Customer Reviews

Before The Beginning: Our Universe And Others (Helix Books)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a book about Cosmology from a big perspective. It takes a view on the very existance of our universe. How it may have come into being and what there may be beyond it in time and space.

Of course, these matters are not the subject of simple experiments but it is remarkable that our understanding of nature allows such speculation.

This book is aimed at a non-technical audience and the overall style is clear and the arguments lucid.

The author starts with an introduction that explains our universe as it has been understood through the main developments of physics in the last one hundred years. The sections on gravitation effects, ranging from stellar collapse to massive black holes missing mass and expansion were presented with great clarity.

However, if you are looking for a book that talks about "Before the Beginning", you may just find yourself wondering why you read the first nine chapters. They are a good, non-technical introduction but they are about our universe from the big bang to the present time.

The last 40% of the book actually contains material hinted at in the title. The author makes the point that our universe is remarkable in the way that it is fit for human life. He then links this observation to the current thinking about the origins of the universe.

Perhaps, our universe is one of many. Very, very many and this one just happens to suit the development of life but there may be many universes "out there" that are still born in the sense that they cannot support life.

Reese explains how space time inflation may lead to universes with different laws of physics and how universes may spawn new universes through the formation of black holes. At the end of this arguement, he talks about the "Anthropomorphic Reasoning" by which we can understand this. These ideas are very speculative and are disputed by many others. Reese achieves a good balance by writing about these disputes.

If you want a book that will give you the current state of the art view of cosmology together with some fascinating speculation about fuuture developments then this is just the job.

I can only level a small number of criticisms at the book. I suspect that most of the target audience will already be familiar with the first 60% of the book so, perhaps, it would have been better to condense that material. The "Further Reading" list at the end just has a collection of titles and authors with no expansion on the contents of these references. Some more information here would be a huge help to readers wondering what to look at next.

This is an exciting and accessible book of cosmological speculation tempered by rationality and an awareness of the scientific method. Consequently I was very happy to read here about the possibility of "universes" beyond ours; or differently put, something beyond the big bang. I used to speculate about what happened before and beyond the big bang, but I was told that such speculations were unscientific because by definition the universe and all of time and space came into being with the big bang. Like Fred Hoyle, I never liked this theory of the beginning of the universe, and wished that his steady state model would gain some serious credence. It didn't and the evidence for the big bang grew. Now however, as Rees makes clear, the perspective and even the terminology has changed. Many scientists now speculate that our universe (notice we now have an "our") may just be a budding off of one "universe" from perhaps an infinite potential.

One page 158 Rees writes about the universe at the Planck time (ten to the minus 43 seconds) which is as early as we can get, and incidentally the universe at that time was as small as anything can get: "At this stupendous density...quantum effects and gravity would both be important. What happens when quantum effects shake an entire universe?"

Now that is a question! And the way it is put propels us into something like a glimpse of the universe at that ultra early stage. The Planck time is a constraint on the size of anything including space. One of the things that this means is that spacetime is not infinitely divisible. Space itself has a quantum-like quality. Really?

On page 24 he is talking about communicating with other intelligent beings: "It would be easy to devise signals that would be incontrovertibly artificial: for instance, attention could be attracted by a series 1,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29... These are prime numbers: no natural process could generate them, but they would be recognized by any culture that was interested in (and capable of) picking up cosmic radio waves." Notice how simply but beautifully put this observation is.

On the same page he makes the point that even though we might get some startling advice from a more advanced civilization, there is some question about whether we would follow it, or even if we could benefit from it. He writes: "Optimists claim that such signals could convey enlightening messages of such import that they would enable us to bypass centuries of scientific endeavor and discovery... But such a gap would be hard to bridge, even within human culture. Could, for instance, a short `message from the future' have guided a leading intellect from an earlier era toward some aspect of modern scientific knowledge? Could Newton have been steered from alchemy toward chemistry...? It would be a daunting challenge to bridge even a few centuries of human cultural change, essentially because scientific advance depends on gradual advances of interconnected techniques and technologies."

I was delighted to find on page 161 my favorite "Zen koan" question, "Why is there anything at all? Why isn't there nothing?" being asked in a slightly different form by Stephen Hawking: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations?...Why does the Universe go to all the bother of existing?" In my opinion, it is a question like this that makes the study of cosmology so compellingly religious. I stopped being concerned with the question of whether God exists or not when I realized how incredibly vast is the known universe that beings superior to us almost certainly must exist and therefore it would be only a matter of degree to get to some being approximating the anthropomorphic conception of "God." That there are demigods out there is clear. That there are demigods who could pass for God among humans is also clear. As for a creator or a first cause, or any sort of nonpersonal "God," the Universe itself is sufficient. So, strangely, I became a deist of sorts. Still on page 161, Rees makes the very important distinction between the physicist's vacuum (which is actually a "rich construct," including "all the particles and fields described by the equations of physics") and the philosopher's "nothing," which really is nothing. Now that I think about it, however, maybe that sort of "nothing" is not even possible, just a philosopher's construct.

Notice that what is wonderful about Rees's book is how freeing it is instead of confining. The mind soars. If his intent was to communicate to a large audience I believe he has succeeded. This is the most informative and readable book on cosmology that I have read in quite a while.

One last speculation: suppose that instead of the expansion of spacetime, we have the implosion of matter, that is to say, instead of having the universe expand, we have matter shrink. Is it possible to tell the difference? Although this may seem frivolous, and perhaps it is, asking such a question has the virtue of engaging the mind, which is what Rees does in this book.

As a person who reads complicated books on everything from cosmology to politics in Imperial China just for fun I tend to get in over my head sometimes, delving into books far beyond my reach of everyday comprehension. So for me "Before the Beginning" was an absolute joy.

I had only a small understanding of cosmolgy before reading this book, but afterwards I feel as if I may be able to debate some points with the best of them. Usually in the midst of stuffy scientific rigamaroll I find my mind wandering to anything but science, yet "Before...." held my attention all the way through. It's clearly written and devoid of too many overwhelming and incomprehensible bits of jargon.

I appreciate and enjoy Sir Martin Rees' dry British humor which makes reading about neutron stars more fun than it should be.

I think if you are someone like myself who has an interest, but not ovewrwhelming passion, in astrophysics this just maybe the perfect book to pick up, and afterward you may just find cosmology a minor passion.

I read dozens of books a year, usually more than 50, and among them I try to read several books on cosmology or physics. So I was pretty familiar with the material in this book even before I read it. The reason I read it anyway was because Rees discusses some of my favorite speculations: Andrei Linde's inflationary multiverse theory and Lee Smolin's theory of fecund universes. I am in no position to evaluate those theories, but I just have an old-fashioned hunch that Linde's theory must be true, while Smolin's is merely possible. But I like them both, and I hope they're both true. So I read whatever I can on them.

What I got out of it that I didn't expect was a deeper respect for Chandrasekhar and Hoyle. Otherwise, I got what I wanted.

Now, if you don't read about cosmology or physics much, I honestly wouldn't recommend this book. John Barrow is on the cover saying it'd be a good first book, but I firmly disagree.

Ahead of it, I'd recommend Ferris' "The Whole Shebang," which, until something better is written, is the best cosmology book available: the best thing since Sagan's "Cosmos," in fact. Don't ask me why it isn't more widely appreciated. It has a wider scope than this book, it goes into greater depth on every point (so it's longer), it's better-written, and its explanations are clearer. Rees' book is a little hard to get into because some of his writing is simply wooden, and he often doesn't trouble himself to explain things very carefully, however.

BUT - it's not that bad really; it just compares unfavorably to Ferris' book, which I strongly urge you to read before this one.

Or just hang on awhile; within a few years something better has got to come out because neither of these books, nor any book that I know of, provides a good introduction to cosmology that includes recent work on the large-scale structure of the universe and the recent, cosmos-shaking discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Here's a major gap in the pop-sci literature, and it's bound to be filled soon.

If you want to read something by Rees, I suggest checking out "Our Final Hour," his more recent, and more provocative book.

The book is a beautifully written for a lay reader. It is broken up in to short sections, each dealing with a specific topic in astronomy and cosmology. It makes it easy to pick up the book for 10 or 15 minutes at a time. You never feel that you are in the "middle" of some heavey topic that in order for you to understand you need to complete a lengthy chapter. Very sophisticated ideas are presented in bite sized chunks and yet are thoroughly explained. This is a great read!

I found the title of this book somewhat misleading. It is only the very end of the book that gets into "before the beginning," and most of the book is simply a preparation for this ending. Most of the book is simply a rehash of what is already readily available in a dozen other popular books on cosmology, although it does reference some of the latest discoveries, such as extrasolar planets. If you're really interested in what it might be like "before the beginning," Guth's _The Inflationary Universe_ is far superior. I'm nudging this book above average (6) because the last few chapters do contain some fascinating material on the nature of the cosmological constants that provides food for thought.

Before the Beginning is one of Sir Martin Rees best endeavors in unraveling the concepts of cosmology for the average reader. As Royal Society Professor at King's College, Cambridge--succeeding Fred Hoyle to the privilege--and Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, his research spans the breadth of astrophysical research, including issues about cosmology, galaxy formation, black holes, and high energy processes like gravitational waves.

While his participation in the forefront of research gives Martin Rees eminent credibility, his ability as a writer gives him great accessibility as well. I am not really a math-physics person, although I enjoy this type of popular work on physics and cosmology and read extensively in the genre. I found this title to be thoroughly understandable. I was lost somewhat in the final chapters of the book especially "How Constant are Nature's 'Constants,'" but pulled more out of the material after rereading it a couple of times. I think that most readers of a skill level of high school and above will understand the material. Even precocious junior high students with an interest in the topic should be able to comprehend much of it.

The author is very methodical in his approach to his topic, introducing it from the point of view of the history of original thinking and research in the field. He gives credit to each participant in that history, even those whose failed attempts have put others on the right path to discovery. He is especially complimentary to Fred Hoyle, who while he helped to create and thoroughly supported the concept of the Steady State Universe, was open minded enough to actually supply some of the tenants of the Big Bang as well. Much is made of the collective contributions of workers in the field, even those who "almost ran." Most important, credit is given to Russian contributions that had been ignored, minimalized, or denied during the Cold War years. By approaching his topic from an historical vantage point, Rees helps the reader to think much the way the discoverers did as they added each additional piece of information to the body of cosmological research as it stands today. While much of actual physics is a plethora of numbers and intricate mathematics even more of it, especially in cosmology, involves logical and creative thought.

From an instructional stand point, the book might be a good way of introducing high school science students to the manner of thought of scientists, to the ideal professional relations between them, to the step by step cumulative logic of this type of thought, and to the actual product of scientific effort.

I purchased this book because of the title, which is, at a minimum, misleading. There is little or nothing in the book discussing the world before the big bang. Nevertheless, this was an interesting and well written book and if it promised no more than it gave, I'd have purchased it anyway.

The more interesting parts concern the collapse of stars, the development of black holes, miniholes and other extremely dense accretions of matter, speculation about dark matter and the possibility of multiple universes. The book gives insight into the relationships of different types of particles and forces and the possible parameters of a unified theory. For the first time, I was able to appreciate (although one must still marvel at it) how the world might have been so small initially and how the universe may have been created from nothing, or something next to nothing. Most interesting to me were passages discussing time and the factors that may give preference to a particular direction in time. The book ends with an unconvincing discussion of anthropic principles, which basically says:" the world is what it is because we are what we are." Personally, I don't think this advances knowledge very much.

The first chapters of the book are a summary of 'The first three minutes' by Steven Weinberg and 'A brief history of time ' by Steven Hawking.
Thereafter, this work becomes a very exciting read.
It deals with the origin of the universe that was created ex nihilo (zero energy), the evolution of the universe (with a first millisecond as an eventful era, and the first 10-36 seconds as an inflationary expansion).
Like John Barrow, he is pessimistic that a 'Theory of Everything' will be found. We don't know the physical laws that prevailed at the Planck time. More, the particles and forces in our universe could be inherently arbitrary. He states that the multiverse may be governed by some unified theory, but each universe may cool down in a fashion that has 'accidental' features ending up ruled by different laws and different physical connstants. His hope to find it lays with the theory of superstrings.
A fundamental question remains the nature of black matter (90 % of the matter in the universe).
On the quantum level, he explains that some processes in the microworld 'know' the direction of time and that there could be a link between consciousness and quantum mechanics.
Importantly,he also states that there is more than one chance in one million that, within the next 50 years, the Earth will be hit by an asteroid large enough to cause worldwide devastation.
A must read for everybody interested in what happened 'before the beginning'.

Sir Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal. How he managed to obtain this lofty position while maintaining his ability to speak English is beyond me. Like Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, Sir Martin is able to explain some rather complicated and complex ideas in small, easily managed chunks. He has the ability to entertain us, like Michio Kaku, while at the same time, imparting us with a lasting understanding of many of life's really big questions. I have read perhaps 3,000 books (mostly science based) in my tenure as resident of this planet and have written several. I have also written dozens of book reviews for various media. However, the concepts put down in Rees book flow quite eloquently, positively, and manageably---which is indeed rare. The difference between this book's take on such things as life in the universe, black holes, and the beginning of time are easily set part from their Pseudoscientific counterparts---they make perfect sense. I would like to say that "if you buy one book on cosmology this year--buy this one." But I wont. Simply pick up a copy, thumb through a few chapters and it will sell itself. This book is a must read for any high school student who believes physics or science are boring. Or, for the adult non-scientist that has a desire to know. I gave this book "5 stars" because "6" was not an option. Even I gleaned a bit of education-and that's never a bad thing. A definite MUST own.