Background / Trinh Xuan Thuan 540 pages of happiness! A great story of 14 billion years addressing astronomy, neurobiology, physics, chemistry and geology, among others. Extension work, precise and exciting, recall the epic of the universe from its birth to the present. And even after 'The Aristotelian concept of an immutable universe is dead. With Trinh Xuan Thuan, navigating in full transdisciplinarity. No partitioning, no sectarianism, an open mind in all relevant disciplines, in line with the Encyclopedists and the Enlightenment. The history of the solar system is only a brief episode of this long cosmic adventure given that since birth there 4.5 billion years, the Sun has done 20 times around the Milky Way, our galaxy, putting 220 million years to complete each round. Hubble's discoveries in 1929 have helped to affirm that every galaxy has exactly the same time to its point of origin to its current position after the Big Bang. Then Einstein showed that the expansion of the Universe is not a movement away galaxies in an immobile space, but a space that causes dilation of galaxies with him at rest. And we talk of superstring theory in an attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity. The author explains how "everywhere in nature is the interaction with the regular irregular, with the harmony of chaos that shapes reality. The reality invariably due to the combined effects of incidental and necessary, the particular and the general, the unpredictable and predictable, the contingent and the universal. '. Chance plays a fundamental role in the evolutionary process. " The intimate conviction of the author is that life is not the result of pure chance as some believe as Gould or Dawkins, but a chance bridled. It emerged at the contingents of events, certainly, but constrained. This chance bridled fact that the universe is pregnant with life and consciousness; and we are certainly not alone in the vast cosmos to admire the beauty and organization of the universe. " At the end of the book, the author warns against overpopulation and the frenzy of reproduction of the human species. The ability to feed the Earth is not infinite. And then the biodiversity is in danger, "every day 75 plant and animal species disappear from the surface of the Earth, or 3 per hour and 27,000 per year. "The danger has never been greater to achieve self-destruction. A wonderful book easy to read, and read necessarily.
