i >Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking.When Edwin Hubble
looked into his telescope in the 1920s, he was shocked to find that
nearly all of the galaxies he could see through it were flying away from
one another. If these galaxies had always been travelling, he reasoned,
then they must, at some point, have been on top of one another. This
discovery transformed the debate about one of the most fundamental
questions of human existence - how did the universe begin?Every society
has stories about the origin of the cosmos and its inhabitants, but now,
with the power to peer into the early universe and deploy the knowledge
gleaned from archaeology, geology, evolutionary biology and cosmology,
we are closer than ever to understanding where it all came from. In The
Origin of (almost) Everything, New Scientist explores the modern
origin stories of everything from the Big Bang, meteorites and dark
energy, to dinosaurs, civilisation, timekeeping, belly-button fluff and
beyond.From how complex life evolved on Earth, to the first written
language, to how humans conquered space, The Origin of (almost)
Everything offers a unique history of the past, present and future of
our universe.
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