Q & A

We have received several questions asking about the availability of BANG! in Australasia.

General Question from BANG! readers

Further info for anyone asking whether/when copies are available in Australia and NZ: we have sold it to publishers in both.

Bookwise will publish it in Australia (out this month) and contactable on: www.bookwise.com.au and

Reed Publishing published it in New Zealand (it was published last Friday) and they are contactable on: www.reed.co.nz.

Carlton Books Ltd

Dear Dr. May,

Huge fan! Got that out of the way.

I am curious about your feelings regarding one very interesting question when it comes to the BIG BANG. Keep in mind as I ask this question that I do believe the Universe started with a concentrated explosion (if you will), and that it is ever-expanding as I type. However, no order ever comes from an explosion... only chaos and destruction. So, here is my question...

If the universe did in fact come from an explosive force, then how is it that so many recorded heavenly bodies have been found in "perfect" orbit around their gravitational centers?

I mean our little solar system in itself is a marvel, is it not? The precision it takes us humans to create a perfect satelite orbit around the Earth is painstakenly perfect, or it decays in either direction. Yet these 9 (old fashion statement any more) planets around our sun seen to maintain just that... a perfect orbit. How?

I welcome your thoughts and opinions here, and should you respond privately or on your website, I would let you know my theories on this matter.

Keep Rockin',

Eddie McCracken - CA, USA

This question and answer originated from the Brian May web site: www.brianmay.com

I think we have to clear up one thing here. The Big Bang, if it did indeed happen as we are suggesting in the book, is not an ordinary explosion. Explosions in our experience always burst out into a space which is already occupied, and of course this DOES cause disruption and destruction, to the objects which were there first. In the language of Physics, ENTROPY is increased, because more chaos, more disorder, is introduced.

But THE BIG ONE is entirely different. We believe the Universe was, and is, exploding into nothing .... we believe that Space and Time did not, and do not, exist outside that expanding fireball. So there coud be no-one standing outside to see it the way we have depicted it (for fun, really) on the cover of our book. And there would be no objects which would get disturbed. We are seeing here an EXPANSION - which perhaps actually has more in common with a balloon being blown up than Nov 5th Banger. So the question of why the Universe looks nice and neat in some ways does not arise. But even this is an illusion really. Your planets in 'perfect' orbits are in fact only stable for periods which are blinks of an eye relative to the grand scale of the Universe. As you'll see in the book, even our cosy, safe-feeling Earth is in a very unsafe place. At present it is an elliptical orbit at a comfortable distance from an apparently stable star, but this will not be so for long, cosmologically speaking. I'm afraid I don't see anything out there as 'perfect' - it is just what it is, a vast agglomeration of matter and energy churning around in a variety of ways, evolving, never still, never stable, and in fact always running down. Yes, Entropy will get the better of us all in the end!

Cheers

Brian May

Why can i feel the heat of the sun stood on Earth yet if i were to travel 50 million miles closer to it i would probably freeze at a molecular level, now given the trillions of stars in the universe that would produce an immeasurable heat source why does space remain absolute zero? by the way are there any plans to take BANG! on tour i.e book signings?

Paul Nicholson - Birmingham, UK

Hi Paul.

There are many facets to your question(s). I'm not sure if I can answer them all on this page .. but ....

To begin with, "temperature" is a concept that can mean different things in different situations - especially to physicists. In every-day life we think something is hot if it communicates heat to our skin .... but actually this can be for various reasons. In the height of a hot summer, you could pick up a leaf from the pavement and have no problem, but if you picked up a metal key from the same place, which would measure the same temperature, it would probably be too hot to hold. Similarly you could put your hand in some of the plasma in those pictures from Hubble, which is said by astronomers to be at millions of degrees K, and not feel a thing. Astronomers measure temperatures by the speed at which the molecules are rushing about and bumping into each other. If you did indeed go 50 million miles closer to the Sun, my feeling is you would not last long ... I don't know why you think you would freeze ... if you were suspended on space on your own, yes, the side of you which was facing away from the Sun would get pretty cold, but that is true for an astronaut even in the neighbourhood of the Earth. Luckily their suits give them protection. The big problem would be dealing with the direct heat of the Sun at that distance. You would be at about 43 million miles from our Mother Star ..... close to the orbit of Mercury. The surface of Mercury gets to over 400 degrees Centigrade, so it's a pretty safe bet that, unless you had an amazingly efficient heat-dispersing space suit, you would fry very quickly.

Your question about the temperature of space ? Very briefly, yes there are countless billions of stars in the Universe, emitting vast amounts of energy, but the stars are very far apart ... so far that if two galaxies collide, there are very few collisions between stars (this always suprises me! ) ... so all this radiation has an awful lot of space to fill ... the "Temperature of Space" is hard to define - you will get different answers by measuring different particles. As I understand it, a unique temperature can really only be assigned meaningfully to a volume which is enclosed and in equilibrium, so all the molecules have had time to share their energy with each other. I'm not sure who told you that Space is at absolute zero, but I can tell you that the laws of Thermodynamics do not allow this. There is no such thing as a perfect vacuum, and no particle can be said to be at absolute zero. This would actually conflict with the famous Uncertainty Principle too ... it would mean that we would know exactly where the particle in question was, and exactly how fast it was moving (not!). Heisenberg's great perception forbids this.

The last question is perhaps the hardest to answer. Book signings. These are just about the most scary events (to be in the middle of) known to Man. Of course I would like to sell loads of copies of BANG!, and get out there and meet our readers - but I am not sure if any of our bodies would withstand the stress! For now we are hoping that we will 'meet' many of our readers like this - ON LINE! Thanks for communicating.

Cheers!

Brian May

Hi Mr May, I'm Italian, excuse me for my english. Well, I want to know if this book will be in italian, because I want to buy it, but in my language. This is a good work and I want to know it.

Francesca - Italy

Yes, Francesca, we are hoping for a release for Bang! in Italian. Thank you for asking !!

Cheers

Brian May

I am often baffled at the fact that 'outer space' is infinite. Is this really the case? For example, if someone is floating in outer space and fires a bullet from a gun - would that bullet (provided that it doesn't hit anything in its path) travel in the one direction for ever...and ever...and ever Or does it get to a point where it can't possibly travel any futher?

Andrew Reid - St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada

I like this question !

Andrew, my best answer to this might be to say "It's in the book ! " But the short answer is that we don't think your bullet would ever get to the point where it met a boundary.   It's one of those concepts which don't really make sense until you just give in and 'believe' it ! Sorry, that sounds vaguely religious, but that's not the intention! If we had grown up from babies seeing people moving at speeds close to the speed of light, and consequently getting shorter and heavier, we wouldn't need it explaining to us!  This is Einstein's special Relativity, and his great genius was to realise this might be so without ever having seen it. But even Einstein didn't attempt to explain WHY. No one has since, either. The Universe is just like that. It's the same with this concept.

You don't come to a boundary because the 3-dimensional Universe, although finite, is not bounded - like the 2-dimensional surface of a ball. If you were an ant crawling on the surface of a football, unable to jump off, you would never get to a boundary, no matter how far you crawled, in what you THOUGHT was a straight line.   But the surface of that ball is not infinite - it has a measurable area - right?   Like the ant, we THINK we are travelling in straight lines, but, thanks largely to Einstein, we now know that space itself is curved, so your bullet, given a few billion years, would seem to be bound to eventually come back to where it started.  But of course no one has been able to observe this happening. If you do, please let us know!  If we lived that long, it would make shooting bullets into space pretty dangerous!

P.S. This thing about a bullet coming back is a neat thought, but very much in doubt, in reality, I think. I have been reliably informed by people more well-informed than me, that if we live in an finite but unbounded Universe that is OPEN - ie expanding forever, and possibly at an increasing rate, the bullet's goalposts would be moving all the time, and it would get tired before it came back ! I woudl like to leave this as on open question !

cheers !

Brian May

Viewing page 6 of 7 : Newer - Latest - Older