Illustrated Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe

In this series of lectures, I will attempt to give an outline of what we believe to be the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to black holes. In the first lecture I will briefly review previous ideas about the universe and how we will get our current picture. One might call this the history of the history of the universe. In the second lecture I will describe how Newton and Einstein led to the conclusion that the universe cannot be static. It must either be expanding or contracting. This in turn implies that there must have been a time between ten and twenty billion years ago when the density of the universe was infinite. This is called the Big Bang. It could have been the beginning of the universe.