"John Dobson. Einstein's Physics Of Illusion (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

pointed out that all these things that we see are made out of not more than
92 ingredients. Those are the 92 chemical elements of the periodic table. It
was suggested in 1815 that all those different chemical elements are
probably made out of hydrogen. That was Prout's hypothesis, because in those
days no one knew how to do it. But now, in modern times,


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we do know how to do it, and we do know that that's what happens.
All the other chemical elements are made out of hydrogen, and it happens in
the stars"
The universe, even as it is today, consists mostly of hydrogen. And
what it is doing is falling together in the gravitational field. It falls
together to galaxies and stars, and the stars are hot. Falling together by
gravity is what makes them hot. And they get hot enough inside so that the
hydrogen is converted to.helium. Now helium is a very strong atomic nucleus,
and so the main line in building up the atoms of the atomic table goes this
way: First, four hydrogens make one helium. Then three heliums make one
carbon. Two heliums won't stick. That would be beryllium-8. There is no
beryllium-8. It won't last. But three heliums will stick, and that's carbon.
Four is oxygen. Five is neon. That's the way it goes in the stars; the other
nuclei are built of helium nuclei. Six makes magnesium. Then silicon,
sulfur, argon, calcium, titanium, chromium and iron.
In big stars it goes like this. But in small stars like our sun it goes
only up to carbon or possibly carbon and oxygen. That's where our sun will
end, at about the size of the earth, but with a density of about four
concrete mixing trucks in a one pint jar. Larger stars get too hot by their
own gravitational squeeze, and the carbon cannot cool off like that. They go
right on to oxygen and so on, until they get, in the center, to iron. Now
iron is the dumbest stuff in the universe. There is no nuclear energy
available to iron -- nothing by which it can fight back against
gravitational collapse; so gravity collapses it, this time to the density of
a hundred thousand airplane carriers squeezed into a one pint yogurt box One
hundred thousand airplane carriers in a one pint box! And, when it collapses
like that, the gravitational energy that is released to other forms blows
the outer portions of the star all over the galaxy. That's the stuff out of
which our bodies are made. Our bodies are all made out of star dust from
such exploding stars. We do know that the main ingredient of the universe is
hydrogen and that the main usable energy in the universe is gravitational.
We know that the name of the game is falling together by gravity (hydrogen,
falling together by gravity), but what we don't know is why things fall
together by gravity. We do know that the stuff out of which this universe is
made is hydrogen, but we do not know from where we get the hydrogen. We know
that the hydrogen is made of electrical particles, protons and electrons,
and we know that the total electrical charge of the universe is zero, but we
do not know, you see, why it is made of electricity. We do not know why it
falls together. And we do not know why, when things are moving, they should
coast. There are these gaps in our understanding. We know how things coast.
We know how things fall. We know how the electrical particles behave, but we
don't know any of the why questions. We don't have any answers to the why