The Greatest Story Ever Told (Location 36)
In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence. Conditions were so hot, the basic forces of nature that collectively describe the universe were unified. Though still unknown how it came into existence, this sub-pinpoint-size cosmos could only expand. Rapidly. In what today we call the big bang. (Location 39)
Shortly before, during, and after the strong and electroweak forces parted company, the universe was a seething soup of quarks, leptons, and their antimatter siblings, along with bosons, the particles that enable their interactions. (Location 71)
3,000 degrees Kelvin (about half the temperature of the Sun’s surface), and all the free electrons combine with nuclei. The marriage leaves behind (Location 128)
For the first billion years, the universe continued to expand and cool as matter gravitated into the massive concentrations we call galaxies. Nearly a hundred billion of them formed, each containing hundreds of billions of stars (Location 132)
The three most important are the conservation of mass and energy, the conservation of linear and angular momentum, and the conservation of electric charge. These laws are in evidence on Earth, (Location 249)
The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. (Location 267)
Quasars are super-luminous galaxy cores whose light has typically been traveling for billions of years across space before reaching our telescopes. (Location 455)
Edwin P. Hubble discovered that the universe is not static. He had found and assembled convincing evidence that the more distant a galaxy, the faster the galaxy recedes from the Milky Way. In other words, the universe is expanding. (Location 703)