Stephen Hawking
L'universo in un guscio di noce

THE REVIEW

"If I were bound in a nutshell, I would count myself a king of infinite space" seems to me, I don't remember well, this phrase might have been said by Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the greatest living scientist, Hawking, reprises this famous phrase to explain the known secrets of the cosmos.

It begins with Newton, the great physicist who discovered that the forces governing the falling of apples were the same that governed and sustained the entire universe with the famous equation of universal gravitation. Then came Einstein, who discovered that gravity doesn't exist but is merely a deformation of space and time, and being a believer, he thought the universe was perfect and constant, saying that God does not play dice.

But Hawking is not a believer; he thinks God is not necessary and discovered that it is precisely thanks to imperfections that galaxies were born; otherwise, the matter would be uniformly distributed in the cosmos without anything happening.

But then, thanks to studies on the atom, the principle of uncertainty of particles was discovered, meaning an electron, if you see it, is not there but nearby, and the forces that hold everything together, namely the four interactions of physics.

In this book, Hawking illustrates that the atom is composed of particles like quarks, bosons, etc., etc., which are themselves composed of strings or branes, small waves of energy, and the work of researchers who collide two particles at CERN to see them break into a thousand pieces, precisely quarks, bosons and hundreds of other particles, is recounted, to then arrive at a theory of everything, meaning to invent a mathematical formula to explain all phenomena, indeed, thanks to those equations, at least eight parallel and functioning universes were discovered.

A book not easy to read but very interesting that I recommend to anyone who wants to know more about our universe.