In The Origin of (almost) Everything, Graham Lawton and his colleagues at New Scientist explain what happened immediately after the Big Bang occurred. “Around 13.8 billion years ago matter, energy, time and space spontaneously sprang from nothing in the event we know as the Big Bang. How did that happen? Or to put it another way: What is the origin of everything? This is the quintessential origin mystery.” The exact day and date have not as yet been pinned down but we now know a great deal that sheds light on that origin mystery and hundreds of others.
Obviously, there were few eyewitnesses to the Big Bang after it occurred so Lawton and his colleagues heavily depended on what science reveals with regard to what happened when and where…also why. For example, when did people start living in cities?
“When it was discovered in 1958, Çatalhöyük captured the world’s imagination. the 13-hectare site contained hundreds of buildings packed tightly together and was once home to an estimated 10,000 people. [Note: a hectare is a unit of measurement equal to 2,471 acres so Çatalhöyük’s size would be 32,123 acres.] It looked like a city but was incredibly old: the earliest remains were about 9,000 years oldc. However, it lacked a key feature found in true cities: functional differential between zones. Çatalhöyük was just lots and lots of houses and rubbish dumps, like an ancient suburbia. The people, it seems, carried out all their activities from home, even burying their dead under the floor. True cities did not emerge for another 1,500 years.” (Page 147)
Graham Lawton and his colleagues at New Science duly acknowledge, “In the end, we had far too much material to squeeze into a single book…Maybe one day I will write The Origin of (almost) Everything Else.” Let’s all hope so.
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The Origin of (almost) Everything was published by Nicholas Brealey (October 2018).