Short History of Nearly Everything

about supernovae)))

“There’s something satisfying, I think,” Evans said, “about the idea of light traveling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an event of that magnitude should be witnessed.”

and Evans does it!

Finding a supernova therefore was a little bit like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first-birthday cake.

как судьба некоторых людей складывается интересно... жил себе человек, ничем особо не занимался, а тут пошел на лекцию о теории большого взрыва, заинтересовался моментом зарождения вселенной, создал свою теорию и вошел в историю.

Most of what we know, or believe we know, about the early moments of the universe is thanks to an idea called inflation theory first propounded in 1979 by a junior particle physicist, then at Stanford, now at MIT, named Alan Guth. He was thirty-two years old and, by his own admission, had never done anything much before. He would probably never have had his great theory except that he happened to attend a lecture on the Big Bang given by none other than Robert Dicke. The lecture inspired Guth to take an interest in cosmology, and in particular in the birth of the universe.