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“Can I see the book?” Often someone will ask you about a book that you read in public. But this is what happened to me while reading Felicitas Mockler’s book, which directly reinforced my impression: “The Evolution of the Universe” is a very beautiful book, full of wonderful color astronomical pictures, printed in high quality. And even if it is not entirely light in the hand and weighs more than a kilogram, you still don’t want to put it aside. The pictures impress you a lot – it is also visible over several meters.
In nine chapters, the author provides an outline of modern cosmology–from the discovery of the expansion of the universe 100 years ago to the current debate over the discrepancy between different values of the expansion rate of the universe. The so-called Hubble constant can be measured in different ways, and in recent years astronomers have been able to improve the accuracy so that today it seems clear that the value obtained from the cosmic background radiation does not agree with that, which is produced by the classical methods of astronomical distance stairs. The difference is now so striking that there is speculation about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with the well-established picture of the universe.
Of course, Mokler gently introduces the reader to the topic. The text is a successful combination, because it explains for long periods in parallel how our worldview has evolved in the past century and how the evolution of the universe has taken place. The common denominator is the development of our knowledge, which, predictably, leads to the great mysteries of cosmology: What could be the dark matter visible in a variety of very different observations? Is dark energy really the cosmological constant that appears in general relativity but cannot be assigned a normal value there? What does the long-term future of the universe look like? Will there be a Big Bounce, or will dark energy become so dominant again that new particle-antiparticle pairs can form, similar to the inflationary phase of the Big Bang?
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