The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture of the Universe by J. Richard Gott (PDF)

Description

A gripping first-person account of how scientists came to understand our universe’s mysterious structureJ. Richard Gott was among the first cosmologists to propose that the structure of our universe is like a sponge made up of clusters of galaxies intricately connected by filaments of galaxies―a magnificent structure now called the “cosmic web” and mapped extensively by teams of astronomers. Here is his gripping insider’s account of how a generation of undaunted theorists and observers solved the mystery of the architecture of our cosmos.The Cosmic Web begins with modern pioneers of extragalactic astronomy, such as Edwin Hubble and Fritz Zwicky. It goes on to describe how, during the Cold War, the American school of cosmology favored a model of the universe where galaxies resided in isolated clusters, whereas the Soviet school favored a honeycomb pattern of galaxies punctuated by giant, isolated voids. Gott tells the stories of how his own path to a solution began with a high-school science project when he was eighteen, and how he and astronomer Mario Jurič measured the Sloan Great Wall of Galaxies, a filament of galaxies that, at 1.37 billion light-years in length, is one of the largest structures in the universe.Drawing on Gott’s own experiences working at the frontiers of science with many of today’s leading cosmologists, The Cosmic Web shows how ambitious telescope surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are transforming our understanding of the cosmos, and how the cosmic web holds vital clues to the origins of the universe and the next trillion years that lie ahead.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Cosmology & Astronomy, Association of American Publishers””One of Symmetry Magazine’s Physics Books of 2016″”With an insider’s insight and a storyteller’s eye for detail. . . . Gott offers a thorough, vivid, and fascinating look at the cosmic web that makes up our universe.” ― Publishers Weekly”The Cosmic Webis not just a well-told story about the frontiers of cosmological knowledge. It is also an inspiration to explore them further.”—Michael Blanton, Nature”Weaving together personal anecdotes with physics and math, Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott’s The Cosmic Web chronicles the nearly 100-year quest to understand the anatomy of the universe. . . . Gott brings detailed insight to how our view of the cosmos has changed, providing a thorough accounting of how cosmologists arrived at these revelations.”—Christopher Crockett, Science News”Provides an outstanding summation of [Gott’s] search for understanding the spongy cosmic web that characterizes the universe at large scales. . . . [A] magnificent achievement.”—David Eicher, Astronomy Magazine”With a style that’s rich in fascinating detail, and bolstered by personal memories and anecdotes,The Cosmic Webdelivers everything we need in a book on this subject.”—Alastair Gunn, BBC Sky at Night”An extraordinary book guiding the reader through the large scale of the Universe and the structure scientists encounter whilst looking at the Universe as a whole.” ― Read about Science”I enjoyed this book hugely. It should be on the shelf of anyone who is intrigued by why the Universe looks the way it does.”—Alan Longstaff, Astronomy Now”Full to the brim with wonderful analogies and genuinely interesting anecdotes that should be a component of all popular science books. If you’ve ever looked up at the night sky and wondered why it looks the way it does, this is one book you should really consider reading.”—Amber Hornsby, Popular Astronomy”Fascinating. . . . I think it should be in every library which aims to cover astrophysics and cosmology.”—G.W. Gibbons, Contemporary Physics Review “Always riveting and thought-provoking, Gott deftly drills down, tunneling through our spongelike universe to reveal wide vistas for contemplation.”―Siobhan Roberts, author of Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway”If you’re baffled by such things as dark matter, dark energy, and the curvature of space-time, help is at hand. J. Richard Gott is an eminent physicist who has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the cosmos―but he also has a gift for expressing complex ideas in clear, compelling language. The Cosmic Web is a terrific guide to what astrophysicists know about the universe, what they don’t know, and how they’re searching for answers.”―Michael D. Lemonick, author of Mirror Earth: The Search for Our Planet’s Twin”Cosmology fans and budding cosmologists will benefit from Gott’s story of the personalities and ideas behind a century of discovery about our universe and its structure. We learn of Gott’s role in the concept of the multiverse and many other aspects of modern cosmology―and, as he puts it, whether the universe resembles meatballs or Swiss cheese.”―Jay M. Pasachoff, Williams College”With lucidity and dry wit, Gott tells the story of how he and his colleagues mapped the large-scale structure of the universe, drawing together the physics of large and small in what must rank among the most significant scientific attainments of modern times. The Cosmic Web is easily accessible to general readers, but I’m betting that even cosmological aficionados will learn from it. Essential reading for everyone interested in how the cosmos got to be what it is today.―Timothy Ferris”This is an excellent book written by a major contributor to the research on cosmic structure. Gott shows how theory, simulations, and galaxy redshift surveys combine to give us a detailed understanding of the ‘cosmic web,’ and convincingly describes how our knowledge has advanced as computation and observational capabilities have improved.”―Chris Impey, coauthor of Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration”By going beyond a sort of ‘Cosmology 101′ pseudo-history. . . Gott provides a complement to this more conventional story, artfully recounting the excitement, debates, and false directions that led to our current ‘best bet’ theoretical description of the universe.”―Martin Bucher,Physics World”Not only do astronomers know the extent and content of the universe, they know where it all came from. . . . It is a picture of our universe that previous generations would have killed for. Gott describes all of this with clarity, charm and infectious enthusiasm. . . . Excellent.”―Marcus Chown,Times Higher Education From the Back Cover “Always riveting and thought-provoking, Gott deftly drills down, tunneling through our spongelike universe to reveal wide vistas for contemplation.”–Siobhan Roberts, author of Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway”If you’re baffled by such things as dark matter, dark energy, and the curvature of space-time, help is at hand. J. Richard Gott is an eminent physicist who has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the cosmos–but he also has a gift for expressing complex ideas in clear, compelling language. The Cosmic Web is a terrific guide to what astrophysicists know about the universe, what they don’t know, and how they’re searching for answers.”–Michael D. Lemonick, author of Mirror Earth: The Search for Our Planet’s Twin”Cosmology fans and budding cosmologists will benefit from Gott’s story of the personalities and ideas behind a century of discovery about our universe and its structure. We learn of Gott’s role in the concept of the multiverse and many other aspects of modern cosmology–and, as he puts it, whether the universe resembles meatballs or Swiss cheese.”–Jay M. Pasachoff, Williams College”With lucidity and dry wit, Gott tells the story of how he and his colleagues mapped the large-scale structure of the universe, drawing together the physics of large and small in what must rank among the most significant scientific attainments of modern times. The Cosmic Web is easily accessible to general readers, but I’m betting that even cosmological aficionados will learn from it. Essential reading for everyone interested in how the cosmos got to be what it is today.–Timothy Ferris”This is an excellent book written by a major contributor to the research on cosmic structure. Gott shows how theory, simulations, and galaxy redshift surveys combine to give us a detailed understanding of the ‘cosmic web, ‘ and convincingly describes how our knowledge has advanced as computation and observational capabilities have improved.”–Chris Impey, coauthor of Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration”By going beyond a sort of ‘Cosmology 101’ pseudo-history. . . Gott provides a complement to this more conventional story, artfully recounting the excitement, debates, and false directions that led to our current ‘best bet’ theoretical description of the universe.”–Martin Bucher, Physics World”Not only do astronomers know the extent and content of the universe, they know where it all came from. . . . It is a picture of our universe that previous generations would have killed for. Gott describes all of this with clarity, charm and infectious enthusiasm. . . . Excellent.”–Marcus Chown, Times Higher Education About the Author J. Richard Gott is professor emeritus of astrophysics at Princeton University. He is the coauthor of Welcome to the Universe (Princeton). Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Some works of popular science, trying to impress the reader with the scale of the universe and the insignificance of humans on the cosmic scale, argue that there’s nothing special about our place in the universe: “an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary star, in a typical orbit within an ordinary galaxy”, or something like that. But this is wrong! Surfaces of planets make up a vanishingly small fraction of the volume of the universe, and habitable planets, where beings like ourselves are neither frozen nor fried by extremes of temperature, nor suffocated or poisoned by a toxic atmosphere, are rarer still. The Sun is far from an ordinary star: it is brighter than 85% of the stars in the galaxy, and only 7.8% of stars in the Milky Way share its spectral class. Fully 76% of stars are dim red dwarves, the heavens’ own 25 watt bulbs.What does a typical place in the universe look like? What would you see if you were there? Well, first of all, you’d need a space suit and air supply, since the universe is mostly empty. And you’d see nothing. Most of the volume of the universe consists of great voids with few galaxies. If you were at a typical place in the universe, you’d be in one of these voids, probably far enough from the nearest galaxy that it wouldn’t be visible to the unaided eye. There would be no stars in the sky, since stars are only formed within galaxies. There would only be darkness. Now look out the window: you are in a pretty special place after all.One of the great intellectual adventures of the last century is learning our place in the universe and coming to understand its large scale structure. This book, by an astrophysicist who has played an important role in discovering that structure, explains how we pieced together the evidence and came to learn the details of the universe we inhabit. It provides an insider’s look at how astronomers tease insight out of the messy and often confusing data obtained from observation.It’s remarkable not just how much we’ve learned, but how recently we’ve come to know it. At the start of the 20th century, most astronomers believed the solar system was part of a disc of stars which we see as the Milky Way. In 1610, Galileo’s telescope revealed that the Milky Way was made up of a multitude of faint stars, and since the galaxy makes a band all around the sky, that the Sun must be within it. In 1918, by observing variable stars in globular clusters which orbit the Milky Way, Harlow Shapley was able to measure the size of the galaxy, which proved much larger than previously estimated, and determine that the Sun was about half way from the centre of the galaxy to its edge. Still, the universe was the galaxy.There remained the mystery of the “spiral nebulæ”. These faint smudges of light had been revealed by photographic time exposures through large telescopes to be discs, some with prominent spiral arms, viewed from different angles. Some astronomers believed them to be gas clouds within the galaxy, perhaps other solar systems in the process of formation, while others argued they were galaxies like the Milky Way, far distant in the universe. In 1920 a great debate pitted the two views against one another, concluding that insufficient evidence existed to decide the matter.That evidence would not be long in coming. Shortly thereafter, using the new 100 inch telescope on Mount Wilson in California, Edwin Hubble was able to photograph the Andromeda Nebula and resolve it into individual stars. Just as Galileo had done three centuries earlier for the Milky Way, Hubble’s photographs proved Andromeda was not a gas cloud, but a galaxy composed of a multitude of stars. Further, Hubble was able to identify variable stars which allowed him to estimate its distance: due to details about the stars which were not understood at the time, he underestimated the distance by about a factor of two, but it was clear the galaxy was far beyond the Milky Way. The distances to other nearby galaxies were soon measured.In one leap, the scale of the universe had become breathtakingly larger. Instead of one galaxy comprising the universe, the Milky Way was just one of a multitude of galaxies scattered around an enormous void. When astronomers observed the spectra of these galaxies, they noticed something odd: spectral lines from stars in most galaxies were shifted toward the red end of the spectrum compared to those observed on Earth. This was interpreted as a Doppler shift due to the galaxy’s moving away from the Milky Way. Between 1929 and 1931, Edwin Hubble measured the distances and redshifts of a number of galaxies and discovered there was a linear relationship between the two. A galaxy twice as distant as another would be receding at twice the velocity. The universe was expanding, and every galaxy (except those sufficiently close to be gravitationally bound) was receding from every other galaxy.The discovery of the redshift-distance relationship provided astronomers a way to chart the cosmos in three dimensions. Plotting the position of a galaxy on the sky and measuring its distance via redshift allowed building up a model of how galaxies were distributed in the universe. Were they randomly scattered, or would patterns emerge, suggesting larger-scale structure?Galaxies had been observed to cluster: the nearest cluster, in the constellation Virgo, is made up of at least 1300 galaxies, and is now known to be part of a larger supercluster of which the Milky Way is an outlying member. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that large-scale redshift surveys allowed plotting the positions of galaxies in the universe, initially in thin slices, and eventually in three dimensions. What was seen was striking. Galaxies were not sprinkled at random through the universe, but seemed to form filaments and walls, with great voids containing little or no galaxies. How did this come to be?In parallel with this patient observational work, theorists were working out the history of the early universe based upon increasingly precise observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which provides a glimpse of the universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. This ushered in the era of precision cosmology, where the age and scale of the universe were determined with great accuracy, and the tiny fluctuations in temperature of the early universe were mapped in detail. This led to a picture of the universe very different from that imagined by astronomers over the centuries. Ordinary matter: stars, planets, gas clouds, and you and me—everything we observe in the heavens and the Earth—makes up less than 5% of the mass-energy of the universe. Dark matter, which interacts with ordinary matter only through gravitation, makes up 26.8% of the universe. It can be detected through its gravitational effects on the motion of stars and galaxies, but at present we don’t have any idea what it’s composed of. (It would be more accurate to call it “transparent matter” since it does not interact with light, but “dark matter” is the name we’re stuck with.) The balance of the universe, 68.3%, is dark energy, a form of energy filling empty space and causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. We have no idea at all about the nature of dark energy. These three components: ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy add up to give the universe a flat topology. It is humbling to contemplate the fact that everything we’ve learned in all of the sciences is about matter which makes up less than 5% of the universe: the other 95% is invisible and we don’t know anything about it (although there are abundant guesses or, if you prefer, hypotheses).This may seem like a flight of fancy, or a case of theorists making up invisible things to explain away observations they can’t otherwise interpret. But in fact, dark matter and dark energy, originally inferred from astronomical observations, make predictions about the properties of the cosmic background radiation, and these predictions have been confirmed with increasingly high precision by successive space-based observations of the microwave sky. These observations are consistent with a period of cosmological inflation in which a tiny portion of the universe expanded to encompass the entire visible universe today. Inflation magnified tiny quantum fluctuations of the density of the universe to a scale where they could serve as seeds for the formation of structures in the present-day universe. Regions with greater than average density would begin to collapse inward due to the gravitational attraction of their contents, while those with less than average density would become voids as material within them fell into adjacent regions of higher density.Dark matter, being more than five times as abundant as ordinary matter, would take the lead in this process of gravitational collapse, and ordinary matter would follow, concentrating in denser regions and eventually forming stars and galaxies. The galaxies formed would associate into gravitationally bound clusters and eventually superclusters, forming structure at larger scales. But what does the universe look like at the largest scale? Are galaxies distributed at random; do they clump together like meatballs in a soup; or do voids occur within a sea of galaxies like the holes in Swiss cheese? The answer is, surprisingly, none of the above, and the author explains the research, in which he has been a key participant, that discovered the large scale structure of the universe.As increasingly more comprehensive redshift surveys of galaxies were made, what appeared was a network of filaments which connected to one another, forming extended structures. Between filaments were voids containing few galaxies. Some of these structures, such as the Sloan Great Wall, at 1.38 billion light years in length, are 1/10 the radius of the observable universe. Galaxies are found along filaments, and where filaments meet, rich clusters and superclusters of galaxies are observed. At this large scale, where galaxies are represented by single dots, the universe resembles a neural network like the human brain.As ever more extensive observations mapped the three-dimensional structure of the universe we inhabit, progress in computing allowed running increasingly detailed simulations of the evolution of structure in models of the universe. Although the implementation of these simulations is difficult and complicated, they are conceptually simple. You start with a region of space, populate it with particles representing ordinary and dark matter in a sea of dark energy with random positions and density variations corresponding to those observed in the cosmic background radiation, then let the simulation run, computing the gravitational attraction of each particle on the others and tracking their motion under the influence of gravity. In 2005, Volker Springel and the Virgo Consortium ran the Millennium Simulation, which started from the best estimate of the initial conditions of the universe known at the time and tracked the motion of ten billion particles of ordinary and dark matter in a cube two billion light years on a side. As the simulation clock ran, the matter contracted into filaments surrounding voids, with the filaments joined at nodes rich in galaxies. The images produced by the simulation and the statistics calculated were strikingly similar to those observed in the real universe. The behaviour of this and other simulations increases confidence in the existence of dark matter and dark energy; if you leave them out of the simulation, you get results which don’t look anything like the universe we inhabit.At the largest scale, the universe isn’t made of galaxies sprinkled at random, nor meatballs of galaxy clusters in a sea of voids, nor a sea of galaxies with Swiss cheese like voids. Instead, it resembles a sponge of denser filaments and knots interpenetrated by less dense voids. Both the denser and less dense regions percolate: it is possible to travel from one edge of the universe to another staying entirely within more or less dense regions. (If the universe were arranged like a honeycomb, for example, with voids surrounded by denser walls, this would not be possible.) Nobody imagined this before the observational results started coming in, and now we’ve discovered that given the initial conditions of the universe after the Big Bang, the emergence of such a structure is inevitable.All of the structure we observe in the universe has evolved from a remarkably uniform starting point in the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. What will the future hold? The final chapter explores various scenarios for the far future. Because these depend upon the properties of dark matter and dark energy, which we don’t understand, they are necessarily speculative.The book is written for the general reader, but at a level substantially more difficult than many works of science popularisation. The author, a scientist involved in this research for decades, does not shy away from using equations when they illustrate an argument better than words. Readers are assumed to be comfortable with scientific notation, units like light years and parsecs, and logarithmically scaled charts. For some reason, in the Kindle edition dozens of hyphenated phrases are run together without any punctuation.

⭐If you’re an astronomer or physicist with professional familiarity with Gott’s subject, then you probably won’t learn much from this book. If you’re anyone else – inquisitive layman, amateur astronomer, even professional astronomer whose expertise lies in a different field – with a desire to learn what astronomers and physicists have discovered about one of The Big Questions, what the large-scale structure of the universe is, as well as why it’s that way, and how we determined this, told as a personal narrative by one of the principal players, then you should order this book as soon as you’ve read the reviews.The author takes the reader carefully and comprehensibly, but rigorously, through the story of early theories about the distribution of matter and galaxies throughout the Universe built on first principles, the acquisition of observational data, the advent of serious computing power, and the beautiful interactions of theory and observation that have led to the present-day understanding. The shape of the distribution of galaxies and dark matter in the Universe has been both predicted and verified to be “spongelike”, with all regions of above-average matter density being a complex, multiply connected 3D structure interlocking with a topologically similar structure comprising the regions of below-average density, with galaxies and dark matter strung along filaments running through the cores of the high-density structure. The shape of each of these regions is interconnected, meaning that you can travel from any spot in the high-density regime to any other spot without traversing a low-density volume, and vice-versa, just as water flows through a sponge. The story of how increasingly sophisticated conceptualization of conditions after the Big Bang and quantum fluctuations superimposed on cosmic inflation, of topological theory (in which Gott excelled from the time he was a teenager!), and of the application of statistics to cosmogony, interacted with increasingly sophisticated and voluminous observational data from ever-larger telescopes and cosmic surveys and with ballooning computational power is a beautiful and fascinating example of the methods of scientific progress. The confluence of multiple areas of both intellectual and experimental inquiry to form, and nail down, in several independent ways and to several decimal places, a consistent model of the beginning, evolution, current state, and ongoing behavior of the Universe is an utterly compelling achievement of modern science.The story commences at one 10-trillionth of a 10-trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and comprises cosmic inflation, density fluctuations due to quantum uncertainty, the application of statistical mechanics, the growth of areas of both high and low density, the origin of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), its virtually perfect fit to a blackbody spectrum, its pattern on the sky and the power spectrum of its variations, the virtually perfect fit of the power spectrum to the predictions from inflation, sound waves in the infant Universe, the prediction of the CMB and its detection, the COBE, WMAP, and PLANCK CMB-mapping satellites and their balloon-borne predecessors, the deduction of the presence of dark matter, the manifold evidence for its existence and its dominance of matter in the Universe, the anticipation of dark vacuum energy and the discovery, by mapping of distant supernovae, of its repulsive effect powering the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe that commenced half the lifetime of the Universe ago, the calculation of it as dominating the mass and energy complement of the Universe, and the awesome (not a word I use hyperbolically) agreement between theory and observation.A word about that agreement: In science, one often hears and thinks of theoretical projections of reality as being refined by observation and cobbled into shape before they reach their present level of refinement. But one of the almost miraculous things about the present picture of the Universe and its history is that just a few first principles, applied and carried to their logical conclusions, a few laws and constants and mathematical expressions, leavened with only a relatively little observational guidance, combined with the revelatory power of modern supercomputers, gave Gott and his colleagues a model universe whose structure and behavior replicate those of our observable Universe to within the limits of observational error. This is a truly astonishing thought.As one of my English Lit professors said at the start of her unit on Shakespeare, the Bard’s work “will reward a close reading”. The same is true of Gott’s work (there’s a bilingual pun in there about God’s work) That is, read on carefully, pay attention, think, be sure you understand what you’ve just read, rinse, repeat. This book is dense in terms of information, reasoning, and conclusions. It will reward a close reading. Those comfortable with a little algebra and physics will be able to stretch those muscles a bit, along with exercising the logic organs. But the book can be profitably and enjoyably read by those who wish to be more spectators than participants; that is, the more taxing parts of the arguments can be glossed over without losing sight of the grand picture. Sentences like “The measured tilt in the primordial power spectrum relative to the Harrison-Zeldovich constant amplitude hypothesis is -0.032 +/- 0.006… This compares amazingly well with the value predicted by inflation–for a simple model rolling slowly down a hill in the landscape: -0.0333” can be parsed, probably with references back to things discussed earlier, by those interested, or taken on faith by the more typical lay reader. Do not be deterred if you see passages like this in the “Look Inside” feature. This book very definitely IS for inquisitive lay people as well as anyone else seeking a peerless nonmathematical introduction to the Universe and how it got its spots – er, sponge (apologies to Janna Levin – see her book too!).

⭐Gott’s book is a study in science par excellence. It describes how the large scale structure of the universe emerged through gravitational instabilities created by density differences in the early, generally uniform, Universe. These overly dense gravity seed regions (initially dark matter, and later supported by baryonic matter) eventually formed a crisscrossed 3D network of elongated filamentary structures. The filaments are made of strings of galaxies. The intersections between filaments consists of immense dense clusters of galaxies with huge areas between filaments that are largly barren of galaxies. We know this today as the “cosmic web”.The text describes the history of the scientific process involved and the detailed analysis behind this amazing web-like discovery. The fascinating thing about the science behind all of this is how beautifully theory, models, and observation all came together. The diagrams and pictures are wonderfully descriptive.I cannot do justice here; anyone interested in this subject matter must read this book.Rich

⭐The author is one of the great minds of our time and is involved in many of the revelations of the last 30 years . He has done a good job of leading us thru our understanding of the structure and history to the possible future of our universe. The book explains his current thoughts on the creation of our current universe and the structure of the web that is our universe. It also gives us the possible paths that our future may hold due to the changes that are occurring in our universe. I recommend this book for all those interested in the structure and future of our universe.

⭐For the most part, this is a very interesting book and the account of the development of our understanding of the large-scale geometry of matter in the universe is well done, though there is rather a lot of emphasis on the author as the hero of his own narrative. However, the book falls apart in the last chapter, “dark energy and the fate of the universe”. This is so sketchy as to be useless, with various thoughts about what might happen on googleplex type timescales displayed without much discussion of the basis of, and potential justification for, these speculations. Roger Penrose in ‘Cycles of Time’ illustrates that this type of speculative analysis can be done very much better.

⭐Updated information and latest developments of cosmology. Very nicely written in a story telling fashion.

⭐Highly informatve and packed with latest results. I highly recommend this brilliant book

Keywords

Free Download The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture of the Universe in PDF format
The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture of the Universe PDF Free Download
Download The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture of the Universe 2016 PDF Free
The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture of the Universe 2016 PDF Free Download
Download The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture of the Universe PDF
Free Download Ebook The Cosmic Web: Mysterious Architecture of the Universe