Astronomy of The Universe (preliminary Edition)

There are 365 nights in every year (366 in a leap year!) and from an amateur astronomer’s point of view, no two are alike.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist explains what happened at the very beginning of the universe, and how we know, in this popular science classic.

A lot has been written about the history of the universe, from the Big Bang through the evolution of galaxies and stars, to the eventual appearance of life and intelligence.

Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned is an album by Czech underground band The Plastic People of the Universe. It was recorded in 1974/75, mainly at Houska Castle, enabled by the castle's then warden Svatopluk Karásek, with some songs being recorded in Prague. The album could not be officially released and distributed under the former Communist regime in Czechoslovakia; instead fans duplicated tapes with one another, often resulting in poor technical quality. It was released in 1978 in France by SCOPA Invisible Production. In the Czech Republic a remastered version was published on CD in 2001 by Globus Music. The album title is a parody of The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Most of the songs on the record are settings of poems by Egon Bondy.

Not so if the book has been translated into Arabic. Now the reader can discern no meaning in the letters. The text conveys almost no information to the reader, yet the linguistic informa­ tion contained by the book is virtually the same as in the English original. The reader, familiar with books will still recognise two things, however: First, that the book is a book. Second, that the squiggles on the page represent a pattern of abstractions which probably makes sense to someone who understands the mean­ ing of those squiggles.

The universe is the largest system of all. It consists of elementary particles bound together by gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear forces. Its structural hierar­ chy in space (from atomic nuclei to supergalaxies) and its evolutionary sequence (from the fireball to the diversity of present forms) is governed by the properties of elementary particles and their interactions.