Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating review of contemporary theories on the origins of the universe, October 12, 2009
This review is from: Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe (Hardcover)
By the time I reached the last page of this book, I just wanted to go to Arizona, drive into the desert and marvel at the glory of the night sky.
The title is a bit misleading in implying a discussion of "the prehistory of our universe" when, in fact, the presentation is about the various contemporary theories attempting to explain what existed before the Big Bang - if, of course, there was a Big Bang. Some of the theories postulate otherwise.
Clegg, who has a physics degree, writes easily of the theories of the universe beginning with the dawn of recorded history. The earlier theories, involving gods and the like, were easier to digest, though Clegg makes an exception for the Egyptians who managed to imbue the Sun with a number of different gods. The Buddhists are given short shrift for not involving a pantheon of deities, but instead adopting a "because it's there" approach. Clegg moves on to describe the earliest efforts to determine the size of the universe. The history of humankind and its quest to determine the nature of the universe is fascinating and Clegg does well at describing the search for answers.
By the time we come to the recent era, the last three centuries or so, the reader has a firm grasp of where we were in our understanding and how we got there.
The explosion of scientific knowledge in the Western world began in earnest in the 17th Century and has not slowed. Clegg describes each of the giants upon whose shoulders the next giant stood; thus Bacon and Newton were the precursors for Einstein. Clegg employs an interesting device here, though I am not sure if it is of his own design or a natural result of explaining the increasing knowledge of the universe. Whichever it is, it works. By the time Clegg begins to seriously address the question of what existed before the Big Bang, the reader has been given a short, but thorough, course in cosmology. The education is needed as Clegg begins his census of modern thinking on the origins of the universe and, more to the point of the title, what came before.
Clegg, by the way, never tells us. In that, the title is a bit misleading.
Instead Clegg offers an exposition of the various contending theories - and while all of them are breathtakingly incomprehensible in toto, some are more incomprehensible than others!
My brain is still spinning with David Bohm's conception of the universe as a hologram: "there are no individual particles; everything is part of the same thing". We are here, but we are there as well and we aren't here at all, so to speak, all depending on vantage point.
In just under 300 pages, Clegg deftly summarizes our understanding of the universe as it evolved over the past several thousand years. Today about a half-dozen major theories of the origin of the universe and explanations of what went before contend for general acceptance within the scientific community. As Clegg makes clear, none of the existing theories are likely to gain universal acceptance and the question of what existed "before the Big Bang" will remain unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable).
In the interim, read Clegg's "Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe" and you'll have a pretty good idea of what scientists yesterday and today thought and believed. This is good stuff, but be forewarned that there are numerous places that may required several readings in order to understand the theory being described.
Jerry
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
As accessible as possible for such an impossible subject!, August 18, 2009
This review is from: Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe (Hardcover)
Clegg combines a history of myth ("a story with a purpose") and science as they struggle to come to terms with creation. His lively narrative strives by frequent metaphor and short chapters to convey an incredibly difficult topic. I never thought I'd be able to understand such astrophysical speculation based on quantum theory and thought-experiments, but thanks to Clegg's clarity, I could, more or less.
Parts of this study will inevitably cause the most nimble mind to quail, given models based on our universe being a 2-d holographic projection into 3-d for us to observe, or a "bit-it" parallel that imagines information itself becoming the building blocks of a universe constructed as we learn to conceive it, or one that is a "multiple universe" one based on the "choices" that a light wave may "make" as we watch it and try to measure it. Not to be confused with multiverses!
That Clegg shows us how this all came to be in the minds of astronomers over the centuries, especially most recently as satellites and telescopes begin to combine with CERN to hint at the previously unimaginable, is an achievement. He tells in a dozen relatively snappy chapters the pre-history of the theories that led to the Big Bang, and then the fudge-factor of lambda added by Einstein as he resisted the quantum mechanics that led to the breakthroughs that eventually eroded the Steady State Fred Hoyle theory in favor of the Big Bang.
Yet, the holes punched in to this model by math and logic, for some astronomers, have then whittled away even this paradigm. "Groundhog Universes" along the Big Crumple, the dodahecadron-shaped possibility of a universe that eludes our whole perception due to our inability to "see" some of its directions, may indicate Clegg's favorite model's replacement of the Big Bang with the Steinhardt-Turok "bouncing branes" set-up. See more about this elsewhere, but this may show another universe a millimeter away from ours with enough ripples in the space-time fabric to allow for gravitational anamolies and a sort of mirror-pattern that shows perhaps a universe previous to the creation of our own.
Such ideas are hard to sum up, but Clegg does his best. This book may often retell the familiar and he has written often on the history of astronomy; he may repeat much, taking about two-thirds of the book to get to where I figured, with the Big Crumple, he'd have arrived far earlier, but much ground for him is smoothed out and worked over before he gets to the latest suppositions. This does slow the book down markedly, but aimed at non-scientists such as myself, such elaboration may be necessary given the immense difficulty of laying out in comprehensible terms (no formulae here) the research of experts.
I do think he gave short shrift to Buddhist cosmological conceptions early on when dismissing these as possible patterns of early thinkers, and he could have also slowed down to dig deeper into the plasma explanations that account for a significant foundation for the multi-dimensional membranes. And, I aver that Clegg needed to flesh out the "universe in a black hole" theory more fully; some of his major points get not lost in the cosmic shuffle of "what-ifs," but they do flash by for the less-skilled layman's eye rather quickly and can be missed too easily.
All in all, a lively primer that as a non-scientist I found answered many of my questions about a question that always fascinated me, and that I did not know had so many analogues. Others more versed in astrophysics may well contend with the devils in the details; to me on the outside, I think Clegg keeps his own biases clear and allows for the chance that as with all scientific theories, nobody can cling to one explanation for such a vast and nearly unprovable subject. The sheer headiness of the glimmer that we can see past our own universe's beginnings is itself cause for the most rarified delight. Clegg keeps his sense of humor, his balance between rigor and skepticism, and his own sense of wonder shows. I recommend this book and thank him for his considerable efforts.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A serviceable treatment of an important topic, August 24, 2009
This review is from: Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe (Hardcover)
How did we come to be here?
This question is so basic and primal it's been addressed not only by all the world's religions but by science as long as science has been around.
In this short accessible book Brian Clegg reveals that while we still don't know for sure where we came from...and therefore what preceded the Big Bang...we do have some interesting speculations:
1) String theory could be right and our reality is just a subset of a larger reality we develop but some of the laws of physics. In this view, the ultimate sub-atomic particles...strings...are tethered to membranes that periodically move and sway like so many sheets of paper in a ream. They're next to each other but not connected because when they connect new big bangs are produced and along with them a reorienting of the laws of physics.
2) Our universe is an imaginary one concocted not from some set of physical laws but from the imaginative perspective of the observer. In this view, referred to as solopsism, the observer litterally conjurs a world into being.
3) Our universe is holographic and like the holograms that can be purchased in a novelty shop the apparent dimensionality is only an illusion...albeit, as Einstein might have said, a subbornly persistent one.
4) Our universe creates itself. In this view, hypothesized by J Richard Gott, each Black Hole in our universe is the porthole to a Big Bang in another universe. Owing to the unique nature of how physics laws break down in a Black Hole, according to Gott, it's possible that one of these Big Bangs is actually the porthole to our own universe meaning the universe actually created itself.
Though theory 4 is my favorite because it actually gives us an answer which takes us before the beginning (as opposed to the others which merely move the question back another step), Clegg favors theory one, string theory.
But, and owing to Clegg's candor this comes through very strongly in this book, we still don't know what our universe's prehistory is and much of what we speculate is not materially closer to reality than the religious speculations of forefathers which of course still leaves us asking the question:
How did we come to be here?
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
