The book “The Story of Everything. 14 billion years of cosmic evolution ”

Recently, answers to questions about our origins in the Universe have come not only from the field of astrophysics. Working under the auspices of a whole association of young fields of science, such as astrochemistry, astrobiology and astroparticle physics, astrophysicists have found that the interaction with many different scientific disciplines in finding the answer to the question: “Where are we from here?” - gives researchers access to information of previously unthinkable width and depth, helping to analyze the structure of our universe.
In the book “The Story of Everything: 14 Billion Years of Evolution”, the authors introduce the reader to a new unified system of scientific knowledge, which allows one to study the origin of not only the Universe, but also its individual largest structures formed by matter: stars that shine in space, planets that offer the most suitable conditions for the birth of life, and life itself on one or more of these planets.

The innate selfishness of man, due to the evolution of his species and life experience acquired on Earth, naturally forces us to focus on local events and phenomena in order to tell most of the stories about the origin. However, with each new level of knowledge about the structure of the Universe, we are only convinced that we live on a particle of cosmic dust that revolves around the most ordinary star somewhere in the outskirts of the most ordinary galaxy - one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe. The very fact of such cosmic insignificance triggers an amazing protective mechanism in the human psyche. Many of us, without suspecting it, resemble a man from a cartoon looking at the starry skies and telling his friend: “When I see all these stars, I am amazed at how insignificant they are.”

Like all human attempts to make progress, the scientific approach works better in theory than in practice. Not all scientists question each other as diligently as they should. The need to impress individual scientists who occupy influential positions and sometimes turn out to be an unconscious victim of external factors often intervenes in the self-correcting processes of science. Nevertheless, errors do not survive in the long run - sooner or later, other scientists will discover them who will climb the career ladder, announcing their discovery to the rest. The same conclusions that withstand repeated attacks by other scientists eventually acquire the status of scientific laws; they are accepted as consistent models for describing reality, even though

However, it cannot be said that scientists spend all their time trying to prove that someone else was wrong. Most scientific research involves testing incompletely validated hypotheses using slightly improved observational results. From time to time a fundamentally new vision of some important theory is born, or (most often in the era of technological progress) a whole set of new observations opens eyes to a new possible set of hypotheses that can explain these new observations. The greatest moments of scientific history are always associated with the emergence of a new explanation, which, possibly coupled with new results of observations, provokes a sharp jump in our understanding of the structure of the world. Scientific progress depends on individuals from both camps: those

The skeptical core of science makes it an unimportant competitor to human hearts and minds that shy away from its endless contradictions and prefer safe reliability, such as “immutable” truths. If the scientific approach offered only the next interpretation of the structure of the Universe, it would never have achieved anything significant. The outstanding success of science lies precisely in the fact that it works. If you fly on an airplane built according to all the canons of science, that is, on the basis of principles that have withstood countless attempts to prove their failure, you are more likely to reach your destination many times more than if you had the chance to travel on an airplane assembled according to the rules of Vedic astrology.

A relatively new history shows that people who are faced with how science successfully explains natural phenomena exhibit one of four types of reactions to this. Firstly, a narrow minority takes a scientific approach with open arms, seeing in it the main hope that someday we will understand nature in all its diversity; they are not looking for additional options for explaining the structure of the universe. Secondly, a much larger number of people ignore science, considering it uninteresting, impenetrable, or contrary to the human spiritual principle (those who eagerly watch TV without thinking for a second where or how the image and sound appear in it remind us of the close etymological the connection of the words “magic” and “machine”). Thirdly, another minority is reacting painfully to how science refutes beliefs that are dear to their hearts, and therefore actively seeks to find ways, in turn, to refute those scientific results that annoy or even anger them. True, they do this outside the skeptical coordinate system of science. This can be easily established by simply asking any of them the question: “What material evidence can convince you that you are wrong?”

Finally, the fourth - rather large - share of the public takes a scientific approach to the study of nature, while maintaining its faith in the supernatural beings that control the universe through mechanisms beyond our comprehension. Baruch Spinoza, the philosopher who built the strongest bridge between the natural and the supernatural, denied any differences between nature and God and insisted that the cosmos is both nature and God. Adherents of more traditional religions, who, as a rule, argue that this difference is and is undeniable, often solve this dilemma for themselves, just dividing the spaces in which the natural and the supernatural.

No matter what camp you consider yourself to be, there is no doubt that we are living in a favorable time for new discoveries related to the structure of the Universe. So let's begin our journey to the origins of mankind in a vast space, we’ll be a little detectives who establish the fact of a crime, based on the evidence found. We invite you to join the search for cosmic evidence and how to interpret them together to try to find out how it turned out that a small part of this universe has become ... you and me.

The book can be found in more detail on the publisher's website.
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