going ‘up and over the hump’, it puts you into
‘zero gravity’. At that point, you are in freefall, just as you would be
inside the International Space Station. It’s pretty exciting!
 To get you used to the sensation of weightlessness, the rst few
parabolas – or curves – that the plane ies over are not too steep.
This means you have the feeling of reduced gravity, the same
conditions you might experience on Mars or the Moon. Mars has
40% of the Earth’s gravity, so you can bounce around in big leaps.
The Moon has less gravity than Mars and so, on the ‘lunar
parabola’, you can do a press-up with one nger!
When the plane descends again, you experience ‘high-G’, strong
gravitational forces which pin you to the oor. Lying on the oor,
you can’t even pick up one nger to move it! As the plane ascends
once more, you gently start to oat away from the oor again.

During the zero-G parabolas, you experience complete weightlessness.

You can do a somersault in the air or walk on the ceiling! These zero-G
parabolas are over too quickly – everyone says, ‘Again! Again!’ But what
goes up must come down – and eventually your plane must land and
bring you back to Earth once more …
 Robotic Space Travel

A space probe is a robotic spacecraft that scientists send out on a journey

across the Solar System in order to gather more information about our
cosmic neighbourhood. Robotic space missions aim to answer speci c
questions such as: ‘What does the surface of Venus look like?’ or ‘Is it
windy on Neptune?’ or ‘What is Jupiter made of?’
While robotic space missions are much less glamorous than manned
space ight, they have several big advantages:
Robots can travel for great distances, going far further and faster
than any astronaut. Like manned missions, they need a source of
power – most use solar arrays which convert sunlight to energy, but
others that are travelling long distances away from the Sun take
their own on-board generator. However, robotic spacecraft need far
less power than manned missions as they don’t need to maintain a
comfortable living environment on their journey.
Robots also don’t need supplies of food or water and they don’t need
oxygen to breathe, making them much smaller and lighter than a
manned spacecraft.
 Robots don’t get bored or homesick or fall ill on their journey.
If something goes wrong with a robotic mission, no lives are lost in
space.
Space probes cost far less than manned space ights and robots
don’t want to come home when their mission ends.
Space probes have opened up the wonders of the Solar System to us,
sending back data that has allowed scientists to understand far better
how the Solar System was formed and what conditions are like on other
planets. While human beings have to date travelled only as far as the
Moon – a journey averaging 378,000 km (235,000 miles) – space probes
have covered billions of miles and shown us extraordinary and detailed
images of the far reaches of the Solar System.
In fact, almost 30 space probes reached the Moon before humankind
did! Robotic spacecraft have now been sent to all the other planets in our
Solar System, they have caught the dust from a comet’s tail, landed on
Mars and Venus and travelled out beyond Pluto. Some space probes have
even taken information about our planet and the human race with them.
Probes Pioneer 10 and 11 carry engraved plaques with the image of a
man and a woman on them and also a map, showing where the probe
came from. As the Pioneers journey onward into deep space, they may
one day encounter an alien civilization!
The Voyager probes took photographs of cities, landscapes and people
on Earth with them as well as a recorded greeting in many di erent
Earth languages. In the incredibly unlikely event of these probes being
picked up by another civilization, these greetings assure any aliens who
manage to decode them that we are a peaceful planet and we wish any
other beings in our Universe well.
 There are di erent types of space probes and the type used for a
particular mission will depend on the question that the probe is
attempting to answer. Some probes y by planets and take pictures for
us, passing by several planets on their long journey[1]. Others orbit a
speci c planet to gain more information about that planet and its
moons[3]. Another type of probe is designed to land and send back data
from the surface of another world[2]. Some of these are rovers, others
remain xed wherever they land.
The rst rover, Lunokhod 1, was part of a Russian probe, Luna 17,
which landed on the Moon in 1970. Lunokhod 1 was a robotic vehicle
that could be steered from Earth, in much the same way as a remote-
controlled car.
NASA’s Mars landers, Viking 1 and Viking 2, which touched down on
the red planet in 1976, gave us our rst pictures from the surface of the
planet of War, which had intrigued people on Earth for millennia. The
Viking landers showed the reddish-brown plains, scattered with rocks,
the pink sky of Mars and even frost on the ground in winter.
Unfortunately, it is very di cult to land on Mars and several probes sent
to the red planet have crashed on to the surface.
Later missions to Mars sent the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
Designed to drive around for at least 3 months, they lasted far longer and
also, like other spacecraft sent to Mars, found evidence that Mars had
been shaped by the presence of water. In 2007, NASA sent the Phoenix
mission to Mars. Phoenix could not drive around Mars but it had a
robotic arm to dig into the soil and collect samples. On board, it had a
laboratory to examine the soil and work out what it contains. In addition,
Mars has several operational orbiters around it – NASA has the Mars
Odyssey, Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which show
us in detail the surface features, and the MAVEN, which studies Mars’s
atmosphere. Also orbiting Mars are the Mars Orbiter Mission from
India, and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, sent by ESA and Russia.
 Robotic space probes have also shown us the hellish world that lies
beneath the thick atmosphere of Venus. Once it was thought that dense
tropical forests might lie under the Venusian clouds but space probes
have revealed the high temperatures, heavy carbon-dioxide atmosphere
and dark brown clouds of sulphuric acid. In 1990, NASA’s Magellan
entered orbit round Venus. Using radar to penetrate the atmosphere,
Magellan mapped the surface of Venus and found 167 volcanoes larger
than 110 km (70 miles) wide! ESA’s Venus Express has been in orbit
round Venus since 2006. This mission is studying the atmosphere of
Venus and trying to nd out how Earth and Venus developed in such
di erent ways. The Japanese probe Akatsuki has also, since 2015, been
studying the atmosphere of Venus. Several landers, all sent by the
former Soviet Union, have returned information from the surface of
Venus, a tremendous achievement given the challenges of landing on
this most hostile of planets.
 In 1970, the Soviet Union’s probe Venera 7 was the first man-
made object to transmit data from the surface of Venus.

Robotic space probes have braved the scorched world of Mercury, a

planet even closer to the Sun than Venus. Mariner 10, which ew by
Mercury in 1974 and again in 1975, showed us that this bare little planet
looks very similar to our Moon. It is a grey, dead planet with very little
atmosphere. In 2008, the MESSENGER mission returned a space probe
to Mercury and sent back the rst new pictures of the Sun’s nearest
planet in 30 years.
Flying close to the Sun presents huge challenges for a robotic
spacecraft but probes sent to the Sun – Helios 1, Helios 2, SOHO,
TRACE, RHESSI and others – have sent back information that helped
scientists to develop a far better understanding of the star at the very
centre of our Solar System. DISCOVR is currently studying solar winds
and coronal mass ejections, and the Parker Solar Probe is on its way. It is
due to y closest to the Sun in 2025.
Further away in the Solar System, Jupiter was rst seen in detail when
the probe Pioneer 10 ew by in 1973. Pictures captured by Pioneer 10
also showed the Great Red Spot – a feature seen through telescopes from
Earth for centuries. After Pioneer, the Voyager probes revealed the
surprising news about Jupiter’s moons. Thanks to the Voyager probes,
scientists on Earth learned that Jupiter’s moons are all very di erent to
each other. In 1995, the Galileo probe arrived at Jupiter and spent 8 years
investigating the giant gas planet and its moons. Galileo was the rst
space probe to y by an asteroid, the rst to discover an asteroid with a
moon, and the rst to measure Jupiter over a long period of time. This
amazing space probe also showed the volcanic activity on Jupiter’s moon
Io and found Europa to be covered in thick ice, beneath which may lie a
gigantic ocean that could even harbour some form of life!
NASA’s Cassini was not the rst to visit Saturn – Pioneer 11 and the
Voyager probes had own past on their long journey and sent back
detailed images of Saturn’s rings and more information about the thick
atmosphere on Titan. But when Cassini arrived in 2004 after a 7-year
journey, it showed us many more features of Saturn and the moons that
orbit it. Cassini also released a probe, ESA’s Huygens, which travelled
through the thick atmosphere to land on the surface of Titan. The
Huygens probe discovered that Titan’s surface is covered in ice and that
methane rains down from the dense clouds.
Even further from Earth, Voyager 2 ew by Uranus and showed
pictures of this frozen planet tilted on its axis! Thanks to Voyager 2, we
also know much more about the thin rings circling Uranus, which are
very di erent to the rings of Saturn, as well as many other details of its
moons. Voyager 2 carried on to Neptune and revealed this planet is very
windy – Neptune has the fastest-moving storms in the Solar System. In
autumn 2019, Voyager 2 was around 11 billion miles from Earth and
Voyager 1 was around 14 billion miles away. They should be able to
continue communicating with us until 2020.
The Stardust mission – a probe that caught particles from a comet’s
tail and returned them to Earth in 2006 – taught us far more about the
very early Solar System from these fragments. Capturing these samples
from comets – which formed at the centre of the Solar System but have
travelled to its very edge – has helped scientists to understand more
about the origin of the Solar System itself.

Deep Impact and Rosetta

Deep Impact was a probe launched by NASA in 2005. One part was
designed to fly past the comet Tempel 1. The second part was
designed to crash-land on the comet’s nucleus! This produced the
best pictures ever taken of a nucleus. Objects less than 10 m (33 ft)
could be seen in great detail. However, the crash-landing made such a
big cloud of dust the spacecraft flying by could not photograph the
impact crater.
In 2014, ESA’s spacecraft Rosetta was able to land the module
Philae on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Sadly Philae’s
battery ran out in 2 days, and because it had landed in shadow it
could not use solar energy to recharge the battery.
 Comets

Comets are big, dirty and not-very-round snowballs that travel

round the Sun. They are made up of elements created in stars that
exploded a long time before our Sun was born. It is believed there
are about 1 trillion of them, very far away from the Sun, waiting to
come closer to us. But we can only see them when they come close
enough to the Sun to have a shiny trail. We actually know of just
over 6,000 comets so far.
The largest-known comets have a central core of more than 32 km
(20 miles) from one side to the other.
When they come close to the Sun, the ice in comets turns into gas
and releases the dust that was trapped inside. This dust is probably
the oldest dust there is throughout the Solar System. It contains
clues about our cosmic neighbourhood at the very beginning of the
life of all the planets, more than 6 billion years ago.
Most of the time, comets circle round the Sun from very far away
(much, much further away than the Earth). Every now and then, one of
them starts to travel towards the Sun. There are then two possibilities:
1) Some, like Halley’s comet, will get trapped by the Sun’s gravity. These
comets will then keep orbiting the Sun until they melt completely or
until they hit a planet. Halley’s comet’s core is about 16 km (9.6 miles)
long. It returns near enough to the Sun to melt down a bit and have a
trail that can be seen by us about every 76 years. It was near us in 1986
and will be back in 2061. Some of the comets trapped by the Sun’s
gravity return near the Sun much more rarely. The Hyakutake Comet,
for instance, will travel for at least 70,000 years before coming back.
2) Because they have too much speed or because they do not travel close
enough to the Sun, some other comets, like Comet Swan, never come
back. They pass by us once and then start an immense journey in outer
space towards another star. These comets are cosmic wanderers. Their
interstellar journey can take hundreds of thousands of years, sometimes
less, but sometimes even more.
One of the most important things in the Universe is the electromagnetic
eld. It reaches everywhere; not only does it hold atoms together, but it
also makes electrons bind di erent atoms together or create electric
currents. Our everyday world is built from very large numbers of atoms
stuck together by the electromagnetic eld; even living things, like
human beings, rely on it to exist and to function.
Jiggling an electron creates waves in the eld – this is like jiggling a
nger in your bath and making ripples in the water. These waves are
called electromagnetic waves, and because the eld is everywhere, the
waves can travel far across the Universe until stopped by other electrons
that can absorb their energy. They come in many di erent types, but
some a ect the human eye, and we know these as the various colours of
visible light. Other types include radio waves, microwaves, infrared,
ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. Electrons are jiggled all the time – by
atoms that are constantly jiggling too – so there are always
electromagnetic waves being produced by objects. At room temperature
they are mainly infrared, but in much hotter objects the jiggling is more
violent, and produces visible light. Light travels at 300,000 km (186,000
miles) per second. This is very fast, but light from the Sun still takes 8
minutes and 30 seconds to reach us; from the next nearest star it takes
more than 4 years.

Electromagnetic waves move in different wavelengths.

Gamma rays are short, and radio waves are long. Visible light
is in the middle, between infrared and ultraviolet.

Very hot objects in space, such as stars, produce visible light, which
may travel a very long way before hitting something. When you look at a
star, the light from it may have been moving serenely through space for
hundreds of years. It enters your eye and, by jiggling electrons in your
retina, turns into electricity, which is sent along the optic nerve to your
brain, and your brain says: ‘I can see a star!’ If the star is very far away
you may need a telescope to collect enough of the light for your eye to
detect, or the jiggled electrons could instead create a photograph or send
a signal to a computer.
The Universe is constantly expanding, in ating like a balloon. This
means that distant stars and galaxies are moving away from Earth. This
stretches their light as it travels through space towards us – the further it
travels, the more stretched it becomes. The stretching makes visible
light look redder – which is known as the red shift. Eventually, if it
travelled and red-shifted far enough, the light would no longer be
visible, and would become rst infrared and then microwave radiation
(as used on Earth in microwave ovens). This is just what has happened
to the incredibly powerful light produced by the Big Bang – after 13
billion years of travelling, it is detectable today as microwaves coming
from every direction in space. This has the grand title of cosmic
microwave background radiation, and is nothing less than the afterglow
of the Big Bang itself.
 Getting in Touch with
Aliens
Dr SETH SHOSTAK
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, USA

If aliens are really out there, will we ever get to meet them?
The distances between the stars are staggeringly great, so we still can’t
be sure that a face-to-face encounter will some day take place (assuming
the aliens have faces!). But even if extraterrestrials never visit our planet
or receive a visit from us, we might still get to know one another. We
might still be able to talk.
One way this could happen is by radio. Unlike sound, radio waves can
move through the empty spaces between the stars. And they move as
fast as anything can move – at the speed of light.
Almost 50 years ago, some scientists worked out what it would take to
send a signal from one star system to another. It surprised them to learn
that interstellar conversation wouldn’t require super-advanced
technology like you often see in science ction lms. It’s possible to send
radio signals from one solar system to another with the type of radio
equipment we could build today. So the scientists stood back from their
chalkboards and said to themselves: if this is so easy, then no matter
what aliens might be doing, they’d surely be using radio to
communicate over large distances. The scientists realized that it would
be a perfectly logical idea to turn some of our big antennae to the skies
and see if we could pick up extraterrestrial signals. After all, nding an
alien broadcast would instantly prove that there’s someone out there,
without the expense of sending rockets to distant star systems in the
hope of discovering a populated planet.
Unfortunately, this alien eavesdropping experiment, the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), has so far failed to nd a single sure
peep from the skies. The radio bands have been discouragingly quiet
wherever we’ve looked, aside from the natural static caused by such
objects as quasars (the churning, high-energy centres of some galaxies)
or pulsars (rapidly spinning neutron stars).

Does that mean that intelligent aliens, able to build radio

transmitters, don’t exist? That would be an astounding discovery,
because there are surely at least a hundred billion planets in our Milky
Way Galaxy – and there are at least 2 trillion other galaxies! If no one is
out there, we are stupendously special, and dreadfully alone.
Well, as SETI researchers will tell you, it’s entirely too soon to
conclude that we have no company among the stars. After all, if you’re
going to listen for alien radio broadcasts, not only do you have to point
your antenna in the right direction, but you also need to tune to the
right spot on the dial, have a sensitive-enough receiver, and be listening
at the right time. SETI experiments are like looking for buried treasure
without a map. So the fact that we haven’t found anything so far isn’t
surprising. It’s like digging a few holes on the beach of a South Paci c
island and coming up with nothing but wet sand and crabs. You
shouldn’t immediately conclude that there’s no treasure to be found.
Fortunately, new radio telescopes are speeding up our search for
signals, and it’s possible that within a few dozen years we could hear a
faint broadcast from another civilization.

What would they be saying to us? Well, of course we can only guess,
but one thing the extraterrestrials will surely know: they’d better send us
a long message, because speedy conversation is simply impossible. For
example, imagine that the nearest aliens are on a planet around a star
that’s 1,000 light years away. If we pick up a signal from them
tomorrow, it will have taken 1,000 years to get to us. It will be an old
message, but that’s OK. After all, if you read Sophocles or Shakespeare,
those are old ‘messages’ too, but they’re still interesting.
 However, if we choose to reply, our response to the aliens will take
1,000 years to get to them, and another 1,000 years will pass before
their answer gets back to us! In other words, even a simple ‘Hello?’ and
its alien response, ‘Zork?’, would take 20 centuries. So while talking on
the radio is a lot faster than travelling in rockets for a meet-and-greet, it’s
still going to be a very relaxed conversation. That suggests that the aliens
might send us books and books of stu about themselves and their
planet, knowing that we won’t be doing a lot of chatting.

But even if they do, even if they send us The Alien Encyclopaedia, will
we be able to read it? After all, unlike in the movies and TV, the
extraterrestrials aren’t going to be uent in English or any other earthly
language. It’s possible that they may use pictures or even mathematics
to help make their message understandable, but we won’t know until
and unless we pick up a signal.
No matter what they send us, detecting a radio squeal coming from a
distant world would be big news. Some day soon they may tell us
something extraordinarily interesting: namely, that in the vast expanses
of space, humans are not the only ones watching the Universe.
And today’s young people may be those who will be there to listen –
and to respond. This could be you!
On Earth there are lots of atoms close together and knocking each
other around. Giving atoms a kick can make them kick their
neighbouring atoms, and then those atoms kick other atoms, and
so on, so the kick travels through the mass of atoms. Lots of little
kicks can create a stream of vibrations travelling through a material.
The air covering the Earth’s surface consists of a large number of
gas atoms and molecules bouncing o each other; it can carry
vibrations like this, as can the sea, the rock beneath our feet and
even everyday objects. The vibrations that are the right sort to
stimulate our ears we call sound.
It takes time for sound to travel through a material because an
atom has to pass each kick on to its neighbours. How much time
depends on how strongly the atoms a ect each other, which
depends on the nature of the material and other things like the
temperature. In air, sound travels at around 1.6 km (1 mile) every 5
seconds. This is about 1 million times slower than the speed of
light, which is why the light from a space-shuttle launch is seen
almost immediately by the spectators, while the noise arrives a bit
later. In the same way a lightning ash arrives before the thunder –
which is the kick given to the air molecules by the sudden and
intense electrical discharge. In the sea, sound travels at around ve
times faster than it does in air.

In outer space it is very di erent. Between stars, atoms are very

rare, so there is nothing to kick against. Of course, if you have air in
your spacecraft, sound inside it will travel normally. A small rock
hitting the outside will make the wall of the craft vibrate, and then
the air inside, so you might hear that. But sounds created on a
planet, or in another spacecraft, would not carry to you unless
someone there converted them into radio waves (which are like
light and don’t need a material to carry them), and you used your
radio receiver to convert them back into sound inside your ship.
There are also natural radio waves travelling through space,
produced by stars and faraway galaxies. Radio astronomers examine
these in the same way that other astronomers examine visible light
from space. Because radio waves are not visible, and we are used to
converting them into sound using radio receivers, radio astronomy
is sometimes thought of as ‘listening’ rather than ‘looking’. But
both radio and visible-light astronomers are doing the same thing:
studying types of electromagnetic waves from space. There isn’t
really any sound from space at all.
 Is There Anyone Out
There?
Lord MARTIN REES
Former President of the Royal Society (2005–2010), Trinity College,
University of Cambridge

Will some readers of this book walk on Mars? I hope so – indeed, I think
it is very likely that they will. It will be a dangerous adventure and
perhaps the most exciting exploration of all time. Throughout human
history, pioneering explorers have ventured to new continents, crossed
fathomless oceans, reached the North and South Poles and scaled the
summits of the highest mountains. Those who travel to Mars will go in
the same spirit of adventure.
It would be wonderful to traverse the mountains, canyons and craters
of Mars, or perhaps even to y over them in a balloon. But nobody
would go to Mars for a comfortable life. It will be harder to live there
than at the top of Everest or at the South Pole.
But the greatest hope of these pioneers would be to nd something on
Mars that was alive.
Here on Earth, there are literally millions of species of life – slime,
moulds, mushrooms, trees, frogs, monkeys (and of course humans as
well). Life survives in the most remote corners of our planet – in dark
caves where sunlight has been blocked for thousands of years, on arid
desert rocks, around hot springs where the water is at boiling point,
deep underground and high in the atmosphere.
Our Earth teems with an extraordinary range of life forms. But there
are constraints on size and shape. Big animals have fat legs but still can’t
jump like insects. The largest animals oat in water. Far greater variety
could exist on other planets. For instance, if gravity were weaker,
animals could be larger and creatures our size could have legs as thin as
insects’.
Everywhere you nd life on Earth, you nd water.

There is water on Mars and life of some kind could have emerged
there. The red planet is much colder than the Earth and has a thinner
atmosphere. Nobody expects green goggle-eyed Martians like those that
feature in so many cartoons. If any advanced intelligent aliens existed on
Mars, we would already know about them – and they might even have
visited us by now!

Go to page 136 to read more about our Solar System.

Mercury and Venus are nearer the Sun than the Earth is. Both are very
much hotter. Earth is the Goldilocks planet – not too hot and not too
cold. If the Earth were too hot, even the most tenacious life would fry.
Mars is a bit too cold but not absolutely frigid. The outer planets are
colder still.
What about Jupiter, the biggest planet in our Solar System? If life had
evolved on this huge planet, where the force of gravity is far stronger
than on Earth, it could be very strange indeed – for instance, huge
balloon-like creatures, oating in the dense atmosphere.
Jupiter has four large moons that could, perhaps, harbour life. One of
these, Europa, is covered in thick ice. Beneath that there lies an ocean.
Perhaps there are creatures swimming in this ocean? To search for life
on Europa, NASA is considering a landing mission, but this may be
di cult if Europa is covered in icy spikes, as recent research suggests it
is!
But the biggest moon in the Solar System is Titan, one of Saturn’s
many moons. Scientists have already landed a probe on Titan’s surface,
revealing rivers, lakes and rocks. But the temperature is about -170°C
(-274°F) where any water is frozen solid. It is not water but liquid
methane that ows in these rivers and lakes – not a good place for life.
Let’s now widen our gaze beyond our Solar System to other stars.
There are tens of billions of these suns in our Galaxy. Even the nearest
of these is so far away that, at the speed of a present-day rocket, it would
take millions of years to reach it. Equally, if clever aliens existed on a
planet orbiting another star, it would be di cult for them to visit us. It
would be far easier to send a radio or laser signal than to traverse the
mindboggling distances of interstellar space.
If there was a signal back, it might come from aliens very di erent
from us. Indeed, it could come from machines whose creators have long
ago been usurped or become extinct. And, of course, there may be aliens
who exist and have big ‘brains’ but are so di erent from us that we
wouldn’t recognize them or be able to communicate with them. Some
may not want to reveal that they exist (even if they are actually watching
us!). There may be some super intelligent dolphins, happily thinking
profound thoughts deep under some alien ocean, doing nothing to
reveal their presence. Still other ‘brains’ could actually be swarms of
insects, acting together like a single intelligent being. There may be a lot
more out there than we could ever detect.
 Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.

There are billions of planets in our Galaxy and our Galaxy itself is only
one of billions. Most people would guess that the cosmos is teeming
with life – but that would be no more than a guess. We still know too
little about how life began, and how it evolves, to be able to say whether
simple life is common. We know even less about how likely it would be
for simple life to evolve in the way it did here on Earth. My bet (for what
it is worth) is that simple life is indeed very common but that intelligent
life is much rarer.
Indeed, there may not be any intelligent life out there at all. Earth’s
intricate biosphere could be unique. Perhaps we really are alone. If that’s
true, it’s a disappointment for those who are looking for alien signals –
or who even hope that some day aliens may visit us. But the failure of
searches needn’t depress us. Indeed, it is perhaps a reason to be cheerful
because we can then be less modest about our place in the great scheme
of things. Our Earth could be the most interesting place in the cosmos.
 If life is unique to the Earth, it could be seen as just a cosmic
sideshow – though it needn’t be. That is because evolution isn’t over –
indeed, it could be nearer its beginning than its end. Our Solar System
is barely middle-aged – it will be 6 billion years before the Sun swells
up, engulfs the inner planets and vaporizes any life that still remains on
Earth. Far-future life and intelligence could be as di erent from us as we
are from a bug. Life could spread from Earth through the entire Galaxy,
evolving into a teeming complexity far beyond what we can even
imagine. If so, our tiny planet – this pale-blue dot oating in space –
could be the most important place in the entire cosmos.
 Wormholes and Time
Travel
Dr KIP S. THORNE
Nobel Prize-winner in Physics 2017

Imagine that you are an ant, and you live on the surface of an apple. The
apple hangs from the ceiling by a thread so thin that you can’t climb up
it, so the apple’s surface is your entire universe. You can’t go anywhere
else. Now imagine that a worm has eaten a hole through the apple, so
you can walk from one side of the apple to the other by either of two
routes: round the apple’s surface (your universe), or by a shortcut,
through the wormhole.
Could our Universe be like this apple? Could there be wormholes that
link one place in our Universe to another? If so, what would such a
wormhole look like to us?
 The wormhole would have two mouths, one at each end. One mouth
might be at Buckingham Palace in London, and the other on a beach in
California. The mouths might be spherical. Looking into the London
mouth (rather like looking into a crystal ball), you could see the
California beach, with lapping waves and swaying palm trees. Looking
into the California mouth, your friend might see you in London, with
the palace and its guards behind you. Unlike a crystal ball, the mouths
are not solid. You could step right into the big spherical mouth in
London, and then after a brief oat through a weird sort of tunnel, you
would arrive on the beach in California, and you could spend the day
sur ng with your friend. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have such a
wormhole?
The apple’s interior has three dimensions (east–west, north–south
and up–down), while its surface has only two. The apple’s wormhole
connects points on the two-dimensional surface by penetrating through
the three-dimensional interior. Similarly, your wormhole connects
London and California in our three-dimensional Universe by
penetrating through a four-dimensional (or maybe even more-
dimensional) hyperspace that is not part of our Universe.
Our Universe is governed by the laws of physics. These laws dictate
what can happen in our Universe and what cannot. Do these laws
permit wormholes to exist? Amazingly, the answer is yes!
Unfortunately (according to those laws) most wormholes will implode
– their tunnel walls will violently collapse inwards – so quickly that
nobody and nothing can travel through and survive. To prevent this
implosion we must insert into the wormhole a weird form of matter:
matter that has negative energy, which produces a sort of anti-gravity
force that holds the wormhole open.
Can matter with negative energy exist? Amazingly, again, the answer
is yes! And such matter is made daily in physics laboratories, but only in
tiny amounts or only for a short moment of time. It is made by
borrowing some energy from a region of space that has none, that is, by
borrowing energy from ‘the vacuum’. What is borrowed, however, must
be returned very quickly when the lender is the vacuum, unless the
amount borrowed is very tiny. How do we know? We learn this by
scrutinizing the laws of physics closely, using mathematics.
 Suppose you are a superb engineer, and you want to hold a wormhole
open. Is it possible to assemble enough negative energy inside a
wormhole and hold it there long enough to permit your friends to travel
through? My best guess is ‘no’, but nobody on Earth knows for sure –
yet. We’ve not been smart enough to gure it out.

If the laws do permit wormholes to be held open, might such

wormholes occur naturally in our Universe? Very probably not. They
would almost certainly have to be made and held open arti cially, by
engineers.
How far are human engineers today from being able to make
wormholes and hold them open? Very, very far. Wormhole technology, if
it is possible at all, may be as di cult for us as space ight was for
cavemen. But for a very advanced civilization that has mastered
wormhole technology, wormholes would be wonderful: the ideal means
for interstellar travel!
Imagine you are an engineer in such a civilization. Put one wormhole
mouth (one of the crystal-ball-like spheres) into a spaceship and carry it
out into the Universe at very high speed and then back to your home
planet. The laws of physics tell us that this trip could take a few days as
seen and felt and measured in the spaceship, but several years as seen,
felt and measured on the planet. The result is weird: if you now walk
into the space-travel mouth, through the tunnel-like wormhole, and out
of the stay-at-home mouth, you will go back in time by several years.
The wormhole has become a machine for travelling backwards in time!
With such a machine, you could try to change history. You could go
back in time, meet your younger self on a certain day, and tell yourself to
stay at home because when you left for work that day, you got hit by a
truck.
Stephen Hawking has conjectured that the laws of physics prevent
anyone from ever making a time machine, and thereby prevent history
from ever being changed. Because the word ‘chronology’ means ‘the
arrangement of events or dates in the order of their occurrence’, this is
called the chronology protection conjecture. We don’t know for sure
whether Stephen is right, but we do know two ways in which the laws of
physics might prevent time machines from being made and thereby
protect chronology.
Firstly, the laws might always prevent even the most advanced of
engineers from collecting enough negative energy to hold a wormhole
open and let us travel through it. Remarkably, Stephen has proved
(using the laws of physics) that every time machine requires negative
energy, so this would prevent any time machine from being made, and
not just time machines that use wormholes.
The second way to prevent time machines is this: my physicist
colleagues and I have shown that time machines might always destroy
themselves, perhaps by a gigantic explosion, at the moment when
anyone tries to turn them on. The laws of physics give strong hints that
this may be so; but we don’t yet understand the laws and their
predictions well enough to be sure.
So the nal verdict is unclear. We do not know for sure whether the
laws of physics allow very advanced civilizations to construct wormholes
for interstellar travel, or machines for travelling back in time. To nd out
for certain requires a deeper understanding of the laws than Stephen or
I or other scientists have yet achieved.
That is a challenge for you – the next generation of scientists.
Space, Time and Relativity

Four-dimensional Space–Time
When we want to go somewhere on Earth, usually we only think in two
dimensions – how far north or south, and how far east or west. That is
how maps work. We use two-dimensional directions all the time. For
example, to drive anywhere you only need to go forward (or reverse), or
turn left (or right). This is because the surface of the Earth is a two-
dimensional space – and you only need to know the longitude and the
latitude.
 The pilot of an aeroplane, on the other hand, isn’t stuck to the Earth’s
surface! The aeroplane can also go up and down – so, as well as its
position over the Earth’s surface, it can also change its altitude. When
the pilot is ying the plane, ‘north’, ‘east’ or ‘up’ will depend on the
aeroplane’s position. ‘Up’, for example, means away from the centre of
the Earth, so over Australia this would be very di erent from over Great
Britain!

To find out about three-dimensional printing, turn to page

362.

The same is true for the commander of a spaceship far away from the
Earth. The commander can choose three reference directions any way
he or she wishes – but there must always be three, because the space in
which we, the Earth, our Sun, the stars and all the galaxies exist is three-
dimensional (longitude, latitude and altitude).
Of course, if we have something we need to get to, like a party or a
sports match, it isn’t enough to know where it will be held! We also need
to know when. Any event in the history of the Universe therefore needs
four distances, or coordinates: three of space and one of time – so, to
describe the Universe and what happens within it completely, we are
dealing with a four-dimensional space–time (longitude, latitude, altitude
and time).
 Relativity
Einstein’s special theory of relativity says that the laws of nature, and in
particular the speed of light, will be the same, no matter how fast one is
moving. It’s easy to see that two people who are moving relative to each
other will not agree on the distance between two events. For example,
two events that take place at the same spot in a jet aircraft will appear to
an observer on the ground to be separated by the distance the jet has
travelled between the events. So if these two people try to measure the
speed of a pulse of light travelling from the tail of the aircraft to its nose,
they will not agree on the distance the light has travelled from its
emission to its reception at the nose. But because speed is distance
travelled divided by the travel time, they will also not agree on the time
interval between emission and reception – if they agree on the speed of
light, as Einstein’s theory says they do!

Remember Einstein’s theories? If not, you can read more

about them on pages 7–8 and page 12.

This shows that time cannot be absolute, as Newton thought: that is,
one cannot assign a time to each event to which everyone will agree.
Instead, each person will have their own measure of time, and the times
measured by two people that are moving relative to each other will not
agree.
 This has been tested by ying a very accurate atomic clock round the
world. When it returned, it had measured slightly less time than a
similar clock that had remained at the same place on the Earth. This
means you could extend your life by constantly ying round the world!
However, this e ect is very small (about 0.000002 seconds per circuit)
and would be more than cancelled by eating all those airline meals!
Tick tock is the familiar sound of a clock and time passing. We all know
about time – or at least we think we do! When we are together in a
room, my clock shows the same time as your clock, my tick tock is the
same as yours, and time passes at a steady beat. If you went on holiday
to a distant country, your tick tock and mine would be the same, even if
our clocks showed a di erent time of day. But time is an interesting
thing because it can pass at di erent rates if you start to move very fast.
When you measure the tick tock on a speeding spaceship, it looks slower
than the tick tock of a clock back on Earth. Scientists call this strange
e ect time dilation, and it happens because light has a speed limit.
To understand time dilation we need rst to understand something
about light.
Light shining through the vacuum of space has a xed speed.
Scientists call this speed c, and it’s around 300,000 km (186,000 miles)
per second. Though light can slow down when it passes through thick
stu like glass, when it’s in free space its speed is c, and that speed c
happens whatever direction you shine the light in.
It’s this xed speed that gives us time dilation: time on a super-fast-
moving spaceship passes more slowly than time on the Earth. This is
the science behind how, in theory, someone is able to travel one way into
the future – travelling so fast that only days pass, while on Earth years go
by.
This all seems crazy, but that’s because you can never in reality move
fast enough to notice. However, if you could move at speeds near the
speed of light, then your tick tock as seen from Earth would become
more of a tiiiiiick toooooock. To get a feel for why this is, we need a light
clock in a see-through spaceship.
Our spaceship light clock is simple – a bulb on one side of the
spaceship and a mirror on the other, with the super-powered engines at
the back. When the spaceship is stationary, the bulb switches on, the
light from it shoots over the distance inside the ship to the mirror and is
re ected back. Tick is the time taken to go over to the mirror, and tock is
the time taken to come back from the mirror.
If we had a mirror 300,000 km (186,000 miles) away, then light from
a (very bright) bulb would take one second to get to the mirror and
another one second to come back, because light travels at c, so that rst
 ash is going to travel 300,000 km (186,000 miles) in one second, and
take one second to come back.
Back on the stationary spaceship, our light clock will happily ash its
tick tock at the same rate whenever we look at it, and we can use it to set
all our other clocks on Earth to the same tick tock.

But we now launch our see-through spaceship so that it’s moving very,
very quickly, and watch it from Earth. The rst ash from the bulb
shoots out towards the mirror but, as we look at it from being stationary
on Earth, in the time the light takes to cross over to where the mirror
would normally be, the mirror has moved. The distance the mirror
moves will depend on how fast the spaceship is travelling; if it’s very
fast, then the light takes a longer sloped path to hit the mirror. Because
the light travelled further and light speed c doesn’t change, from our
view-point this could only mean that the time it took to get to the shifted
mirror was longer. What was tick on our stationary light clock now
becomes tiiick.
On the re ection of the light, the same thing happens: the light
coming from the mirror has to cover a longer distance to get back to
where it started, so our tock is now tooock. This means that when we
look from Earth, a moving clock runs slower than a stationary one and it
seems that less time has passed on the moving spaceship. For example,
when the spaceship’s slow-running clock has only reached one o’clock,
while it’s now ve o’clock on Earth, that would mean the spaceship is 4
hours into the Earth’s future.
 You can also think about this time dilation with some simple letter
shapes. When the clock is stationary, the ashes travel back and forth
like two letter I’s, as the mirror and bulb are straight across from each
other. The rst I is the journey to the mirror, the second I is the journey
from the mirror. But when our spaceship moves, the path of the light
seen from the Earth is more like a V. The light now has to travel a longer
distance at an angle to bounce o the shifted mirror at the bottom of the
V, and again cover a longer distance to return to the start. The di erence
between the II and V distance means that from Earth it takes longer to
have a pulse re ected back when the clock is moving, so the moving
clock is slower.
That’s the basic idea behind time dilation, and it’s a prediction of the
theory of relativity, which was one of scientist Albert Einstein’s great
breakthroughs (although, of course, the details of his theory are a bit
more complicated). Though Earth sees my clock as running slow, if I’m
on the spaceship, then from my viewpoint I’m stationary and it’s the
Earth that is moving away from me, so I see the Earth clock running
slower, not mine. Both Earth and spaceship points of view are right, so
why is it only on the spaceship that time travels into the future?
 If you look closely at the mathematics, it turns out that changing
speed can also cause time dilation. Since only the spaceship has to
change speed and direction in order to turn round to get back to Earth,
the conditions on the spaceship’s ight are di erent from those on
Earth. It’s the time dilation from the spaceship’s super-fast speeds and
mid-course about-turn that causes the time di erence that shoots the
returning spaceship one way into Earth’s future.
We can’t yet y spaceships at speeds anywhere near light speed, but
we have some interesting experiments that show that Einstein’s time-
dilation idea was correct. In an accelerator – like the one at CERN in
Switzerland – particles are pushed to move at speeds near the speed of
light, and usefully many have their own sort of clocks on board. A
particle’s half-life is related to the time it takes for the particle to
disintegrate into other smaller sub-particles. We can measure this half-
life in the lab when the particle is stationary, and we can also measure it
when the particle is moving. It turns out that when the particle moves,
the ‘half-life’ clock does run slower than when it’s stationary, and by an
amount exactly predicted by Albert.
From particles to the Goldilocks Zone to time travel … What does it all
mean for the future of our planet?
Enter the world of the unknown: in the following pages, experts from
all over the globe take a unique look at what science can do for us, and
how it will a ect modern scientists just like you.
Our beautiful, complex, astonishing Universe is nearly 14 billion years
old.
What’s next?
 My Robot, Your Robots
Professor PETER McOWAN
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary
University of London

Writing about robots is as much fun as building robots. When I was

younger I used to draw robots, write about robots and even build robots
out of cardboard boxes and string. Now I build them for real – but I
haven’t forgotten that it is a lot of fun. Writers, scientists and engineers
use their imaginations all the time to come up with new ways of doing
things, and when it comes to robots there is no end to the possibilities;
well, almost. In fact, when you have to build a robot for real you start to
run into all sorts of problems, but they are always interesting problems,
problems worth solving. In this chapter, I’m going to tell you some of the
history of robots, some of the ways they are used today and some of the
ways we might be able to use them in the future.
The dream of building a machine that looks like something real goes
way back in history. One of the rst built was a mechanical servant
created in ancient Greece around 250 BCE; this clever device could
automatically pour a cup of wine from a jug, and mix it with water as
required! Its inventor, Philo of Byzantium – also known as Philo
Mechanicus – came up with lots of amazing mechanical ideas, including
a water-powered chirping bird, but his servant automaton was one of his
most popular. An automaton (plural: automata) is the name for a
mechanical device that looks like a living thing.
 In the eighteenth century, automata became amazingly popular.
Inventors would use the new clockwork technology of the time to create
beautiful devices that looked like living dolls – dolls that could play
musical instruments, perform magic tricks and even draw pictures and
write. They would tour these around the courts of Europe and make lots
of money from their exhibitions; the age of the clockwork robot had
arrived. In their day, they wowed the crowds, but today they look kind of
creepy, alive but not quite alive, with dolls’ faces, a key to wind them up
and tiny mechanical bodies that jump, judder and creak.
 But they set the scene for the future: for example, consider the
‘Draughtsman-Writer’ automaton designed by the Swiss clock-builder
Henri Maillardet at the start of the nineteenth century. This was able to
draw pictures and write poems.
Some early automata were what robot builders today would call
programmable, as depending on the card (or brass disc, in the case of the
‘Draughtsman-Writer’) you placed in the automaton’s slot, the machine
would do di erent things. In essence, most robots today are similar: they
have a body, they have some way of deciding how to move, a list of things
to do, and a way to provide the power to do them.
 However, not all robots that inhabit the world with you today look like
humans, as robots can take on all types of shapes and forms depending
on what their job is. In modern car factories robots pick up parts and
weld them together; and even computers themselves are now often built
by industrial robots that put the di erent parts accurately in place.
Robots like this can do these jobs without getting tired or bored, they are
powered by electricity rather than clockwork, they have simple repetitive
tasks to do but they get on with the job and do nothing else. They don’t
really need to understand their world.
On a farm, however, there can be robots that milk cows, and these
robots need to be much smarter, since cows won’t always be in exactly
the right place at exactly the right time. These farm robots have to be
able to see and make decisions. When a cow wanders in, the robot has to
identify where the udders are and carefully attach the suction cups to
them to remove the milk. Therefore they need to have the ability to
understand a picture from a camera, and work out the best way to move
their suction-cupped arms safely and gently into place. If they get it
wrong, there will be trouble!
These apparently simple tasks of seeing and moving are actually really
hard for machines. About half your brain (including the bit at the back of
your head called the visual cortex) is right now working on
understanding the world you see around you, and a great big slice in the
middle of your brain – called the motor cortex – is working out how to
move your muscles to do what you want your body to do. Human brains
are actually making billions and billions of calculations all the time, but
what’s simple to us needs to be turned into clear instructions –
thousands of lines of computer code – for a robot, and as we don’t yet
understand exactly how the human brain does all these wonderful
calculations, making a machine mimic the brain is tough. Fortunately,
down on the farm, our limited understanding is enough for us to build
robots with just enough intelligence to manage the job and keep the
cows happy.

Ideas for robots can come from anywhere. There are scientists who
study insect intelligence, for instance, since insect brains are much less
complex than human brains with fewer interconnected networks of
nerve cells – neurones – but insects are still smart. They have to be to
survive in a di cult world – try swatting a y! Using this example, in
fact, there are robotic devices being built to t into cars that allow cars to
swerve automatically to avoid collisions; the idea for these devices came
from studying ies’ brains.
 But what if there was an accident? Who, then, would be responsible?
The car driver, the car manufacturer or perhaps even the y? What do
you think? As intelligent robots start to live in the world with us, there
could be lots of questions like this.
Accepting robots into our world is complicated, and how you feel
about them may also depend on where in the world you live. In the West,
people tend to think of robots as sinister, out to take over the world.
Often this is because that’s the way robots are portrayed in lms and TV.
In Asia, however, robots are often presented in stories as heroic
characters.
There is also something scientists call ‘the uncanny valley’. If you look
at how acceptable robots are, we nd that robots that look like robots are
generally more acceptable than robots that look like humans … but aren’t
quite the same. It’s that creepy living-doll problem from the age of
automata again: things just don’t look right, so we don’t feel happy
around them.
Today’s electronics and computer technologies, able to mimic the way
the neurons in our brains work, as well as the movement of our limbs,
allow us to build ever more lifelike robots, but they are still far from
perfect. These androids – human-like robots – now buzz as the electric
motors whir, rather than creak with clockwork gears, and they have
complex computer programs which try to create arti cially the myriad
ways our brain’s neurones work together, but the androids can’t yet
e ortlessly walk up stairs, catch a ball or reliably tell the di erence
between silk and sandpaper. They can’t unfailingly recognize faces or
expressions, or single out particular voices in noisy rooms like we can;
they can’t yet talk, react or understand us and our world as we would
naturally expect a fellow human to. They are ‘not quite right’, and so are
hard for us to accept.
 Heider and Simmel
Fritz Heider (1896–1988) was an Austrian psychologist who went to
live and work in the United States in 1930. Before studying psychology,
he thought of becoming an architect, then a painter, and then he
studied law. None of these subjects really suited him!
Marianne Simmel (1923–2010) came from a German-Jewish family
who had to flee the Nazis. They reached the United States in 1940.
Aged 17, she had to work as a housekeeper while studying to get the
education she needed to go to university to study psychology.

But all is not lost for today’s robots; our brains hold another trick we
can use. In a classic experiment by Heider and Simmel in the 1940s,
people were shown random shapes moving round a screen, but when
asked what was happening many came up with elaborate stories about
squares falling in love with circles or larger triangles chasing smaller
triangles. Our brains are smart gigantic learning machines, and one of
the main ways we learn is by creating stories to make us better able to
remember and understand our world. When we see robots, our brains
tend to ll in the gaps that today’s technologies can’t yet build, so we
naturally think that robots have personalities and are more intelligent
than they really are, and robot-builders often give us cues to help us
make these stories seem more real, and which help us to accept and use
the robots better.
One big problem with robots, for instance, is the question of what
powers them. When the batteries go at, they stop, and a robot can’t
always be connected to the electrical mains by a cable. To get round this
problem, providing power to the robot can be made part of its story. A
great example is how scientists created a baby seal robot to provide
comfort to residents in an old people’s home and built in the need for the
seal to be ‘fed’. They inserted a dummy teat that was actually a recharger
for the robot’s batteries, so that recharging became a part of the robot’s
story.
In one of my projects, when the batteries in a robot dinosaur ran down
it would ‘go to sleep’ and transfer itself to your mobile phone, where a
virtual image of it could continue to play with you (while someone
recharged the actual robot), then it would go to sleep on the phone and
wake up in the robot body remembering what you had done with it on
the phone. Can you think of a story for a robot?

How long will it be before we have robot politicians? After all, robots
can make decisions based on all the facts, and they can’t be corrupted,
can they? When should we have robots ying our planes, driving our
trains and cars, teaching in our classrooms, helping us in our homes and
o ces, performing surgery on us or ghting on the battle eld, making
the decision to shoot by themselves? Well, we already have basic forms of
these sorts of robots, but at present there is always a human somewhere
in control. Should that always be the case? After all, people make
mistakes all the time. Could robots do better?
New advances in nanotechnology will allow us to create microrobots
that can be injected into our bodies to perform repairs or even update us,
linking our bodies and minds with external technology, building a new
species of humans – transhumans: robot human hybrids. Is this the stu
of nightmares or a way to improve the life of disabled people and give
humanity exciting new abilities? Who knows? It might be you who
builds these future robots.
I too started by reading books, having ideas and dreaming about
robots. When I was about 7, I built ‘Billy the robotʼ from boxes and string
(and I still have him), then I dreamed a lot. I’m now about 50, and have
been lucky enough to be involved in building robots that dance, help kids
learn chess, assist the elderly in their homes and work as part of a team
with people in their o ces. None of my robots want to rule the world!

I have worked with loads of amazing, creative scientists and engineers

to help turn my childhood robot dreams into reality. The cardboard and
string have been replaced by maths, electronics and computers, but they
are all proud descendants of ‘Billy’.
They are my robots and I’m still having fun.
What will your robots be like?
 Robot Ethics
Dr KATE DARLING
Research Specialist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Is it OK to be mean to a robot?
We all know that robots are just machines that are programmed to do
things. You can’t hurt their feelings and they don’t experience pain like
humans and animals. But … if verbal or physical violence towards robots
still feels wrong to you, that’s not crazy!
There’s an interesting phenomenon in human psychology called
anthropomorphism. It means that we project human qualities and
emotions on to non-humans. If you’ve ever thought that a stu ed
animal looked sad because it was thrown under the bed, or that a dog
was smiling happily at you, you’ve experienced anthropomorphism.
Dogs certainly have emotions, but they’re harder to read than most
people think! We sometimes take cues from animals and objects and
imagine that they feel the same as a human would. And even though we
may be wrong about what we’re imagining, it’s a pretty natural thing to
do – evolutionarily, it’s how we try to make sense of, and relate to, other
beings and things.
 It turns out that we anthropomorphize robots a lot. Robots combine
two factors that evolution has taught us to respond to: physicality and
movement. We’re very physical creatures, and our brains are hardwired
to see life in certain types of movements. So if we see a robot in our
physical space that seems to be moving around all by itself, part of our
brain thinks that the robot is doing things intentionally. And that makes
it easy to imagine that the robot has goals and emotions. That’s why a lot
of us feel sorry for a robot when it gets stuck somewhere, even though
the robot really doesn’t care at all if it’s stuck!
Some robots are specially designed to target this instinct. Have you
seen Star Wars? Just like R2-D2 and the other robots in Star Wars, we
can make real robots that use sounds and movements and other cues
that we automatically associate with living things. A lot of children and
adults enjoy playing with these robots because it’s so easy to imagine
that they’re alive. And this imagination can even be used to help people
in health and education. For example, robot animals can be pets for
lonely or sick people who are allergic to real animals. Teachers can use
robots as friendly and engaging sidekicks to make learning more fun.
Some robots are already really good at reminding people to take
medicine, or comforting them, or motivating them to learn new
languages. And these robots are helpful because people treat them like
living things instead of like devices. It’s more fun to talk to a robot than
to a toaster or a computer!

Is your robot a spy?

Maybe some day soon you’ll have a robot helper at home. But before
you tell your robot all your secrets, here’s something to keep in
mind: it’s important to know a little bit about how the robot works,
what purpose it serves, and what data it collects about you. For
example, is the robot recording what you say? If you tell it something
personal, can somebody else get that information? Most companies
that sell robots probably just want you to have a cool robot, but
some of them may want to collect your data to sell to other big
companies. Or they may have some other idea to make more money
using the robot. After all, robots are machines made by people, so
they do what their creators want them to do. That’s not always a bad
thing. It’s just a good idea to take a moment to ask: who made this
robot, and why?

In the future, robots will be in a lot of places and made for many
di erent tasks. Some robots will be programmed to act as if they have
feelings. And that brings us back to the question: is it OK to be mean to
a robot? If robots don’t really have feelings, it’s not as bad as being mean
to animals or people. But if you’re nice to robots, you’re not being silly.
In fact, it may mean that you have a lot of empathy. Scientists like me
have been researching the ways in which we treat robots like they’re
alive. One of our questions is whether we can learn anything about a
person from how they act towards a robot. So far, we think that people
who feel empathy for robots have a lot of empathy for other people too.
So before being mean to a robot, consider this: if you’re a kind and
caring person, that may not matter to the robot, but it sure matters to
you and others!
What does it mean to be intelligent? Most often in daily life, the term is
used to describe how well someone does at maths, writing or another
academic subject, but there is a more basic de nition. At its core,
intelligence means the ability to achieve goals in a wide variety of
environments. Sometimes your goal might be solving a maths problem,
but other times it might be something much simpler that we usually
take for granted: describing the weather, playing a computer game or
using a knife and fork to eat a meal. Although we don’t usually think of
these as particularly challenging tasks, they actually involve a
tremendous amount of computer power, and it is remarkable that our
brains are able to do so many di erent activities so well.
Intelligence is what makes humans exceptional when compared to
other animals. By looking at the world around us and thinking about
how it works, we have built tools, societies and civilizations to help us
achieve our goals. In the span of a few tens of thousands of years – the
blink of an eye relative to the history of life on Earth – humans have
used our intelligence to make incredible progress: discovering
electricity, building skyscrapers, curing diseases, mastering ight and
even sending people to the Moon and launching probes past the limits
of our Solar System. Human intellect has powered these achievements.
It is unlike anything else on this planet and possibly unlike anything
else in the entire Universe.
Imagine if we had intelligent machines that could help us discover
even more new inventions and answer even more questions! This is
exactly the goal of arti cial intelligence, or ‘AI’.
For a long time computers have been excellent at some tasks, such as
maths and logic, but they have not been nearly as exible as human
minds. Activities that we nd easy – like identifying di erent animals or
carrying on a conversation – have generally been incredibly di cult to
automate. But as computers have become faster, people have discovered
new ways of programming them that have unlocked some of these
abilities. Today, a number of the world’s most brilliant scientists are
working on designing new programs (or ‘algorithms’) that will enable
computers, like humans, to apply intelligence to accomplish goals in a
wide variety of environments. This is AI.
The most exciting area of AI research at the moment is called
‘machine learning’. Machine learning takes a di erent approach to
normal computer programming: instead of giving the computer precise
step-by-step instructions, machine-learning researchers write learning
algorithms that allow computers to observe the world around them and
gure out answers for themselves. For instance, instead of writing a
program that tells a computer that a cat has two eyes, four paws and
whiskers, a machine-learning researcher might write a learning
algorithm and then simply show the computer a lot of di erent pictures
of cats. Over time, the algorithm will learn from these examples to
identify cats for itself. This is very similar to how we teach human
children: we might simply say, ‘This is a cat’, or, ‘This is a dog’, and let
the child work out independently what the di erences are between cats
and dogs.
 One of the most wonderful and powerful aspects of machine learning
is that it is much more adaptable than regular programming. For
instance, we could take the same algorithm that we used to identify cats
and train the computer to identify all sorts of di erent animals. We
could also use it to recognize faces, cars, buildings, trees and pretty
much anything else. This saves us a huge amount of e ort because we
don’t need to write speci c programs for each problem! Because the
algorithms are general-purpose, they can be used in all sorts of di erent
situations.

Another bene t of learning algorithms is that, unlike normal

computer programs, they can discover new facts and strategies that we
did not know when we created them. For example, just recently an AI
program called AlphaGo defeated the best player in the world at an
ancient Chinese board game called Go. Go is sort of like chess, but
much, much more complicated: it has more possible board positions
than the number of atoms in the entire Universe! This makes the game
very di cult, and the world’s best players spend their entire lives honing
their skills and trying out new tactics. AlphaGo is a machine-learning
program that, like human players, learned to play the game by
experimenting over time with lots of di erent moves and seeing which
ones worked best. This meant that it discovered some novel strategies
that no human player had ever used, so it not only won the game but
also taught human Go players worldwide about powerful new
techniques – this could never have happened with an algorithm that had
been programmed conventionally with step-by-step directions. AlphaGo
was a major milestone for AI because it demonstrated the power of
learning algorithms to make their own discoveries in very complex
domains.
Of course, we have not yet built anything nearly as exible or capable
as the human mind; there are lots of tasks that we humans nd easy but
that even the best AI algorithm remains unable to do. But over the past
few years machine-learning has made tremendous progress. In addition
to playing Go and identifying people and animals, machine-learning
programs have translated languages, improved energy e ciency and
made medical advances, to list just a few of the many astounding recent
examples of AI.
All this, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, AI scientists
hope to achieve ‘arti cial general intelligence’ (AGI) – an AI algorithm
capable of doing anything the human brain can do – which would be
invaluable in helping scientists conduct important research and uncover
new truths. Having AGI will usher in a new age of tremendous scienti c
discovery: just like humans have made amazing progress over the past
few thousand years by applying our own intelligence to various
problems, imagine what we can accomplish if we can combine that
intelligence with the power of AI! We might be able to cure most
diseases, solve di cult problems like climate change and discover
miraculous new materials that could enable everything from improved
space travel to cars that drive themselves. These are ideas that once
seemed fantastical but are now being proved possible every day.
 Did you know the first-ever self-driving and self-sufficient cars
appeared as far back as the 1980s?!

This is a very exciting time for machine learning. It seems as though

almost every day brings a new discovery that inches us closer to arti cial
general intelligence. Achieving AGI will be a huge breakthrough for
mankind – something on the same level as the Moon landing or the
creation of the internet. Over the course of human history we have built
many tools and instruments – ranging from hammers and shovels to
telescopes and microscopes – but none of them have had the same
potential as AI for revolutionizing almost every aspect of human life.
Of course, nobody can say for sure how far we are from AGI. But at
the speed that the eld is progressing, it could happen within our
lifetimes, in which case right now we are standing on the brink of a
world-changing discovery, gazing into a future bursting with
possibilities. There has never been a more thrilling time to be alive!
 It is a fascinating and hugely exciting area to work in. In the years to
come, maybe you – as one of the current generation of young people for
whom computers are a familiar part of everyday life – will be one of the
programmers who develop AGI further and further. You could use your
skills to help our society achieve truly amazing things!
 On the Ethics of AI
CARISSA VÉLIZ
Research Fellow, University of Oxford with thanks to Martina Villarmea
González

Ethics is the study of what is right and wrong, what we should and
shouldn’t do. Every person who is born nds the world in a particular
state. If they lead ethical lives, when they die they will leave the world no
worse than they found it. If they have been especially good, they might
leave the world much better than they found it. Wouldn’t it be nice to be
able to say that, because you lived, the world is better than it would’ve
otherwise been?
Imagine that, in a few years’ time, you get to be a brilliant scientist;
someone with the skills, knowledge and resources to invent wonderful
things. Like many other scientists, you might want to create an arti cial
intelligence – a computer or robot that could be even smarter than you,
or me, or any other human being. The rst question you might want to
ask if you’re worried about ethics is if this scienti c invention is a
worthwhile project.
It’s great if you nd it an interesting and challenging project to spend
your time on, but maybe there are projects that would do more good.
Creating an AI is expensive. It takes time, e ort and resources that might
be put to better use on something else. Maybe you could do more good
by using all your talent to invent a tool that eliminates global warming or
a medicine that cures all diseases. Whether a project is worthwhile partly
depends on how likely it is to be successful and how much it will cost.
Perhaps the tool that eliminates global warming is quite cheap and easy
to invent in comparison to an AI. Maybe it’s not worth putting so much
money and e ort into trying to develop AI if you think that it’s unlikely
to work.
Suppose that, after thinking about it long and hard, you come to the
conclusion that developing an AI is in fact worthwhile. You have good
reason to think that it will not be too expensive; that there is a good-
enough chance you will succeed in what you set out to do; and that, if
you do, AI will have the power to solve global warming, diseases and
many other problems.
You decide, then, to create an AI. Let’s call him Alfred. How would you
go about making sure that Alfred will be a force for good and not for
bad? Good intentions are a good place to start. Let’s say you want Alfred
to be the perfect assistant. Although good intentions are important, we
have all experienced a situation in which good intentions were not
enough to actually do good. Sometimes we hurt people without meaning
to, like when we want to o er a friend a nice cold drink and end up
spilling it on her by accident.
Scientists can have good intentions and still make things that harm
the world. In the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley tells the story of a
scientist, Victor, who is interested in creating life. Victor is so curious
and focused on his main task of making life that he forgets to think
about what kind of life he might be creating. The creature that he nally
brings into existence is so scary that Victor runs away from him. The
monster, as he is called in the novel, nds himself abandoned by his
creator, and he becomes violent and hurts people.
Frankenstein is partly a story about what can happen when scientists
don’t take ethics into account. So, how do you make sure that Alfred does
not become like Frankenstein’s monster? First, you want to design Alfred
with the right values in mind. You want him to be not only super smart,
but also super kind, funny and helpful. To that end, you make your best
e ort to bake in the right ingredients so that he turns out to be a decent
guy. Then you might want to check whether Alfred actually does what
you designed him to do. Before you set Alfred loose in the world, then,
you might want to test him out in a lab. For example, you might put him
in situations in which people need help and see whether Alfred really is
as kind and helpful as you want him to be. If it turns out he is grumpier
than you expected, you might have to go back into the lab and tweak him
until you get it right.

Let’s suppose you nally manage to get Alfred to be kind, funny and
helpful. Now your job is to make sure that he will continue to be a good
guy. To that end, you should ask yourself: what can go wrong? Let your
imagination run wild. For instance, suppose you ask Alfred to do
something extremely urgent and important, something that will save
lives, and he runs out of battery in the middle of the task. That could be a
disaster, and it would make him (unintentionally) unhelpful. So you have
to make sure that can’t happen, maybe by designing a way for Alfred to
generate his own energy every time he moves, so that he does not
depend on batteries.
Something else to consider is that some tools can be used for both
good and evil. Gunpowder, for example, was invented in China as a
medicine. Only later was it used di erently, rst for reworks, and then
for rearms. Sometimes it is useful to think like a villain in order to
avoid harm. Imagine you are the most evil villain. How might you use
Alfred for bad? Perhaps you might hack into his central system and
make him act like Frankenstein’s monster. To avoid such a possibility,
you might want to make sure Alfred has such a secure system that
hacking him is almost impossible. You might also want to design a
remote o switch, so you can retain the power to turn Alfred o in case
something goes wrong.
Throughout the history of science, some scientists have come to regret
what they invented. Mikhail Kalashnikov, for instance, invented an
automatic ri e that would help soldiers defend his country. When that
ri e was later sold across the world and used to hurt innocent people in
countless con icts, he felt responsible for those harms, and he wished he
hadn’t invented his ri e. One of the dangers of science is that you can’t
uninvent what you have invented. In Kalashnikov’s case, it was easy to
foresee how his invention would be used to cause harm. Better to be like
those many other scientists who can be proud of what they invented, like
Edward Jenner, who saved millions of lives by developing the world’s rst
vaccine.
When you grow up, if you take ethics into account from the start, if
you make things that will be used for good, and if you make every e ort
to avoid unintended bad consequences, your inventions could make
people happier, healthier and wiser. And what better way to spend your
time and energy than trying to make the world a better place?
 Kalashnikov’s Dilemma
Mikhail Kalashnikov, a soldier and engineer, invented his rifle just after
the Second World War for the army of the Soviet Union to use. It was a
very simple design, straightforward to operate, and it could be easily
maintained even in the most difficult conditions. People all over the
world used it – or illegal copies of it. A few months before Kalashnikov
died, he wrote a letter to a Russian clergyman and asked: ‘I keep
having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people’s lives,
then can it be that I … a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to
blame for their deaths?’
What do you think?
 What Is a Computer?

Mathematical Laws
It is a marvellous feature of the Universe that everything in it seems to
follow mathematical laws – anything from a planet to a beam of light to a
sound wave – so we can predict what it can do by performing
mathematics.
A computing machine turns this round – we design and assemble a
collection of parts that will behave according to some mathematics of our
choosing. We allow the machine to then behave naturally (to ‘run’) and it
performs the mathematics and gives us an answer. If the theory behind
the machine, the way it is built and our measurements are all su ciently
accurate, we can trust the nal answer to be accurate.
Nowadays, we are used to the idea that a computer can be
programmed to do almost anything if it has enough memory and
processing power, and that the programs themselves are just more data.
But the computer you use today is a long way from the earliest designs …

A Very Early Analogue Computer

Way back in the second century BCE in Greece, a very early computing
machine – the Antikythera mechanism – was built to simulate the cyclic
behaviour of the Sun, Moon and planets using rotating gear wheels. The
designer of the machine drew an analogy between the celestial objects
moving around in the sky and bronze wheels, carefully arranged through
a complex mechanism so that they would accurately re ect the
arrangement in the sky of those celestial bodies at di erent times. Since
it is based upon an analogy with a speci c physical system, it is an
example of an analogue computer.
A slide rule – a ruler with a sliding central strip – is also an example of
an early analogue computer. This handheld device was invented in the
seventeenth century and widely used until the arrival of pocket-sized
electronic calculators in the 1970s. It is based upon the mathematics of
logarithms.
 Antikythera Mechanism
In 1900, sponge divers working off the island of Antikythera in the
Mediterranean Sea found an ancient shipwreck. Then, in 1901, they
brought to the surface a corroded lump of metal, which had once been
housed in a wooden box. Over the years, using the latest technologies,
scientists found it was made of bronze and had over 30 gears (the
biggest had 223 teeth). On other pieces of the machine there were
inscriptions. As well as predicting astronomical positions, the
mechanism could foretell eclipses and the 4-year cycle of games like
the Olympics. The ability to make something as complicated as this
had been lost for centuries.
 But analogue computers have clear limits. The main disadvantage is
that, once created, an analogue computer can only solve one type of
problem with a xed accuracy. A di erent problem may require di erent
mathematical behaviour, and so need a di erent analogy, a di erent
design and a di erent machine.
A human being, on the other hand, approaches calculation di erently.
They might start by writing down a set of equations, then transform
these equations into other equations step by step using the rules of
mathematics – a familiar process that you will know from school, e.g.
solving quadratic equations.
A new form of computational device was needed to tackle problems in
this way.

A Computer Powered by Steam!

Mechanical calculators followed – Blaise Pascal’s of the seventeenth
century was groundbreaking at the time. Then, in 1837, Charles Babbage
designed an Analytical Engine which (if it had been built) would have
been the rst programmable computer – it would have used punched
cards for programs and data, used only mechanical parts, and been
capable of performing like a universal Turing machine – although it
would also have been 100 million times slower than a modern computer!
And it was powered by steam …

There’s more about the Turing machine on page 350.

 Blaise Pascal
(1623–1662)

Blaise Pascal was a French child prodigy. He was a mathematician,

physicist, inventor and theologian. Aged 16, he wrote a paper on
geometry that was so impressive that some thought it had to be his
father’s work.
In 1638, Pascal’s father was sent to the city of Rouen to try to sort
out its taxes which were in a dreadful mess. Seeing how hard his
father was working to bring order to the chaos, Pascal, then 18,
invented a mechanical calculator that could add and subtract. In later
years, he refined the machine several times, but it was never a
commercial success. However, it made him a pioneer in what would
eventually become computer engineering.
Pascal was also responsible for the first bus service in Paris!
 Charles Babbage
(1791–1871)

Charles Babbage was a British mathematician, inventor and computer

pioneer. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society when he was 24, and
he co-founded the Analytical Society, the Astronomical Society and the
Statistical Society. Babbage held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at
Cambridge University, but never gave a lecture. He devised two
machines for making mathematical calculations, the Difference
Engine in 1823 and the Analytical Engine in 1837, which could be
instructed by punched cards. These machines could also store
information in a memory, and had a mill – a calculating unit – and a
printer, features identical to a modern computer. Sadly, Babbage
couldn’t raise the money to fund them or find the engineering
expertise to make the parts. In the late twentieth century the Science
Museum in London used Babbage’s designs to make scaled-down
versions of the machines and they worked.
Ada Lovelace, who worked with Babbage, wrote the first algorithm
(or computer program) and was the first to recognise it could be used
for more than pure calculation.
 From Turing to the First Digital
Computers
A digital computer is a machine designed to follow algorithms
automatically (like a human being might follow an algorithm, only much
faster). In practice, it turns an input whole number (possibly very big)
into an output whole number.

Why Whole Numbers?

It is easy to turn text into numbers – for example, in the ASCII scheme,
‘A’ is represented by 65 and ‘Z’ by 122. For actual numbers, in practice
we always want to deal with fractions to a certain number of decimal
places (or precision), e.g. 99.483. This is the same as 0.99483 times 100
(or 10 x 10, written mathematically as 10²). So a digital computer only
really has to store the whole numbers (integers) 99483 and the number
2, which tells us the power of 10 that is used (10²). A real computer more
normally works with binary digits (bits) which take the values 0 or 1 only,
and any data – numbers, text, images, program instructions – can be
represented (coded) by integers in binary notation, and put together as
one long binary number in the computer’s memory.
In 1949, Cambridge University built and started to use a valve-based,
electronic and Turing-complete computer, EDSAC, for research, and over
the following decades the electronics shrank, rst from tubes to
transistors, then to integrated circuits and microprocessors with very
large numbers of electronic parts etched on to single pieces of silicon.

Computers Today
A computer today is a machine we expect to be able to read and store
digital data and instructions, and then automatically do what we want it
to do at the press of a few keys – or by moving a mouse, or by swiping,
pinching or touching a screen. It is a lot smaller than its predecessors
too. And as the electronics shrank, with more and more tiny parts
crammed closer and closer together, the speed of a computer increased
enormously.
But, unlike the Turing machine way back in the 1930s, a real computer
still only has a nite amount of memory – it might, for example, have 2
GB of RAM (random access memory). It also has to perform basic
operations at a very high speed – maybe 20,000,000,000 steps or
‘ oating point operations’ per second (20 g op/s).
For example, when you double-click on an image le on your laptop,
the viewer application and the image le are both read into memory
from the disk, then the processor runs the application instructions on
the image data to decode it into the correct coloured dots to send to the
screen so you can see what you asked for. And see it quickly too.
A typical computer today also has permanent storage (a hard disk)
which lets you turn the computer o without losing your les. It often
has a connection to other computers and most likely is able to log on to
the internet.
Many homes now have a personal computer – or more than one – and
individual people can even carry one in a pocket on a tablet, or access the
internet on a smartphone. New technology is coming out every year, and
the computers of the future may look very di erent.
One byte is a group of 8 bits, which is enough to store any letter of
the alphabet.
One gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes.
 Alan Turing
(1912–1954)

Alan Turing was a mathematician, computer scientist and codebreaker

who is most famous for his extremely important role in defeating the
Nazis in the Second World War. During his life, he was persecuted for
being a gay man. In 2009, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
issued a public apology for the appalling way Turing was treated while
he was alive. A 2017 law retrospectively pardoned men who were
imprisoned for their sexuality, and it’s affectionately known as the Alan
Turing law.
Alan showed a talent for maths and science very early on, and later
in life he created the Turing machine, an imaginary computer that
could theoretically calculate absolutely anything.
His codebreaking skills came into play when he created a computer
that decoded secret messages enemy soldiers were sending to each
other – people say now that his invention saved over 14 million lives in
the Second World War!
 The Universal Turing
Machine
An Imaginary Device

In 1936, a ‘computer’ was a human being performing calculations. The

Turing machine developed by genius mathematician Alan Turing was
intended to be a simple imaginary device capable of reproducing
everything a human computer might need to do while calculating. The
machine is therefore a mathematical, rather than a real-world, device to
be used to understand what computation is, and what can be achieved by
computation. But it could not exist in reality; for example, it is assumed
to have both in nite ‘memory’ and an unlimited time in which to
operate, neither of which are feasible.

A String of 0s …
The operation of a machine is rst de ned by a nite list of coded
instructions. Imagine a very long tape on which is written a very long
string of 0s (as long as the tape itself). The tape stretches out forever in
both directions (assume it is in nitely long) and represents the
‘memory’ of the computing machine. Sprinkled among these 0s are
nitely many 1s which represent the ʻdata’ given to the machine. Sitting
on this tape is the processing device (the processor) that can read just the
one symbol that is currently directly beneath it and it can leave it as it is,
or replace it with either 0 or 1.
It also has a clock which ticks steadily, and at each tick of the clock, the
processor reads the symbol it can currently see. It then does one of two
things depending on what it just read and its current state. It can:
change the symbol beneath, marking it as 0 or 1, then move one
position either left or right along the tape, maybe change to a
di erent state, and wait for the next tick;
or do the same but then halt (turn o ).
What it actually does depends on the rules (the ‘program’) we give it,
and what it nds on the tape. As an example, let’s assume that the
machine starts out in state 0, with a long string of 0s on the tape, and
that somewhere to the right of it some of the 0s have been replaced by 1s
– these 1s form a pattern which is the binary number we give the
machine as its input.
Then a good rule to start with is: if in state 0 and we read 0, then switch
to state 0, write 0 and move right.
This means that when the machine sees 0 initially (when it is in state
0), it stays in state 0, does not change the 0 on the tape and moves one
step right. If the tape one step right still says 0, the same happens – the
machine stays in state 0, leaves the tape as it found it and marches
another step right.
This happens at each tick of the clock, until the machine nally
reaches the rst of the 1s written on the tape. It now needs a rule which
tells it what to do when it reads a 1 in state 0. The simplest rule would be
to: stay in state 0, write 1 and move another step right and halt. The 1 will
now appear on the left of the machine, and is the result of the
computation.
We could describe this very simple computation as v, where by valid
we mean ‘contains at least one 1’. If there were no 1s written to the right
of the machine when it starts, it would simply carry on marching right
looking for a 1 forever – it would not halt but carry on working
fruitlessly! This can happen on a real computer – a program can
endlessly ‘loop’ or ‘spin’ until the entire computer crashes.
This possibility is unfortunately a fundamental property both of
Turing machines and real computers. However, we can stop this
happening straight away by insisting that ‘valid’ inputs contain at least
one 1, so that this rst rule cannot simply be used forever.

Every Possible Calculation

Given enough time and the ability to write as many 1s on the tape as
required, every mechanical operation with whole numbers that we can
think of could be performed by feeding a Turing machine with the
input number on the right of the machine, starting the clock and
waiting for it to halt, then reading the answer on the left of the
machine. It includes every arithmetic calculation a human with pen
and paper could ever do, and Alan Turing proposed that what his
Turing machine can compute should be taken as a definition of what
can be computed at all. Amazingly, nearly 80 years after his theories,
this is still widely believed to be a good definition because every
known design for a digital computing machine can only compute what
a Turing machine could compute.

Turing also showed mathematically that even a Turing machine

cannot solve every problem! Put another way, some problems in
mathematics are uncomputable – mathematicians can’t be replaced by
computers yet.
What Can’t a Computer Do?

All known computer designs (including quantum computer designs)

can compute no more than a Turing machine could compute if given
enough time and memory. However, Turing was able to prove that some
problems in mathematics are uncomputable, that is to say, they cannot
be solved by a Turing machine – and hence not by any known computer
today! He demonstrated this with a problem concerning Turing
machines themselves, known as the halting problem.

The Halting Problem

When will a Turing machine halt? If it only has one state (state 0), then
only two rules are needed – what to do if the machine reads 0 or 1.
There are varied ways these rules could lead to di erent results,
depending on how the 1 rule is formulated:
The 0 rule says leave 0 and march right, continuing until it nds
the input of a number 1, then halt. The machine halts and outputs
the answer.
But a Turing machine could nd itself in an endless loop: choosing
‘if 1 is read, write 1 and move left’ would make the machine move
back to the previous 0, then move back to the 1 at the next tick of
the clock (following the 0 rule), and then repeat these two moves
forever.
It is also easy to make a Turing machine that will not ever halt.
Changing the 1 rule to ‘if 1 is read, write 0 and move left’ will cause
the machine to move back to the previous 0, then return, but this
time it sees 0 and continues past until the next 1. The machine will
turn all the 1s into 0s and then disappear o to the right forever.
 Machine ‘H’
Alan Turing himself posed the question: is there an algorithm that,
when fed with the program of any Turing machine and some extra
input, will output the answer 0 if that machine with that input doesn’t
ever halt and output an answer?
Suppose for the moment that such an algorithm existed – then there
would be a Turing machine to perform it. Furthermore, there would be
a machine that could test whether any Turing machine would not halt
when the input was its own program. Let’s call this machine H and
input data such that H halts if, and only if, its input is the program of a
Turing machine which doesn’t halt when input with its own program.
So what happens if we feed H with its own program?
If it does halt, then it is an example of a Turing machine which halts
when input with its own program – but then H was designed not to halt
when fed with the program of such a machine!
If it doesn’t halt, then H is a machine which doesn’t halt when input
with its own program, but that means that H fed with the H program
should halt, because it was designed speci cally to detect such
machines.
Either way, this is a contradiction! A nonsensical situation like this
tells a mathematician that what they were assuming is true was wrong.
Constructing the imaginary Turing machine H – which cannot exist –
was therefore very clever. It proved there cannot be a Turing machine
able to compute whether any Turing machine with any input doesn’t
halt. And if this question cannot be settled by a Turing machine,
therefore it is uncomputable on any computer we can currently imagine
building.
Put simply, a computer can’t solve this problem!

Infinite Numbers
The number of possible programs and Turing machines is in nite, but
because every computer program can be turned into one big binary
number a mathematician would describe the set of all programs or
machines as countably in nite, because we can list them in order of
size.
But there are much bigger in nities, for example the in nity of
decimals with in nite decimal places – these are called the ‘real
numbers’. There are real numbers whose digits cannot be generated by
a computer.
For example, the real number pi (which you use in working out the
circumference of a circle, for instance, and you probably know stands for
3.142) can be written out to any number of decimal places by a
computer. The rst few are 3.1415926535 and a computer has done this
to trillions of decimal places. Most real numbers, though, cannot be
generated like this: they are fundamentally uncomputable – a computer
can’t do it!

The Future?
Some theorists speculate that new types of computer, relying on as yet
unknown physics, will be discovered in the future that can compute
more than a Turing machine can compute, and that the human brain
(the original ‘computer’) may even turn out to be one of these.
There is no general agreement on whether the human brain could be
described by a su ciently complicated Turing machine.
Computers have become integral to almost all aspects of our daily lives.
Today’s computers are in our homes and our cars, and most of us carry
one with us everywhere we go in our mobile devices. This technological
revolution was made possible by our understanding and harnessing the
properties of the world around us. At the heart of that understanding is
mathematics.

A Challenge for Mathematicians

In 1900, a German mathematician – David Hilbert – posed a list of 23
problems for mathematicians to solve. When British mathematician
Alan Turing worked on one of the problems, which asked
mathematicians to nd out if we could always discover if a mathematical
proposition was true in a nite amount of time, he tackled it by
proposing to build a hypothetical machine that would derive theorems
in a mechanical way, the Turing machine. It was a blueprint for today’s
classical computers.

Classical Versus Quantum

Scientists like Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and others described the world
around us to a high degree of accuracy, coming up with the theories of
classical mechanics. But when scientists began working at the scale of
atoms and molecules, classical approaches broke down and they needed
a new set of theories and rules: quantum mechanics.
These rules are very di erent from those of classical mechanics. For
instance, the superposition principle states that if A is a solution of an
equation of quantum mechanics and B is also a solution, then A+B is
also a solution. What does that mean? In the case of an electron, it
means that if we have one solution with an electron here, and another
solution with an electron there, we can have a solution with a single
electron being here and there at the same time. Pushing this possibility
to its limits led the physicist Schrödinger to show that at the quantum
level we could see a cat alive and dead at the same time – something we
certainly don’t see at our scale!

Read about Schrödinger on page 104.

Using Quantum Principles with

Computers
 1. First we transform a bit of information into a quantum bit, or qubit
for short – and this can be encoded in the superposition of the state
0 and 1 at the same time!
2. If we have two qubits, they can therefore be in the superposition of
four states: 00, 01, 10 and 11. Now imagine three qubits: 000, 001
… 111: a total of eight states.
3. You can see that the number of states grows exponentially with the
number of qubits. Just by changing the classical or (0 or 1) to a
quantum and (0 and 1), we can have an exponential increase in our
computing power!
4. This means that if we change the rules with which we compute, we
can develop new algorithms and drastically change the type of
problems we can solve too, though quantum computers would not
necessarily have an advantage on all problems.
5. For some problems, quantum computers therefore are formidable
devices. An example of a quantum algorithm is factoring large
numbers which are the product of two primes – a hard problem for
classical computers and the basis of most of today’s cybersecurity. A
quantum computer would be able to solve factoring problems with
ease and break encryptions. Quantum algorithms will also be
applicable in other complex disciplines such as materials science
(where we want to create new quantum materials and understand
their performance), chemistry (to predict the behaviour of large
atoms and molecules and apply it to drug design, for example),
health care (by constructing new types of sensors) and much more
that we have not yet imagined. These principles have allowed us to
develop a new language, which is the proper one for talking and
listening to quantum particles such as atoms and molecules.
Quantum mechanics has provided a key to understanding the very
building blocks of our world. Quantum information science gives us an
incredible opportunity to harness the power of quantum mechanics for
the development of mind-boggling technologies such as the quantum
computer, quantum cryptography, quantum sensors and more that have
not even been imagined today.
 3D Printing

Dr TIM PRESTIDGE
Divisional CEO, Halma PLC
What is 3D printing, how is it di erent to 2D printing, and why is it so
exciting?

What does ‘3D’ mean?

The ‘d’ stands for ‘dimensional’, so something that is 3D, three-
dimensional, is something that has the following dimensions:
a length (one)
a width (two)
a height (three)
So, while a picture on a piece of paper is a two-dimensional image ( at
on the paper), physical objects that you interact with every day (like your
bike, your dinner and your nose) are all ‘three-dimensional’.

Slicing a Sausage!
2D printing (two-dimensional) is what we usually think of when we say
‘printing’ – for example, using a printer connected to a computer at
home or in your school or library.

A 2D printer usually:
uses special inks to make the 2D images on paper.
takes an electronic le that describes a whole 2D image – like a
photograph from a digital camera or a document from a word
processor – and then electronically ‘slices’ it up into lots of very thin
strips. This process is sometimes called salami-slicing because it’s a
bit like a chef chopping a salami sausage into slices!
takes each electronic slice in turn and carefully squirts coloured inks
on to a matching section of paper to produce a precise image of that
slice.
then moves down and does the same for the next slice, and then the
next, until nally the entire image has been built up on the paper
one slice at a time.
Artists and lmmakers can make 2D objects appear 3D by using
tricks: like perspective in pictures and 3D special e ects in movies.
But these are optical illusions and the images themselves are 2D as
they only have a width (one) and a height (two).
 Magic Machines
When my son was younger, he would watch with fascination as our
printer whirred away producing photographs and letters. He’d also
watch carefully if we bought something (like a toy) on the internet – he
would wait expectantly by the printer for whatever we’d just bought to
plop out of it! I guess that would make complete sense to a 4-year-old.
The funny thing is, for some types of toys, this is now close to reality.

Making a Real 3D Object

In 3D printing, what is made is not just a 2D image but a real 3D object.
The machines that do this are called 3D printers or additive
manufacturing machines.
It begins, like 2D printing, with an electronic le. However, this is
now a special type of electronic le called a CAD model (CAD
stands for computer-aided design) which describes every single
detail about the object to be 3D-printed. If you look at the CAD
model of an object on a computer screen, you can see an image of
what the object looks like from the outside, but you can also ‘ y
through’ to see what the object looks like from any point inside it.
The 3D printer salami-slices the CAD model into electronic slices,
one on top of another, where each slice might be about 20 microns
thick.
Although all of the slices are 3D because they have thickness (or
length) as well as width and height, the 3D printer treats each slice as
a 2D cross-section showing precisely what the object would look like
if it were carefully cut through.
The 3D printer prints out each slice – starting with the lowest – just
like a printer would a 2D image. But instead of squirting ink on to
paper, it produces all the details in each slice as a 20-microns-thick
layer of ‘stu ’ (which can be liquid plastic, wax or metals, like silver,
titanium or steel).
The material for one slice dries and hardens, then the 3D printer
indexes (moves up) and produces the next slice as another 20-
microns-thick layer on top of the previous one.
This process is repeated over and over until all the slices of the CAD
model have been printed one on top of another to produce a real 3D
object!
20 microns – or 1/50th of a millimetre – is approximately 25%
of the thickness of one of the hairs on your head! A CAD model
of an object which is 10 cm high would therefore be salami-
sliced into about 5,000 electronic slices!

Facts about 3D Printers

The most common material used is plastic, as it can be easily
squirted out in very small amounts as a liquid and will quickly
harden into a solid. It is also ideal for making prototypes (models of
new things like buildings or cars). As modern machines can use
several di erent kinds of plastic at the same time and can print in
colour, prototypes can be very realistic. This is still the biggest
application for 3D printers.
There are two common types of 3D printers used today.
Extrusion Machines: the material is forced through a nozzle,
rather like using a piping bag to ice a cake. These machines are
especially good when using more than one type of colour or
material, since more nozzles can easily be added.
Bed Machines: these are most commonly used with powdered
metals. Enough powder is poured out to ll one slice completely,
then a power laser fuses (melts and joins) the powdered metal into a
solid shape at precisely the right places in the slice. Once the model
is complete, the excess powdered metal is brushed away.
Over the next few years scientists expect that machines using plastic
could become more common in peoples’ homes, allowing you to
download patterns and 3D-print things like made-to-measure bike
helmets or personalized tools.
3D printers in factories use materials like metals and ceramics, for
example to print out parts for jet aeroplanes that are lighter and
stronger, thereby making the aeroplanes safer and more fuel-
e cient.
 Medical devices like implants for new hips and teeth, and cranial
plates (used to repair holes in skulls) can also be 3D-printed, because
this process allows them to be made speci cally for the person they
will be tted into.

Robots of the Future?

Today’s 3D printers are still quite slow and can only make things out of a
few di erent materials at the same time – it would not yet be possible to
print a complete robot since you would need complicated interlocking
parts made of many materials: metal parts, gears and motors, magnets,
wires, plastics, oil, grease, silicon, gold – even rare things like yttrium
and tungsten!
But 3D printers could easily make parts for robots within a fully
automated factory. The parts could then be unloaded from the 3D
printers by unloading robots, polished by polishing robots, and then
assembled by assembly robots …
Robots using 3D printers (with other technology too) to make robots?
Is this something you will see in the future?
 Driverless Cars

Driverless cars – sounds like science ction!

Driverless cars already exist! Also known as robotic or self-driving
cars, these are vehicles that can perform the main functions of a normal
car without a human being in charge. They can sense the environment
around them, using radar, computer systems and GPS, so they can
navigate as well as get round obstacles or deal with changing conditions
on the roads.
For instance, the Google self-driving car – powered by software called
Google Chau eur – has been running for a number of years already and
their latest car has no steering wheel or pedals!
Driverless cars could be really useful. They do long journeys without
getting tired, and they could help disabled or blind people who can’t
drive ordinary cars to get around. Cars driven by robots, if they function
properly, might be safer than cars driven by humans: robots don’t look
out of the window or ddle around changing the radio station, answer a
mobile phone or have arguments with passengers! But all machines can
malfunction – and getting rid of human error doesn’t mean there won’t
be accidents. If a driverless car malfunctions while in motion, it’s
possible that the passengers in the car wouldn’t be able to control the
vehicle. And what would happen if we all forgot how to drive? Would
that be a good idea? What would happen to all the bus, coach and taxi
drivers? What jobs would they do if robots took over the road?
 Some countries in Europe are already drawing up plans to create
transport networks for driverless cars, and thinking how laws might
need to be changed to cover their use. Keep your eyes peeled – you
might see a driverless car near you soon.
 Problems Facing Our
Planet

Asteroid Attack!
An asteroid is a rocky fragment left over from the formation of the Solar
System about 4.6 billion years ago. Scientists estimate there are
probably millions of asteroids in our Solar System.
Asteroids typically range in size from as little as a metre, or 2 feet, to
hundreds of miles, or kilometres, across.
Once in a while, an asteroid will get nudged out of its orbit – for
example by the gravity of nearby planets – possibly sending it on a
collision course with the Earth.
Around once a year, a rock the size of a family car crashes into the
Earth’s atmosphere but burns up before it reaches the surface.
Once every few thousand years, a chunk of rock about the size of a
playing eld hits the Earth, and every few million years, Earth su ers an
impact from a space object – an asteroid or a comet – large enough to
threaten civilization.
 If an asteroid or a comet – a rocky ice ball that slingshots round the
Sun – were to hit the surface of the Earth, it is possible that it could
crash through the surface, releasing a ood of volcanic eruptions.
Nothing would survive the impact.
An asteroid smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago. This could
be what wiped out the dinosaurs – the impact sending up a cloud of ne
dust, blocking out the sunlight and dooming the dinosaurs and many
other species to extinction.

A meteoroid is a chunk of rock that flies through our Solar

System; a meteorite is what you call that piece of rock if it
lands on the Earth.
 Gamma Ray Burst … Game Over!
We also face the exotic threat of extinction by gamma rays from space.
When very massive stars reach the ends of their lives and explode,
they not only send hot dust and gas across the cosmos in an expanding
cloud. They also shoot out deadly beams of gamma rays, like lighthouse
beams. If the Earth were directly in the path of such a beam, and if the
GRB (gamma ray burst) happened close enough to us, the beam could
rip our atmosphere apart, causing clouds of brown nitrogen to ll the
skies.
Such explosions are rare. One would need to happen within a few
thousand light years of our planet to do real damage, and the beam
would need to hit us very precisely. Thus, astronomers who have studied
the problem in detail are not that worried!

Self-Destruct!
We’ve already done a lot of damage to our planet, without any help from
asteroids or gamma rays.
The Earth is su ering from overpopulation.
All those extra people mean we will need to grow more food, putting a
greater strain on the Earth’s natural resources and sending even more
gases into the Earth’s atmosphere. There’s been a lot of argument about
climate change. But scientists are clear that the planet is getting warmer
and that human activity is the reason for this change. They expect this
change to continue, meaning that the world will get hotter and some
areas will experience heavy rainfall while others su er from drought.
Sea levels are expected to rise, which could make life very di cult for
people who live on coastlines.
There are more and more humans on Earth but fewer and fewer other
species. Extinction of other animals is a growing problem, and we are
seeing whole groups of species disappear from the face of the Earth. It
seems a real pity that we are destroying our beautiful and unique planet
just as we are learning how it really works.
Globally, nearly a quarter of all mammal species and a third of
amphibians are threatened with extinction.

The Earth is home to over 7 billion people.

 The Future of Food
Dr MARCO SPRINGMANN
Senior Researcher in Population Health, Oxford Martin School

Many predictions have been made about the future of food. They range
from ‘edible air’ to ‘meals in a pill’. Highly engineered novelty food
products have been the staple of food futurists, and indeed of early space
missions. Had you been on board a spaceship in the 1960s, you would
have had toothpaste-type tubes, with lique ed or puréed food for
breakfast, some bite-sized food cubes for lunch, and maybe some freeze-
dried food powders for supper. Not the most appetizing prospect!
 But the nutritionists’ early enthusiasm for vitamin pills and ‘meals in
a pill’ has now given way to a renewed focus on wholefoods. Take the
humble apple, for example: apples, like other fruits and vegetables,
contain a complex mixture of thousands of compounds that protect cells
from damage. When eaten in the form of the whole fruit, apples can
help prevent us from developing chronic diseases such as cancer and
heart disease.
Scientists have tried to extract what they thought of as the active
ingredients – for example, vitamin C from fruit such as apples, vitamin
E from green leafy vegetables such as spinach, and beta-carotene from
orange vegetables such as carrots. However, it has been found that
eating those extracts in pill form does not have any preventive health
e ects in most cases, and it could even sometimes lead to an increase in
chronic disease. You do have to eat the whole food to get all the health
bene ts.
What you would now nd in the canteen of a spaceship, or on board a
space station, would resemble more what you can nd in one down on
Earth. How about some mashed potatoes, nuts, broccoli and even an
apple a day?
Let’s get back to thinking a bit more about the future of food. For that
purpose, it might be instructive to consider what in uences what we eat,
and how what we eat in uences our health and our planet (and any
future planets we might nd).
I’ll start with what might seem like a simple question: why do you eat
what you eat?
Maybe you eat a speci c meal because you like its taste, or you are
hungry. Maybe you eat it because it is there, and somebody has prepared
it for you. Why do you think that person chose to cook that meal and not
something else? Why is that speci c meal there to begin with?
Scientists consider a similar set of questions when trying to predict
how and what the world might eat in the future. They start with what
can and has been produced in the past, and where. In the UK, that
would currently include milk, meat, wheat and root vegetables such as
potatoes and carrots; and of course also some fruit, like apples and
strawberries. Then they look at how many people are around to eat the
food produced, how much money those people have to spend on their
food, what other foods might be available somewhere else, and how easy
it would be to exchange some foods that are closer for foods that are
further away.
What the scientists observed was: as people become richer, they
consume more in general, and in particular more meat, dairy, sugars
and oils, and fewer grains and beans. This observation raises two
problems that we could be faced with in a future with more people and
with higher incomes worldwide.
The rst problem concerns our environment, and the second our
health.
Many thinkers in the past 200 years have been worried that we might
not be able to produce enough food on our Earth to feed a growing
population. And there’s another worry: whether we can produce our food
in a way that does not harm our environment.
One of the greatest threats to our survival on Planet Earth could be
climate change. And food has no small role to play here. Currently
almost a third of all climate-change-causing greenhouse gases are
emitted during food production. And that proportion is expected to grow
in the future, if humans continue to consume meat.
Beef is by far the greatest culprit. Cows produce greenhouse gases in
their digestion system by fermenting feed in their rumen, the rst
compartment of their stomachs. Yes, I’m talking about burping and
farting! In addition, growing feed for cows and other livestock requires
fertilizers, which also emit greenhouse gases. As a result, beef produces
about 250 times more greenhouse gases per gram of protein than crops
such as lentils and beans, and more than 20 times more greenhouse
gases per serving than vegetables. Other animal-based foods – such as
eggs, dairy, pork, poultry and some seafood – emit signi cantly less
greenhouse gas than beef, while plant-based foods emit the least.
It is no surprise then that scientists, in order to save our planet, have
called for people to move away from diets high in animal products
towards more plant-based diets. And the food industry is eager to jump
on board with soy-based meat replacements, algae extracts and meats
whose production might emit less greenhouse gas – such as lab-grown
meat or edible insects. Perhaps you will be one of our future scientists
working in this area, helping to produce foods to feed the world without
hurting our planet.
Thinking now of health: a move towards plant-based diets could also
avoid some of the dangers that come with the otherwise expected
increase in meat, dairy, sugars and oils. Processed meats – these include
burgers, sausages and chicken nuggets, but also the battered fried sh
portion of a plate of sh and chips – have recently been declared
carcinogenic. This means that they can cause anyone eating a lot of
these foods over a number of years to be more likely to develop cancer in
the future. And even unprocessed forms of pork and beef have been
associated with greater risks of cancer and other chronic diseases.
At the same time, energy-dense foods that are high in sugars and oils
– think of ultra-processed foods such as biscuits, crisps, chips, sugary
drinks and the like – are contributing to more people becoming
overweight and obese, which is also associated with a greater risk of
cancer and other chronic diseases. Sometimes those foods are described
as ‘empty calories’ – calories without any nutritional value. They do not
make us feel full, and we often snack on them between meals. Others
call such foods ‘junk foods’. I bet you can guess why.
Where does all this leave us? It seems clear that to avoid dangerous
levels of climate change and unhealthy levels of diet-related diseases, the
food of the future needs to deviate from the past trends of eating more
and more meat, dairy, sugars and oils. A healthy and environmentally
friendly diet for the future would be low in unhealthy and emissions-
intensive foods – such as most animal products and ultra-processed
foods that are high in sugars and oils – but high in health-promoting
and low-intensity foods, such as whole grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables
and legumes.
On your next trip to Mars, how about, instead of a beef burger with
fries, you try a lentil-and-bean burger in a wholewheat bun with some
extra slices of lettuce and tomato? Throw in a toothpaste-like tube of
algae if you feel fancy. And enjoy your favourite fruit as dessert. Bon
appétit!
Politics is about power. It’s true that a few people want power because
they are bossy and like the sound of their own voices, or they think other
people will be impressed by them. But you nd such people in other
places too. The important thing is that most people who work in politics
want to use their power to do good things, to help people and to make
their neighbourhood, their country and the world a better place. Using
the power of a whole country to put your ideas into practice is one of the
best ways of making big changes happen – like tackling climate change
or introducing exciting new technology. However, to be successful, you
can’t just be right; you also need to convince other people to agree with
you.
 Listening to Politicians
With the power given to them by voters, politicians can do things that
other people and organizations can’t. They can pass laws that everybody
has to abide by, and they can make everybody pay taxes, and spend that
money on their ideas. That means considering many di erent views and
judging which ideas are likely to work – which is why debating is such
an important part of politics. Robust arguments are a sign of a healthy
democracy – as long as people are debating what is best for the country,
not just calling each other rude names!
People worry that politicians don’t say what they mean. Politicians nd
it very hard to admit to making mistakes or saying that there are things
they don’t know, even though they are human like the rest of us. To
them, admitting they are not perfect feels very di cult because they
have so many political opponents and journalists watching their every
move, waiting for them to slip up.
To avoid this problem, some politicians may fall into the trap of saying
everything is perfect; they may also avoid answering simple questions or
taking responsibility for their decisions. Some try to divert attention
from their own mistakes by shouting loudly about their opponents, and
some try to disguise their own opinions as facts that can’t be challenged.
Listening to the arguments can teach you a lot, and the politicians who
are the most open and honest about their opinions, and who want to do
the right thing, usually end up looking better than those trying to dodge
questions.

Trying Out Your Own Opinions

A good start is to try reading or listening to a politician’s views on an
issue you are interested in – maybe something mentioned in this book,
or something else: perhaps protecting endangered tigers or stopping
pollution on beaches. You could follow news stories on TV or via
downloads, read a number of di erent newspapers or follow the debates
on social media.
 Think about which parts you agree with and which you don’t. Find
other people who are talking about the same issue, and see what you
think. Do you agree, or do you have a di erent opinion? It can be just as
much fun nding people you really disagree with. Try to spot when you
think a politician is not giving a straight answer, or is making their
answer deliberately complicated, or when they claim something as an
absolute fact when it is actually just their opinion.
In maths, there’s only one right answer to a sum. In physics, you know
that if you throw an apple into the air it will de nitely fall back to the
Earth. Politics, however, is about making your own judgements, working
out what you think and then making the case for others to agree with
you. Remember too that you can also change your mind as you learn
more about an issue.

How You Can Change the World

Having opinions is good, but it doesn’t change anything by itself. If you
want something important to change, you have to nd who has the
power to make the right decisions. You might want to ban plastic bags –
well, who is responsible for making new laws? Or you might want a new
sports ground in your neighbourhood – who is responsible for paying
for that?
Remember that politicians don’t have to listen to just you – they have
lots of di erent people coming to them with problems and ideas. They
only have a limited amount of time and money, and it can be tricky to
make the right decision.
 Make Your Voice Heard!
Just as politicians need support to get elected, you need to show that
your idea works and will be popular. You might join an organization
that is already working on the issues you are passionate about. You
might want to start a petition – a list signed by all the people who
agree with your idea, and presented to a politician or other leader who
could do something about the subject of your petition. You could
write to your local newspaper. The most important thing is to find
people and organizations who believe in the same things you believe
in and have the same goal to get something done.

In the past, politics has been controlled by small groups of people who
decided what they thought was best for everyone. Looking ahead, I
believe that the brightest future for politics and for the strength of our
democracies is for us to embrace an idea called pluralism. This means
involving many di erent people in making political decisions, listening
to various points of view, and encouraging everybody to take an active
interest in the decisions made about the place – town, country, planet –
where they live.
The rst step in achieving pluralism is for as many people as possible
to get involved. That includes you. You might rst become an active
follower of politics, working out what you believe and what you think
needs to change. When you’re old enough, you’ll have the important
responsibility of voting at elections. You might even become a supporter
or campaigner for the issues you are passionate about – and perhaps one
day you’ll be elected as a politician and make the big decisions yourself.
However you get involved, you have the same right to an opinion as
everybody else, and an equal right for your voice to be heard.
 Cities of the Future
BETH WEST
Head of Development for London, Landsec Real Estate

When you ask people to imagine what the city of the future will look
like, most have an idea of what they expect. My idea started with a
cartoon that was rst shown in 1962 called The Jetsons. Living in 2062,
the Jetson family had a at in a very tall apartment building, every-one
rode around in ying cars, Mr Jetson worked for only 2 hours per week,
and the dog was walked on a treadmill rather than outside. Several
concepts shown in The Jetsons have already come true: they talked to
each other through their televisions
(videoconferencing/Skype/FaceTime) and read their newspapers on
their television screens as well (iPads/Kindles).
Whatever you think future cities will be like when we reach 2062 or
2081 or beyond, they will keep evolving and there are many challenges
that will need to be addressed in order to make cities liveable places in
the future.
The modern city – places in which a large proportion of the world’s
population now make their homes – has been around for less than 200
years. Although cities have existed for over 5,000 years, only 2% of the
global population lived in them as recently as 1800. As the Industrial
Revolution changed how we made and grew things, more and more
people moved into our cities. Two hundred years later, at the beginning
of the twenty- rst century, over 50% of the global population was living
in cities. In the most developed countries in the world, about 75% of
people live in cities. By 2030, it is estimated that 67% of the global
population and about 85% of people in the most developed countries
will be living in cities!

So, if the vast majority of us are going to be living in the cities of the
future, what do we need to do to make them truly liveable places for the
bene t of all of their residents?
As with many areas of the future, technology will have a big role to
play, and many of the di erent elements of life will need to work
together to create somewhere that we want to call home.
In the past, adding more and more people to our cities has resulted in
extensive pollution, tra c jams, housing shortages and huge demands
on services. City planners of the future will need to consider how to
manage these issues if they want to make cities great places, rather than
places that we only tolerate because that’s where our jobs are.
 Where will we live, work and go to school in these cities of the future?
What will those experiences be like? Will we have robot butlers? Will we
have to work at all, or will everything be done by robots?
As we have seen since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
many jobs that previously were undertaken by people have been
mechanized. There is no reason to think that this trend will change in
the future. But there will continue to be a need for people to design the
machines and the robots that we will use to do many of these tasks. And
lots of things can’t be done by machines: creative jobs such as writing
books and creating art; designing buildings or computer games. These
areas will continue to need people and their ideas. Maybe we’ll work
fewer days per week in the future, but people could then spend more
time with their families, helping their communities or having fun.
No matter what jobs we may be doing, we’ll still need a place to do
this work. Although technology continues to develop so that a lot of our
work can be done from anywhere with an internet connection, many
people still choose to go to o ces or other spaces where they can
collaborate with others. So we’re likely to continue to want some kind of
building in which to talk to each other and share ideas. As more and
more high-rise o ce buildings are being developed around the world, it
is unlikely that our skylines will change completely in future, but these
o ces are likely to be designed to be attractive places to work. There is
increasing demand for outdoor spaces in o ce towers, so although the
skyline may not change, it is likely to look much greener than it
currently does, with terraces, roof gardens and green walls.
Di erent cities have already shown di erent approaches to where we
live – some cities have lots of houses, while others have lots of
apartment buildings. As cities become more densely populated, it is
likely that housing will need to be intensi ed, meaning that more people
will need to live in the same small area. City planners will need to
consider how to develop additional housing – and make it a ordable for
all types of people to live there – to meet the needs of growing
populations.
 Whatever the outsides of our houses look like, however, technological
changes are likely to make the insides di erent from today. Many of the
devices that currently exist will continue to develop to make our lives
easier: smart devices should be able to tell us how much energy we use
so that we can use less; other technology can turn on our music or let
the cat out. And 2017’s Alexa will likely develop into a full-scale robot
butler to take care of many more of our household chores.
Schools will also take advantage of changes in technology. Will we
need to go into a school building? For the same reason that people
prefer to go to o ces, children of the future will probably still attend
school and teachers will still be humans rather than robots. But
technology will develop in ways that allow for virtual and augmented
reality that allows children to ‘go’ to the rainforest or experience the
French Revolution or the Roman Empire more than we can today.
So if we know what we’re doing in the future with regard to work and
school and home, what else needs to be considered so that our cities can
be amazing places to live? The big issues a ecting cities today are likely
to continue to be the big issues of the future: transport and our
environment. If our cities are getting bigger and more populated, it will
be harder for people to move around easily in cars. Public transport will
be key to minimizing the number of people stuck in tra c. Planners
will need to consider if more underground trains make sense, or if
alternative transport solutions are preferable. Driverless vehicles are
likely to be more and more prominent, but will these cars create more
tra c or less? We will need to come up with solutions to manage
driverless vehicles more e ectively, rather than this simply resulting in
more cars on the road.
Will we need to care about tra c and public transport at all if there
are ying cars? Probably even more so. Just because cars can y, it
doesn’t mean that tra c and pollution will go away. Combine ying cars
with delivery drones and aeroplanes and helicopters, and there could be
some very busy and polluted skies!

Missed the discussion about driverless cars? Turn to page 368.

Transport uses a lot of energy, which has an impact on the

environment. Putting millions of people in a single city location is going
to have an impact on the environment as they cook, turn on lights, heat
and/or cool their homes, charge their phones, use computers and TVs,
and travel around. All these things require energy, and energy
consumption has historically had a negative e ect on the environment.

Many city governments are now looking at how they can lessen their
impact on the environment, especially by reducing pollution that could
be harming their residents. E ort will need to go into reducing energy
consumption and nding environmentally friendly energy solutions to
deliver our needs. More and more electricity is generated through
renewable and low-carbon means, but really innovative solutions may be
the best ways to create the energy we need for the future: hydrogen cars
could replace existing petrol and diesel cars (though production of
hydrogen comes with its own issues), and their only exhaust would be
water vapour rather than carbon dioxide. Technology could be developed
that turns human power, generated by walking or cycling, into
electricity. Or that turns our homes, o ces and schools into energy
generators in some way, allowing us each to self-generate our own
requirements. Perhaps you, in the future, will be one of those who will
design technology like this, or will help in planning and building our
cities of the future. A strong vision of what we want these cities to be
like will be required so that we can capture all the bene ts that
technology could give us in our lives. Do you have this vision? I began
by imagining my city of the future based on a TV cartoon series. What
sort of city can you imagine?
Maybe not ying cars, but hopefully lots of robot butlers!
 The Internet: Privacy,
Identity and Information
DAVE KING
Chief Executive O cer, Digitalis

Have you ever thought about who can see what you do on the internet or
how long the messages you write will last for?
The internet is made up of many, many di erent computers all
interconnected across the world. We tend to access the internet through
our mobile phones and other devices but some computers are designed
speci cally to store the information we all put on the internet. These
computers, called servers, host the websites we access. Some of them are
in homes and o ces, but most are in purpose-built centres run by
internet service providers (for short, ISPs). Big companies like Google,
Facebook and Amazon have their own data centres – and networks of
machines which each hold huge amounts of data. Social media sites
allow people to talk to each other using this vast computer network,
often over great distances – and much of the content posted to social
media platforms is kept, potentially forever! Other messaging
applications are deliberately designed to allow for information to be
around for only a short while, but of course if you receive a message
from somebody electronically you can always nd a way to copy it – so
things can always nd their way on to the internet.
Search engines such as Google use software scripts called robots or
‘spiders’ to trawl every page of the internet (or certainly as many as they
can nd) by bouncing continuously from links on one page to another.
Their aim is to catalogue everything that is on the web so that we can
easily and quickly nd what we’re looking for.
 Search engines and other such sites are therefore constantly copying
and listing much of the content we post or read online. In this way
something we publish in one place might quickly appear or be recorded
somewhere else. As a result, an item published on one site and then
removed might already exist on another website – to be found by another
internet user at some point in the future.
This is why we should all think really carefully about what to put on
the internet about ourselves, because sometimes there is e ectively no
‘delete’ button.

Watch Out! Information

Alert
Telling your friends on social media that you’re away on a
fantastic holiday with your parents may seem like a really cool
thing to do, but the last thing anyone wants is to alert criminals
to the fact that their house is empty.

There are other reasons why we might not want people nding
information we posted online a long time ago. In the past, as part of job
interviews, potential employers would ask previous employers for
information about candidates. Nowadays, when you apply for a job, it is
common for employers to look you up on social media to nd out what
they can about you, your friends and what you spend your time doing.
This means that what your friends post online – what appears on your
timeline, for example – can also have a real impact on what others think
about you!
The internet as a whole, and social media especially, has
revolutionized our ability to communicate, to have fun and to engage
with others. Some people say social media makes us more antisocial in
the real world and some use it so much that maybe it does. Like most
things, though, if it doesn’t take over our lives and we understand the
risks of using it, there are many bene ts to be had. There are no hard
and fast rules, of course, but I created the rules below as a set of things
to think about when it comes to sharing your life online.
1. Think Before You Post
Before you post something online, don’t just think of the person who
you intend to see it. Think about whether you’re happy for other
people – those who know you, and many who don’t – to see its
content, now or in the future. If in any doubt, don’t post!

2. Think Before You Click

There are lots of reasons why people send ‘spam’ emails to huge lists
of people who didn’t want or request them. Sometimes they’re simply
designed to sell products, but other times they contain links designed
to take you to a website you shouldn’t be visiting. The worst type of
spam email attempts to install software on your machine in order to
steal data or take control of it. There’s a simple rule here. If you’re not
absolutely sure who an email is from, or if it looks in any way fishy,
don’t click on any links.
3. Think Before You Share
Many people post pictures to social media without thinking about it,
but often the people in those photographs may not be so excited
about them being publicly available. Before posting a snap of your
brother, sister, parents or friends, why not ask for their permission?
After all, it’s data about them you’re putting out for the world to see.
Ask for the same respect from those who take photos – or videos – of
you, and never be shy about asking someone not to post. For
instance, if you have a party at your house, you might ask all your
friends to agree in advance not to post any photos. It could be you
who appears on the internet just as you drop a slice of messy pizza all
down your chin!

4. Only Befriend Friends

People can pretend to be somebody else over the internet –
sometimes by using false names, photographs and ages. These
people often rely on the fact that we all want to be popular – and
many people will click ‘accept’ just to add another friend to their
count. If you’ve set up your privacy settings properly, friends can
probably see a lot more than those who aren’t linked to you, so if you
don’t know who the person is, don’t let them into your circle of trust.

5. Be Aware of Privacy Settings

Social media sites make money by selling advertisement space to
companies and brands who want to sell their products. They can
make these adverts really powerful and effective by presenting them to
people they know are interested in a particular subject. Because of
how much we tell them about ourselves they can promise their
advertisers that the football-computer-game advert will only be shown
to people who talk about football and about games consoles. The
downside (for us) is that it’s in the interests of these companies for us
to put lots of information about ourselves online. All these sites have
privacy settings, but they tend to change quite frequently, and most
people don’t read the details before accepting. The best bet is either
to stay on top of this or to assume that anything you post might later
be visible to others.

6. Be Aware of Location Settings

Watch out too for location settings, which are certainly helpful when
we look on a search engine for a local cinema or skate park. They’re
less ideal if, when we post thoughts or photos to social media, we
don’t want other people to know where we are. Did you know that the
settings on many apps now default to sharing your location with the
app provider? You should always work out whether this will actually
make the app more useful to you (if you are using it for directions, for
instance, the answer would be yes), whether you trust those who
provide the app you are using, and whether that data could fall into
the wrong hands. If in doubt, switch it off.

7. Passwords and Security

Software scripts are used by criminals to try many thousands of word
combinations in an attempt to ‘guess’ passwords and get access to
people’s data. This is why it’s so important to use complex passwords
(which use more than simple word forms). Thankfully, in years to
come, biometric data (like your fingerprint or eyeball scan) will
increasingly replace passwords, but for now it’s important to come up
with a series of passwords which are impossible to guess and
complicated for a computer to work out. Never use ‘password’,
‘123456’ or similarly easy-to-guess patterns. And it’s a good idea to
avoid something obvious like the name of your pet or your favourite
football team, since this information is easy to find out.
 Finally, I like to think of the internet as being just like the real world.
There are loads of great things going on out there, and so many friendly
people. In certain places in the real world, though, we have to learn to be
careful where we walk, whom we speak to and what we do. All this
works when we’re taking a stroll online too.
 Climate Change
NITYA KAPADIA

Millions of years ago, before humans existed on Earth, there were plants
and animals everywhere. These organisms went through the cycle of life
and death, and when they died they fell to the ground. As more species
fell and rotted away, they were covered by sediment and mud, tiny
fragments of eroded minerals carried by wind and water. As the covering
layers grew, the temperature increased so it was much hotter and there
was a lot more pressure. The rising temperature and pressure eventually
transformed these dead organisms into fossil fuels. They remained in
the ground for an incredibly long time – millions of years.

Did you know that we have a leap year every 4 years? In a

million years there are 997,268 leap years!

Fossil Fuels
There are three fossil fuels: oil, coal and natural gas. In our society today,
they have an enormous value because they are our primary sources of
energy. We use them to light our homes in the dark, drive our cars and
heat us during cold winters. However, to obtain this energy, we have to
burn these fossil fuels and, when we do so, they release carbon dioxide,
which is a greenhouse gas. This causes problems for our environment
because these gases trap heat from the Sun in our Earth’s atmosphere,
which leads to the temperature rising. This is known as climate change.
 Greenhouse Gases
You will probably know that a greenhouse is a building made of glass,
which allows plants inside it to keep warm. Heat from the Sun passes
through the glass, but the glass keeps out cold winds, ice and snow.
This means gardeners can enjoy growing delicate or tropical plants
that would be killed in a cold climate. Some gases, such as carbon
dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, work in the same way when they
get into Earth’s atmosphere. They absorb and emit infrared radiation,
trapping heat, so scientists call them ‘greenhouse gases’.

Getting Warmer
Now while having hotter weather during a harsh winter might sound
appealing, it has started to have a disastrous impact on our planet. As the
Earth warms, glaciers and ice caps, which are large bodies of ice, are
melting. Not only does this lead to a signi cant loss of habitat for several
species that live on the ice, so many animals lose their homes, it also
means that many peoples, living in coastal areas and on low-lying
islands, will nd the sea level rising. Their homes and their lands will be
liable to severe ooding. Some may be lost completely.
In addition to these problems, the melting of the ice caps has another
e ect on climate change. The colour white, which is the colour of the ice
caps and glaciers, re ects heat out of our atmosphere. As more ice melts,
there is less ice re ecting less heat out of our atmosphere. The heat
remains trapped on the Earth’s surface and so the Earth’s temperature
climbs further up. Some scientists believe that there is a ‘tipping point’
beyond which our planet can still be habitable. I nd this deeply
shocking, because this means that our way of living might come to an
end.

Other Threats
Climate change and increased volumes of carbon dioxide in the air also
pose other worrying threats. For instance, an increase in carbon dioxide,
which pollutes our air, leads to a decrease in air quality. That means that
there is less clean and healthy air for us to breathe, which causes many
serious health conditions. Furthermore, water quality, which measures
how good the water is, will also be reduced because water bodies will be
contaminated by pollutants like carbon dioxide. This does not just a ect
humans – all life on Earth is impacted by these problems. The diversity
of species on our planet is in dramatic decline, with experts estimating
that we are losing between 0.01% to 0.1% of our species every year.
These numbers do not really seem that high but when you put into
context that there are millions of species on our planet, it is an enormous
number.
 Did you know that scientists calculate that clams in the Baltic
Sea release as much of the greenhouse gas methane as
20,000 cows?

A Weather Forecast
Moreover, as the Earth warms up, weather patterns will be hugely
a ected. At the same time as more precipitation (rain, snow, sleet or
hail) falls in some areas of the world, other places are starting to
experience very serious droughts. Because of these much harsher heat
waves and droughts, many regions will be left with lower volumes of
water available, insu cient for everyday use. Some areas will become
completely uninhabitable. This change in weather patterns will have a
very marked impact on human life and water shortages could even be
the cause of wars breaking out in the future. The world will also have to
combat more frequent natural disasters such as hurricanes and oods.

What can we do?

We hear a great deal about single-use plastics, but fossil fuels are also
single-use – they are non-renewable sources of energy, which means we
can only use them once. As we look to the future, we need to start using
renewable energy, such as solar or wind energy. These are much more
eco-friendly as they do not emit greenhouse gases. The solutions to
problems related to climate change are admittedly quite complex but
that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Plants take nutrients from sunlight, air and water by a process

called ‘photosynthesis’. In doing this, they capture large amounts
of carbon dioxide. In fact, at the moment the only sure way of
getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is through
photosynthesis!
Trees take up more carbon dioxide than any other single plant.
If we could plant many more trees than we have, it would be
enormously useful in helping to lessen the effect of greenhouse
gases. All trees are good, but trees that grow quickly and live a
long time, such as horse chestnuts, walnuts and various pines,
are extra good.
Peat, a type of soil made from wet and partly rotten plant
material, is also very good at retaining carbon dioxide.
However, if a tree is cut down or burned, it will release all its
stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere! If peat is cut
and dried, to use as fuel or as compost for gardens, it will also
release carbon dioxide.
If you haven’t got a garden to plant a tree in, why not grow a
potted plant or two? Even a small plant will help, if you look after
it properly.

Nothing should deter you from wanting to help and taking action,
regardless of your age or location. For inspiration, look at Greta
Thunberg, a climate change activist who was nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize at aged 16. The reason so many people in our generation
nd her very inspirational is because she is so young. Rather than her
age becoming a barrier for preventing the climate crisis, she uses it as an
opportunity to highlight the severity of our problems.
In order to do something, it is crucial that you educate yourself on the
various di erent causes and consequences of climate change. While
fossil fuels are one of the main issues, there are several challenges that
we need to consider, such as plastic polluting the ocean and killing
organisms. What we do now with our planet, when we are at such a
tipping point, will a ect all future generations. It is imperative that we
take action now.
I nd our environmental issues terrifying! It is as if there is a clock,
counting down on life in our world. So many of our problems seem so
complicated, and so far out of our capacity to make change. I know that,
like me, many people in my age group feel a sense of helplessness
considering it will take a huge e ort to tackle our problems, which go far
beyond just one individual’s ability to solve. Personally, I do not believe it
should just concern the younger generations, but instead should involve
all generations. These problems threaten our way of life, and if no action
is taken, in a few years we could be living completely di erent lives. It is
frightening to think that unless we take immediate action, such as
changing our energy sources from fossil fuels to cleaner, renewable
sources, we will have to face consequences such as less food being
produced to feed the world, or water wars.
However, I believe that we can solve our problems by coming together
and creating practical and e ective solutions. If I had to make one major
change in the world today to prevent climate change, I would want to
stop deforestation. This includes enforcing rules to ensure that paper
and other resources from the forest are obtained sustainably, and that
when trees are cut down new ones are planted at once to replace them.
Reforesting is very important because not only are these forests home to
so many species, forests emit oxygen for us to breathe. If you could
make any change, what would you do?
 Afterword

I’ve never liked saying goodbyes. It always seems too sad and too nal.
But there are a couple of important farewells to say with this book. My
beloved father, Stephen, is no longer with us and is so very badly missed
– by me and by millions of others. And my great friend, collaborator,
supporter and all-round science genius Peter McOwan recently passed
away. The light feels a bit dimmer and greyer without these two, both
great scientists and wonderful human beings who sought to use their
own intelligence and insight to create a better, fairer world. Both would
have been so delighted to read the work of our authors, including our
youngest ever contributor, Nitya, a teenage climate change activist who
has written for us on how the future looks to her generation. So, while
my heart breaks that these two amazing people are not with us, I
console myself with the thought that we have their work and their lives
as sources of inspiration and knowledge – and that there is a new
generation of passionate, engaged and outspoken young scientists and
activists emerging. My father and Peter would have been so proud of
them. They might just save the world. And so could you.

Lucy Hawking
The Milky Way is another name for the galaxy that contains our Solar System – so
called because of the hazy, ‘milky’ band of light we can see from Earth. Find out more
about our galaxy on page 5: A Voyage Across the Universe.
How would it feel to visit an erupting volcano? Find out on page 81.
In 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the rst humans to set foot on the
Moon.
THE BLUE MARBLE The rst photograph taken of our Earth from the surface of the
Moon. Find out more about Neil and Buzz’s journey on page 243.
The Kármán line is the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. Read
more on page 124.
A model of our Solar System, which shows the planets, in order, moving away from the
Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
The surface of our neighbouring planet Mars is cold and rocky, with a thin atmosphere
made mostly of carbon dioxide. Find out more on page 150.
Discover the secret behind Saturn’s rings on page 163.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest large galaxy to our own Milky Way. You can read
about it on page 176.
Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our Sun. Find out more on page 172.
This is a rendered image of what a black hole looks like to us. Read Stephen Hawking’s
essay about black holes on page 206.
 Glossary
algorithm A set of rules to be followed when working out a
problem. Computers use algorithms when they are calculating.
altitude The distance of an object in the sky above (or sometimes
below) the horizon, measured as an angle. The height of a
satellite above the Earth, measured in kilometres or miles, is
also described as its altitude.
analogue computer An analogue computer uses data from
physical sources that are continuous but changing, such as
temperatures, mechanical movements or voltages. Most
analogue computers have now been replaced by digital
computers.
analogy A comparison between two things, usually to explain
something or make it clearer.
android A robot that is made to look like a human being.
antimatter Ordinary matter is made up of particles – electrons,
protons and neutrons. Antimatter is the opposite: it is made
up of positrons, antiprotons and anti-neutrons. The particles of
matter and antimatter have equal but opposite electrical
charges, and if they were to meet, they would destroy each
other, leaving only energy.
ASCII The American Standard Code for Information
Interchange. First used in telecommunications, it is a code
used in computing, though modern coding has developed
considerably from the original version.
binary system, binary solar system A binary system describes two
stars that orbit each other. Gravity attracts the two stars, and
their paths are ellipses, not circles. Sirius, the Dog Star, the
brightest star in the sky, is a binary system.
bioengineering Genetic engineering, when certain characteristics
are deliberately introduced into a living organism. For
 example, scientists might add genes that enable a grain like
wheat or rice to withstand drought or cold, so more can be
grown in places that would otherwise be hard to farm.
Bioengineering can also be used to describe giving people
arti cial organs that make them work better – these might
include hearing aids or arti cial limbs.
biominerals Living things can produce minerals, often used to
harden their existing tissues. These minerals are known as
biominerals, and include shells and skeletons.
black smoker A hole (or vent) on the seabed from which
superheated water is ejected. The water is black because it
contains sulphides, black compounds of sulphur.
blue shift When a source of light moves, it creates waves. The
waves of visible light can come in di erent lengths. When a
light source is moving fast towards an observer, the
wavelengths are short, and look blue. This is known as a blue
shift. (When the light source travels away from an observer, the
wavelengths get longer and look red – a red shift.) Using the
colour of the wavelengths, it’s possible to tell in which
direction a light source is travelling.
cosmos, cosmocentric Cosmos is another word for the Universe,
and sometimes it is used to refer to space. Words that start
‘cosmo’ have to do with the Universe. Cosmocentric describes
the idea that the Universe is the most important thing, the
opposite of ‘anthropocentric’, which thinks that human
existence is the most important thing. A cosmocentric view of
nature would object to actions like people redesigning planets
so they could live on them.
cryogenic To do with very low temperatures – being at a low
temperature, or producing a low temperature, or related to a
low temperature. Cryogenics is a branch of physics that studies
the subject.
cryovolcano When a cryovolcano erupts, it pours out things such
as water, methane or ammonia rather than molten rock. The
 eruptions can be in liquid or vapour form, but freeze solid
when they condense. Scientists think there are cryovolcanoes
on Pluto and some of the moons far out in the Solar System,
such as Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus.
cryptography Secret writing. It usually refers to putting messages
into code, or decoding messages that are sent in ciphers.
cybersecurity Keeping safe data that is stored electronically on
computers. Organizations of all kinds want to protect
information from anyone who has no right to have it or use it,
including criminals.
diaphragm A partition. In mammals, it refers to muscles that
separate the neck from the chest area. It can also describe such
things as a device for varying the lens aperture in a camera, or
a thin membrane making a partition in a sound system.
EDSAC The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator. An
early British computer. It was built at Cambridge University,
and was taken up by J. Lyons & Co., a company involved in the
catering business. Lyons was the rst British company to use a
computer commercially.
electromagnetic radiation A form of energy found throughout
the Universe. It moves in the form of waves. These range from
radio waves, which have the longest wavelengths, through
microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays and
gamma rays, which have the shortest wavelength.
empathy The ability to understand and be sensitive to the
thoughts and feelings of another being, without having them
explained.
epiphany A moment of sudden understanding or revelation.
ESA The European Space Agency. ESA is a group of 22 countries
dedicated to exploring space. ESA’s headquarters are in Paris.
ESA is involved in manned and unmanned space ight,
including the International Space Station and the Orion
spacecraft destined for future Moon landings.
fundamental particles The smallest things in the Universe. They
make up the electrons, protons and neutrons that form atoms.
fuse To join di erent things together so they become one. This is
often done by using heat, which melts the di erent elements
so they mix.
geocentric Having the Earth at the centre. Early astronomers and
scholars thought everything in the heavens – the Sun, the
Moon and the stars – revolved round the Earth, which they
believed was in the middle of everything.
greenhouse gas A gas like carbon dioxide, which builds up in
Earth’s atmosphere and stops heat escaping. This causes the
atmosphere to become hotter. Methane is another greenhouse
gas.
hydrothermal vent A hole in the seabed from which ows very
hot water full of minerals. A black smoker is a type of
hydrothermal vent.
hyperspace A space of more than three dimensions. In stories, it
is an imaginary place where it would be possible to travel faster
than light.
ion Usually an atom that has lost at least one of its electrons.
This gives it a positive electrical charge. An atom with an extra
electron is an ion with a negative electrical charge. Atoms can
become ions when they collide with each other.
Kuiper belt An area of the Solar System stretching far out into
space from the orbit of Neptune. It is full of small icy objects –
frozen water, methane and ammonia – that are probably left
over from the formation of the Solar System.
latitude An imaginary line round the Earth, parallel to the
Equator. It is used to measure distances from the Equator in
degrees. There are 90 degrees of latitude on each side of the
Equator.
logarithm Numbers that can be used to express repeated
multiplications of a single number. For example, 2 x 2 x 2 can
 be written as 23. A mathematician would call 2 the base
number, and 3 the exponent. 3 is the logarithm of the number
8 to the base 2.
longitude An imaginary line round the Earth. Lines of longitude
run north and south, starting at the North Pole and running to
the South Pole. They are measured in degrees, beginning at
the Greenwich meridian in London, which is 0 degrees
longitude.
macroscopic Something described as macroscopic can be seen
with ordinary eyesight. It doesn’t need to be magni ed to be
visible. Sometimes ‘macroscopic’ is used for an object on a
very large scale.
nanotechnology ‘Nano’ means something so tiny it is sub-
microscopic. Nanotechnology describes technology at an
atomic or molecular scale, and a nanobot is a very small self-
propelled machine. The nanoworld is the area of science
where minute things are studied or made.
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration. An
American government agency, NASA is responsible for all
American space ights, space probes and satellites. It also
carries out research and runs launch sites.
neurone Cell that transmits the impulses of the nerves. Almost
every species of animal has neurones.
node In astronomy, a node is a crossing point. It is the point
where the orbit of a heavenly body, such as a planet or a moon,
crosses a plane being used for reference, such as the plane of
Earth’s orbit, or the celestial equator.
particle One of the very tiny pieces of matter that make up an
atom. Varying numbers of protons, neutrons and electrons
make up di erent kinds of atoms.
phyllocian period Part of the chronology (or timeline) of the
history of Mars. Scientists try to work out when di erent
events occurred, which are the oldest rocks and land
formations, and what might have happened more recently.
 Using information gathered by the Mars Express probe,
scientists have looked at the way surface minerals have been
changed by weathering. The Phyllocian period covers a time
when there was water on the surface of Mars, valleys were
formed and deposits of clay were left on the surface. Scientists
think that if there is any evidence of life on Mars, it will come
from this time in its history. Phylloscilicate is the name of a
type of clay.
plasma A cloud of gas full of ions – a mixture of electrons and
the nuclei of atoms. Everything inside stars is in a state of
plasma.
psychology The study of the human mind and how it works, with
particular reference to the way people behave.
radioactive A kind of energy. This energy is given out when a
radioactive atom throws out one or more particles, such as
protons or neutrons. When the Universe was created
enormous amounts of radioactivity were released.
space–time A mathematical framework which uses four
dimensions to locate any event or object. It is based on the
speed of light, which never changes and therefore can be used
to measure time, plus three-dimensional space, joined
together.
supernova When a very large old star runs out of nuclear fuel, the
material that is left collapses inwards. The temperature at the
centre of the star increases by millions of degrees, and it
explodes in a supernova. The light from a supernova can be up
to 20 times brighter than the light from the original star.
velocity the speed with which an object moves in one direction.
Velocity is measured by length and time, for example metres
per second, or miles per hour.
wave function How waves behave. A wave is a form of energy,
which oscillates – it moves up and down, or backwards and
forwards, in a steady pattern. Electromagnetic radiation travels
in waves.
 Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dr Toby Blench, Sue Cook, Dr Christophe Galfard,

Stuart Rankin and Felicity Trotman for their invaluable editorial
assistance and input in di erent editions of the George series and on
Unlocking the Universe.

A huge and warm thank you to everyone at Penguin Random House

Children’s for believing in the George series and working so hard to
publish books that make science accessible to young readers! In
particular, Ruth Knowles, Emma Jones and Annie Eaton. Also a massive
thank you for all the brilliant backup from the team at Janklow and
Nesbit, led by Rebecca Carter.
‘What You Need to Know about Black Holes’ by Professor Stephen
Hawking was rst published in George’s Secret Key to the Universe (Corgi
Books, 2007)
‘Why Do We Go into Space?’ by Professor Stephen Hawking, ‘A Voyage
Across the Universe’ by Professor Bernard Carr, ‘Getting in Touch with
Aliens’ by Dr Seth Shostak, ‘Did Life Come from Mars?’ by Dr Brandon
Carter, ‘Is There Anyone Out There?’ by Lord Martin Rees were rst
published in George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt (Corgi Books, 2009)
‘The Creation of the Universe’ by Professor Stephen Hawking, ‘The
Dark Side of the Universe’ by Dr Paul Davies, ‘Wormholes and Time
Travel’ by Dr Kip S. Thorne were rst published in George and the Big
Bang (Corgi Books, 2011)
‘My Robot, Your Robots’ by Professor Peter McOwan, ‘The History of
Life’ by Professor Michael J. Reiss, ‘Quantum Computers’ by Dr
Raymond La amme, ‘The Building Blocks of Life’ by Dr Toby Blench,
‘3D Printing’ by Dr Tim Prestidge were rst published in George and the
Unbreakable Code (Corgi Books, 2014)

‘The Oceans of Earth’ by Professor Ros E. M. Rickaby, ‘Volcanoes on

Earth, in our Solar System and Beyond’ by Professor Tamsin A. Mather,
‘Building Rockets for Mars’ by Allyson Thomas, ‘Imagining a Life on
Mars’ by Kellie Gerardi, ‘The Overview E ect’ by Dr Richard Garriott de
Cayeux were rst published in George and the Blue Moon (Corgi Books,
2016) ‘Buildings Rockets for Mars’ copyright © 2015 National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, an Agency of the United States
Government. Used with Permission.
‘Time Travel and the Mystery of the Moving Clocks’ by Professor Peter
McOwan, ‘The Future of Food’ by Dr Marco Springmann, ‘The Future
of Politics is … You!’ by Andy Taylor, ‘Cities of the Future’ by Beth West,
‘Robot Ethics’ by Dr Kate Darling, ‘The Internet: Privacy, Identity and
Information’ by Dave King were rst published in George and the Ship of
Time (Corgi Books, 2018)

First published in this edition: ‘Genetics’ by Professor Ammar Al

Chalabi, ‘Flat-Earthers, Moon-Hoaxers and Anti-Vaxxers’ by Dr Sophie
Hodgetts, ‘The Multiverse’ by Professor Thomas Hertog, ‘Black Holes’
by Sasha Haco, ‘Arti cial Intelligence’ by Dr Demis Hassabis, ‘On the
Ethics of AI’ by Carissa Véliz, and ‘Climate Change’ by Nitya Kapadia
Colour insert credits
Footprint on the Moon, and rst photograph of Earth from the Moon ©
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an Agency of
the United States Government)
All other colour photographs/images © shutterstock
 Index

The page references in this index correspond to the print edition from which
this ebook was created, and clicking on them will take you to the the location
in the ebook where the equivalent print page would begin. To nd a speci c
word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook
reader.

3D printing 362–7
55 Cancri 174–5
acids 71–2, 73, 74–6
Aldrin, Buzz 243–4, 261
algorithms 330–2, 345, 346, 355, 360–1, 408
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) 98, 101
alkalis 73
Alpha Centauri 172–3
AlphaGo 331
altitude 301, 408
amino acids 48, 49, 111
Andreyev, Yevgeni 127
androids 319–20, 408
Andromeda Galaxy 6, 15, 176–8
anthropomorphism 324–5
Antikythera mechanism 341, 342
antimatter 26, 95, 99, 408
anxiety 119–20
Apollo missions 243–5
apps 396–7
Armstrong, Neil 243–4
arti cial intelligence (AI) 328–33, 334–9
ASCII 346, 408
asteroids 138, 170, 239, 270, 370–1
astronauts 239, 245, 251–5, 261
astronomy 6
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) 98, 100
atmosphere
Earth 33, 44, 47
Moon 131, 132
atoms
elements 113–14, 196–7
formation 27, 29, 113
quantum theory 20
sound 283
structure 26, 89–90, 202
automata 315–16
Babbage, Charles 343, 345
baby wipes 241
bacteria 41
ballet 234–5, 237
Baumgartner, Felix 127
Bayer, Johann 173
beef 377
Berners-Lee, Tim 95
Big Bang 3–5, 7, 10, 23–9, 100, 186–7, 216, 277
binary numbers 346–7
binary solar systems 142, 173–4, 408
biometric data 398
biominerals 75, 409
black holes 178, 206–14, 215, 221–5
black smokers 72, 409
Boltzmann, Ludwig 77, 79
Bouman, Katherine 212
brains 47, 289, 317–18, 321, 357
Bumba (African god) 3
bytes 348
CAD models 364
Callisto (Jupiter moon) 153, 155
carbon 110, 113
carbon composite 236–7
carbon dioxide
acidity 72
climate change 76, 400, 402, 404
water cycle 71
weathering 73, 75
cars 318, 368–9, 390, 391
Ceres (dwarf planet) 170
CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) 95, 309
chemistry 113, 197
chronology protection conjecture 298
Circumstellar Habitable Zone (CHZ) 66–7
cities 385–91
climate change 76, 183, 239, 373, 377, 399–406
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) 98, 100
Collins, Michael 243, 244
comets 138, 272–4
computers
analogue 341–3, 408
arti cial intelligence (AI) 329–31
digital 346–7
history 341–7
memory 347–8, 351
modern 347–8
programming 340–1, 345, 352–3
quantum computers 358–61
unsolvable problems 354–7
conspiracy theories 117–22
continents 62
Copernicus 9
coronal mass ejections (CMEs) 218, 270
CoRoT satellite 171
Cosmic Dark Ages 27, 28
cosmic horizon 186, 188
cosmic microwave background (CMB) 4, 28, 277
cosmonauts 246
cows 377–8, 402
creation myths 3, 51
Crick, Francis 46
cryovolcanoes 162, 409
cybersecurity 361, 398, 410
dark energy 99, 200, 204–5
dark matter 20–1, 25–6, 28, 99, 200, 201–4
Darwin, Charles 38, 51–5, 75
data
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 97
personal 326, 393–4, 398
storage 392–3
day length 63–5
deforestation 406
Deimos (Mars moon) 149
democracy 381, 384
Democritus 196
Diamandis, Peter 261
dimensions 107–9, 189, 300–1, 362
dinosaurs 75, 239, 371
DNA 38–9, 46, 58–9
Drake Equation 258–60
Drake, Frank 258
Earth
atmosphere 33
catastrophe risks 370–3
conspiracy theories 118
continents 62
day length 63–5
 development of life 34–42, 47–8, 49, 50–5, 74–5
distance from the Sun 175
formation 36
humanity’s impact 256
Kármán line 124–5
oceans 68–9, 72
structure 82
temperature 112
view from International Space Station 253–8
weathering 72–4
echo chambers 118–20
EDSAC 346–7, 410
Einstein, Albert 7–8, 11–12, 109, 309
elections 384
electricity power cuts 217–20
electromagnetic radiation 89, 275–7, 285, 410
electrons 25, 26, 27, 89, 276
elements 113–14, 196–7
empathy 327, 410
Enceladus (Saturn moon) 86, 161–2
encryption 361
energy 390–1, 400, 403, 405, 406
environment 377, 390–1 see also climate change
ESA (European Space Agency) 155, 410
ethics
arti cial intelligence (AI) 334–9
robotics 324–7
eukaryotes 41, 74
Europa (Jupiter moon) 86, 153, 154–6, 270, 288
Eustace, Alan 127
Event Horizon Telescope 212
event horizons 222–3
everything, theory of 16–20, 109, 216
evolution 36, 38–42, 47–9, 50–5, 74–5, 291
exoplanets 141–3, 171, 173, 174, 232, 289–90
exotic matter 23–4, 25
extinction 373, 402
extraterrestrials 133, 162, 258–60, 278–82, 287–91
Feynman diagrams 91–3, 94
Feynman, Richard 94
ssion 114
food, future of 374–9
forests 406
fossil fuels 76, 399–400
fossils 38–9, 43, 75
Frankenstein (Shelley) 336
Franklin, Rosalind 46
fusion 113
Gagarin, Yuri 246
galaxies see also Milky Way
Andromeda 6, 15, 176–8
dark matter 201–2
distances 6, 15
Edwin Hubble 9–10, 15, 31
formation 29
Local Group 176
Galileo Galilei 9, 35, 45, 153, 155, 156, 163
gamma rays 276, 372
Ganymede (Jupiter moon) 153, 155, 159
gauge bosons 91
general relativity 8, 12–13, 107, 186, 204–5, 216
genetics 56–9
Glenn, John 247
global warming see climate change
gluons 20, 25, 89, 98, 100–1
Goldilocks Zone 66–7, 174–5, 232
GPS (global positioning system) 181
graviton 20
gravity
black holes 207, 211, 222
 escape velocity 222
general relativity 12
Newton’s laws of motion 18–19
ocean tides 130–1, 133
orbits 221
quantum gravity theories 187, 188
Universe 28, 204–5
zero 229–30, 261–3
greenhouse gases 147, 150, 377, 400, 402, 411
gunpowder 337
guns 338, 339
hadrons 26
half-life 309
halting problem 354–5
handshakes 248–9
Hawking Radiation 214, 224–5
Hawking, Stephen 188, 223, 224–5, 261, 298–9, 407
health 378–9
Heider, Fritz 320, 321
Heisenberg, Werner 105
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle 102–4, 105
helium 113
Herschel, William 161, 165
Higgs boson 20, 100
Higgs, Peter 100
Hilbert, David 359
Hipparchus 165
homes 389
Hubble, Edwin 9–10, 15, 31
Hubble Space Telescope 183, 204
Hubble’s Law 10
humans
brains 47, 317–18, 321, 357
civilization development 36–7
impact on Earth 256
 intelligence 328–9
overpopulation 373
transhumans 322
Huygens, Christiaan 159
hydrogen 90, 110, 391
hydrothermal vents 72, 411
hyperspace 296, 411
in nities 356–7
in ation 3–4, 14, 24–5
information, early recording 36–7 see also data
insect brains 318
International Space Station (ISS) 229, 250, 252, 254
internet 392–8
Io (Jupiter moon) 86, 153, 270
iron 113
Jenner, Edward 338
junk food 378–9
Jupiter 86, 116, 141, 152–6, 270, 288
Kalashnikov, Mikhail 338, 339
Kármán line 124–5
Kármán, Theodore von 125
Kepler-90 175
Kepler mission 143
Kittinger, Colonel Joseph 127
Kuiper Belt 141, 170, 411
Large Electron Positron collider (LEP) 96
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 91, 93, 95–101, 109, 203
latitude 301, 411
leap years 399
learning 321, 330
Leonov, Alexei 247
leptons 20
LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) 98–9
life
amino acids 111
evolution on Earth 36, 38–42, 47–9, 50–5, 74–5, 291
extraterrestrials 133, 162, 258–60, 278–82, 287–91
Mars possibility 42–4, 150–1, 287–8
number of species 50–1
water 66, 74, 110–11
light
blue shift 178, 409
electricity power cuts 217–19
electromagnetic radiation 275–7
quantum electrodynamics 94
red shift 32, 277
speed of 6, 12, 134, 276, 302–3, 305
light years 135
location settings 397
logarithm 341, 411
longitude 301, 411
Lovelace, Ada 345
M-theory 109
machine H 355–6
machine learning 330–3
magma 84
Maillardet, Henri 316
mantle 80, 82, 83–4
Marius, Simon 156
Mars
bombardment 42
living on 150–1, 231, 233, 239–42
Phyllocian period 43, 412
possibility of life 42–4, 150–1, 287–8
space travel 235–7, 239–42, 266, 267–8, 286–7
structure 149
vital statistics 148
 volcanoes 84–6, 149
water 43–4, 151, 231, 233, 241, 287
mass 115–16
mathematical laws 340, 343
matter 90, 99, 296 see also dark matter
measles 120–1
meat 377
Mendeleev, Dmitri 198–9
Mercury 116, 137, 144–5, 269, 288
Messier 87 galaxy 212
Messier, Charles 176
meteorites 43, 371
meteoroids 371
microrobots 322
microwaves 276, 277
Milky Way 9, 141–2, 208
Miller, Stanley 47, 49
molecules, water 69, 77–8
Moon
conspiracy theories 117–18
extraterrestrials 133
far side 192–3
formation 132–3
human weight 116
phases 194–5
space travel 230, 243–5, 265–6, 267
temperature 112
vital statistics 130, 132
volcanoes 84, 86
water 133
moons
de nition 130
Solar System 86, 138, 149, 153–6, 158, 161–2, 163, 167
motion, Newton’s laws 18–19
MSA diaphragm 235–7
nanotechnology 322, 412
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) 118, 183, 237,
246–7, 267–9, 412
natural selection 38, 51–5
negative energy 296–7, 299
Neptune 86, 116, 137, 166–7, 271
neurones 318, 412
neutron stars 209–10, 280
neutrons 26, 89
Newton, Isaac 18, 19, 180
nuclear energy 29, 113, 114
numbers 346, 356–7
oceans 68–9, 72, 74–6, 130, 183, 405
Olympus Mons (Mars volcano) 85, 149
opinions 382–3
organic compounds 48
overpopulation 373
‘Overview E ect’ 254, 256
oxygen 44
Pandora (Saturn moon) 163
parallel worlds 190
particles 26, 88–93, 100, 109, 309, 410, 412
Pascal, Blaise 343, 344
passwords 398
peat 404
periodic table 197–9
Philo of Byzantium 315
Phobos (Mars moon) 149
photons 20, 25, 26, 27–8, 89
photosynthesis 404
physics, laws of 188–9, 190, 298–9
Planck, Max 22
planets
dwarf 138, 168–9, 170
 exoplanets 86–7, 141–3, 171, 173, 174, 232, 289–90
Solar System 137–40, 144–67
plants 404
plasma 25, 98, 100–1, 412
plastic 403, 405
pluralism 384
Pluto 141, 168–9, 170
politics 380–4
pollution 391, 402
pressure 83
printing, 3D 362–7
privacy 393, 394–8
prokaryotes 41
Prometheus (Saturn moon) 163
proteins 111
protons 26, 89, 95, 97
Ptolemy 165
pulsars 280
quantum computers 358–61
quantum theory 20, 94, 101, 102–7, 187, 359
quarks 20, 25, 89, 98–9, 100–1
quasars 280
radio waves 276, 278–9, 280, 285
radioactivity 114, 412–413
red shift 32, 277
relativity 7–8, 12–13, 107, 186, 204–5, 302–3, 308–9
renewable energy 403, 406
robotics
3D printing 367
compared to brains 317–18
driverless cars 368–9
ethics 322, 324–7
future 323
history 315–17
 nanotechnology 322
problems 314, 318–19, 320, 322
space travel 264–72
‘stories’ 321–2
‘the uncanny valley’ 319
rockets 235–7
salt 72
satellites
de nition 179
man-made 17, 171, 179–84, 203
natural 130
satnav 181
Saturn 86, 116, 157–63, 270–1
schools 389
Schrödinger, Erwin 104, 106, 360
Schrödinger’s Cat 104, 106, 360
‘science denial’ 120, 122
search engines 393
security 398
sedimentation 36, 72, 73
self-awareness 37
SETI Institute 258, 260, 278–82
Shelley, Mary 336
Shepard, Alan 247
sight 277, 317
Simmel, Marianne 320, 321
singularities 215–16
slide rules 341–3
smart devices 389
social media 118–19, 393–7
solar-age coincidence 40
Solar System 136–41, 273, 291
solstices 65
sound 283–5
space, Kármán line 124–5
space-diving 125–7
space junk 184
space shuttle 249, 250, 284
space stations 248, 250
space–time 7–8, 12, 101, 215–16, 300–3, 413
space travel see also spacecraft
to asteroids 270
astronaut’s description of 253–7
to comets 272
rst man in space 246
handshakes 248–9
to Jupiter 270
Laika (dog) 180
to Mars 235–7, 239–42, 266, 267–8, 286–7
to Mercury 269
to the Moon 230, 243–5, 265–6, 267
to Neptune 271
reasons for 228–9, 232
relativity 7–8
robotics 264–72
to Saturn 270–1
to the Sun 270
to Uranus 271
to Venus 269
space warp 8
spacecraft see also satellites
furthest distance travelled 138
probes 145, 147, 154–5, 160, 162, 231–2, 264–72
spacewalks 247
special relativity 7–8, 12, 302–3
speed of light 6, 12, 134, 276, 302–3, 305
Standard Model 20, 99, 100
stars see also supernovas
elements 113
exoplanets 86–7, 141–3, 171, 173, 174, 289–90
formation 28–9, 139, 141
 light from 134–5, 277
nearest 172–3
neutron stars 208–9
red giants 211
visibility 128
string theory 108–9, 188, 189
subduction zones 83
Sun see also Solar System
coronal mass ejections (CMEs) 218, 270
formation 30, 139
future 211, 291
gravity 131
light 134
probes 270
temperature 112
weather e ects on Earth 218
white dwarfs 211
Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) 95
supernovas 113, 208–10, 413
superstrings 109
supersymmetry 107, 109
tectonic plates 82, 83
telescopes 35, 45, 183, 204, 212
television 182, 220
temperature 112
terraforming 150
theory of everything 16–20, 109, 216
Thunberg, Greta 405
tides 130, 133
time see also space-time
dilation 305–9
gigayears 37
relativity 7–8, 12, 302–3, 308–9
time travel 295–9, 309
Titan (Saturn moon) 158, 159–60, 231–2, 271, 288–9
transhumans 322
transport 390
trees 404
Triton (Neptune moon) 86, 167
trust 122
Turing, Alan 349, 350, 353, 355, 359
Turing machine 343, 349, 350–3, 354–5, 359
uncertainty 102–5
Universe
‘bubbles’ 10
composition 99–100, 200
cosmocentric viewpoint 10, 409
de nition 5
expansion 10, 26–7, 31–2, 186, 204, 277
formation 2–4, 7, 23–9
geocentric theory 9, 410–411
heliocentric theory 9
in ation 3–4, 14, 24–5
‘multiverse’ proposal 7, 78, 185–90
travelling across 5–10
uniformity 13–14
uranium 90
Uranus 116, 164–5, 271
Urey, Harold 47, 49
vaccination 120, 338
velocity 45, 413
Venus 86, 116, 146–7, 269, 288
vision 277, 317
vitamin pills 375
volcanoes 80–7, 149, 162, 269
volume isolators 235–7
voting 384
water
 boiling point 83
climate change 403, 406
dissolving substances 70–1
Enceladus (Saturn moon) 161–2
Europa (Jupiter moon) 154, 156
life 66, 74, 110–11
Mars 43–4, 151, 231, 233, 241, 287
molecular behaviour 77–8
Moon 133
oceans 68–9, 72, 74–6, 183
supply electricity requirements 220
water cycle 69–71
Watson, James 46
wave functions 103, 413
weapons 338, 339
weather 182–3, 218, 255, 403
weathering 72–4, 75, 76
weight 115–16
Wilkins, Maurice 46
wind 158, 165, 167
Witten, Edward 109
World Wide Web 95
wormholes 8, 295–9
writing 37
year length 63, 399
zero gravity 229–30
zero-gravity ight 261–3
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