One of the most obvious facts about the universe is that the past is different from the future. We can turn an egg into an omelet, but can't turn an omelet into an egg. Physicists have codified this difference into the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the entropy of a closed system always increases with time. But why? The ultimate explanation is to be found in cosmology: special conditions in the early universe are responsible for the arrow of time.
Simon Singh grew up in Somerset, and completed his undergraduate work at Imperial College London, and his Ph.D. at Cambridge University and CERN. He has worked with the BBCs Science Department since 1990. In 1996, Singh directed the award-winning documentary Fermats Last Theorem. The documentary was also nominated for an Emmy under the American title The Proof. He is the author of three books, most recently, the Big Bang, a history of cosmology.
Astronomers believe our Universe began in a Big Bang, and is expanding around us. Brian Schmidt will describe the life of the Universe that we live in, and how astronomers have used observations to trace our Universe's history back more than 13 Billion years. With this data a puzzling picture has been pieced together where 96% of the Cosmos is made up of two mysterious substances, Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
