Discipline
Physics
Lessons across the journey that lean on physics, in the order they appear in the story.
- 1.1 Was the Big Bang an explosion?Draft
The Big Bang was not a blast at a point in empty space. It was the whole universe, everywhere at once, hot and dense and beginning to expand.
- 1.2 The first three minutesDraft
How quarks became protons and neutrons, and how the first nuclei formed before the universe was twenty minutes old.
- 1.3 Why is the night sky dark?Draft
A dark night sky is evidence that the universe has a finite age and is expanding.
- 1.4 The afterglowDraft
The cosmic microwave background, the oldest light there is, and what its faint ripples tell us.
- 1.5 How we knowDraft
The three pillars of evidence for the Big Bang, and how each one could have proved it wrong.
- 1.6 The Dark Ages and the first lightDraft
A hundred million years of darkness, and then the first stars switch on.
- 1.7 Open questionsDraft
Dark matter, dark energy and inflation: what the standard model of cosmology cannot yet explain.
- 2.1 Gravity versus pressureDraft
How a cloud of gas collapses, heats and ignites.
- 2.2 What a star isPlanned
Fusion in the core balanced against gravity: the equilibrium that lets a star shine for billions of years.
- 2.3 The lives of stars, sorted by massDraft
Why a star's mass decides everything: how long it lives, how it dies and what it leaves behind.
- 2.4 GalaxiesPlanned
Cities of stars, dark matter and the cosmic web.
- 2.5 Reading starlightPlanned
Spectra, distances and the cosmic distance ladder: how we measure things we can never visit.
- 2.6 The Sun, a typical starPlanned
Our own star as an ordinary star, with Aditya-L1 as India's eye on it.
- 2.7 One chart for every starPlanned
The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, which organises every star by brightness and temperature.
- 3.1 Where the elements come fromDraft
Stellar nucleosynthesis: how stars build carbon, oxygen and iron.
- 3.2 Making goldPlanned
Supernovae and neutron-star mergers, the violent events that make the heaviest elements.
- 3.3 The periodic table as a history bookPlanned
Every element has an origin story; the periodic table arranged by where each one was made.
- 3.4 Why carbon?Planned
Bonding, chains and rings: why carbon chemistry is the chemistry of complexity.
- 3.5 Molecules in spacePlanned
Dust, ice and organic molecules between the stars.
- 3.6 From quarks to the HiggsDraft
The fundamental particles and the four forces that shape matter.
- 3.7 Are you really made of stardust?Planned
The famous claim, tested element by element.
- 9.1 The next century: climatePlanned
What the climate models say, what is settled, what is not, and what is still up to us.
- 9.2 Energy after fossil fuelsPlanned
Sun, wind, atoms and storage: the transition that decides what the next century looks like.
- 9.3 Machines that learnPlanned
Artificial intelligence, and whether it counts as a new kind of collective learning.
- 9.5 Leaving EarthPlanned
Space as a place to live, and the physics that makes it hard.
- 9.6 The deep futurePlanned
From the year 3000 to the death of the Sun and the fate of the universe.