Big Bang: The Origin Of The Universe

I read so many books to put together the same facts I just found in one book: Big Bang by Simon Singh. I savored every single word. The way the book is written makes it easy to grasp the concepts, which were given an equal amount of thought and consideration. The summaries at the end of each chapter, as well as the tables of comparison, constitute an efficient way of serving the objectivity with which these topics are discussed throughout the book. Loved it, loved it! I highly recommend it to everyone who loves science in general, this including old and new theories alike.

Another excellent book from Dr. Singh I could not put down. This book has increased my interest in the cosmos; I will now search for a book to fill in the gaps mentioned by other researchers in the hope of understanding the concepts behind the search for dark matter in the CERN laboratories. I will also buy a telescope and teach my son some of the concepts contained in this book.

This time, in his 3rd book with the similar approach, Simon Singh dwelves into the world of Cosmology (leaving Fermat's Theorem and Coding Theory behind) with the intension of popularizing this field, making it approachable for a broader audience. Does he succeed? Yes, he does (as always this far).

Starting out with the presentation of thoughts on the universe by Greek philosophers, continuing with outlining the ideas (and personalities) of, for instance, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galilei & Einstein, and in the final run describing the back-and-forth battle between the believers of a stationary in contrast to a expanding universe (assuming an infinitely old universe in contrast to creation through a 'Big bang') he takes us on a long, but both fascinating and inspirational journey.

Throughout this trip, we are exposed to a rich amount of facts corresponding to thoughts and derivations based on scientific logic and brilliance from such diverse fields as atomic theory, general physics, chemistry, mathematics and (of course) astronomy. Though the mathematics are kept to a minimum, it might help the reader to be to some extent acquainted with scientifc reasoning based on logical arguments and to hold some tiny insight into the world of academics.

You will meet a set of truly outstanding personalities and make your way through the accumulation of knowledge (in the paradigm-sense) through brilliant theories and observations, all presented in a logically, lively, well-structured and exciting way. You will most likely learn exlicitly by absorbing the actual content, and implicitly through kick-starting your knowledge-searching inherent ability, ending up a brighter and/or better person so to speak. A must read!

[Note: The Swedish-version contains some extra material through comments by the translator Margareta Brogren (for example putting some things into a Swedish context) and the expert reader Hans-Uno Bengtsson (for example making some concepts up-to-date or extending them). Impressive!]

What is the origin of the universe? What does the nighttime sky say about the manner in which this universe has evolved? How have astronomers sought to learn the answer to these and other fundamental questions? "Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe," by physicist turned journalist Simon Singh, seeks to provide answers to these questions. It is a broad, useful overview that serves well as an introductory text for neophytes and students, but it will be disappointing to scholars of all stripes. For example, its title may mislead too many readers. Anyone seeking a cosmological discussion of the origins and evolution of the universe--and there are many very good books on this subject and a broad audience reading them--they will be disappointed with Singh's work. Instead of cosmology of the type offered by such popular science writers as James S. Trefil, John Gribbin, Brian Greene, or Paul Davies, this is a history--and a singularly linear one at that--of how the theory of the Big Bang emerged in the science community in the early part of the twentieth century and eventually came to be accepted as the standard method of explaining the origins of the universe.

After two introductory chapters that lay out a generalized version of cosmology from the ancients to the beginning of the twentieth century and a discussion of Einstein and his place in astrophysics Singh relates how the notion of a Big Bang gained a foothold in the scientific discipline. He emphasizes how hotly disputed this prospect was at first, suggesting as it does that all of the matter of the universe might have been rolled into a infinitesimally small point that exploded with such force that matter moved outward, setting in motion the forces that create stars, galaxies, planets, and eventually life. Offered first by the Belgian priest and scientist, Georges Lemaitre, this concept of an explosive beginning to the universe found few adherents because of a dearth of supporting evidence. For many scientists, such a "creation" also smacked of religious ideology. The observations of Edwin Hubble on the expanding universe in the 1920s provided some of the first undisputable evidence that something violent had taken place at some point in the history of the universe.

Over time, as scientific data mounted, the Big Bang gradually gained support in key scientific communities and eventually became the standard explanation of how the universe has evolved. Most of this change came in the heady years following World War II when new technologies offered startling new scientific understandings. Among the most important of these capabilities involved the radio telescope and advances in spectroscopy, employed by a myriad of researchers to collect data about the universe, to explore the chemistry of stars. They discovered that the uneven distribution of galaxies in the universe called into question other modes of explanation. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson proved to be the critical scientists in collecting and interpreting this data, finding that background radiation existed in the cosmos and gaining the Nobel Prize in 1978 for this discovery. Others followed. NASA's COBE satellite in the early 1990s discovered background radiation of varying densities clumped in various parts of the universe that could have fostered the formation of galaxies. NASA scientist John Mather received the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his path breaking work with COBE. Others dated the origins of the universe to 13.7 billion years ago, with a margin of error of +/- 200 million years.

A central actor in this story was the eminent British astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the term "Big Bang" as a derisive label for the theory. Hoyle became the theory's most vocal and obvious critic, and offered an alternative theory labeled the "Steady State" universe that sought to counteract the "Big Bang" model. Central to his theory was a timeless universe in which matter was continuously being created and annihilated. For more than two decades his theory garnered the lion's share of support from cosmologists, but over time the weight of countervailing evidence swung against the "Steady State" model.

Hoyle refused to give up on his theory despite mounting evidence supporting the "Big Bang," however, and Singh makes much of his intransigence. One of Singh's major conclusions is explained thus: "Death is an essential element in the progress of science, since it takes care of conservative scientists of a previous generation reluctant to let go of an old, fallacious theory and embrace a new and accurate one" (p. 75). In Singh's estimation, Hoyle and his theory died together. This is an unfortunate conclusion on many levels. While there are always diehard advocates of any theory, scientific or other, in most instances scientists are persuaded by compelling evidence and that is what happened in the case of the "Big Bang." The process of scientific advancement is much more complex than waiting for the advocates of an alternative explanation to die off. It involves alteration of models over time to take into account new data and understandings. It may, but does not always, involve the overthrow of a dominant paradigm after the facts no longer support it as Thomas S. Kuhn famously analyzed in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (University of Chicago Press, 1962). There are also many instances of how scientists were more open-minded than Hoyle. For one, Harold Urey abandoned his model for the capture theory to explain the origins of the Moon when evidence went against him during the Apollo era, as historian of science Stephen G. Brush noted in "Fruitful Encounters: The Origin of the Solar System and of the Moon from Chamberlin to Apollo" (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Singh's facile explanation is both less illuminating than the complex processes of scientific discovery and incorporation of it into the body of knowledge. He does a disservice to scientists and their scientific pursuits with such easy explanations.

While "Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe" is an entertaining and sometimes enlightening work, it could have been so much more. A sophisticated history of how scientists formulated, evolved, and adopted the "Big Bang" model of the universe is a noble endeavor deserving of serious scholarly attention. We have the beginnings of it in Singh's book, but historians of science have yet to tackle this important subject in their research. Potentially, the history of how the Big Bang gained primacy as a scientific explanation of the universe's origins could be a study as significant of the replacement of the Ptolemaic with the Copernican model of the solar system as explained by Kuhn. I await such a path-breaking study.

I had read the first two books by Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma and The Code Book, a I was very pleased with them. However, I'm not very interested in astronomy and the big bang, so I didn't want to read this book at first. However, when I finally decided to give it a go, it turned out to be just as good as the first books! From now on, I'll read everything Simon Singh writes, no matter how boring they may sound!