16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Avoid, Avoid, Avoid, July 12, 2005
This review is from: The Big Bang: What It Is, Where It Came From and Why It Works (Paperback)
The book appears to be aimed at novice readers, and I have commented on that basis. At 200 or so small format pages, the paperback attempts to be both entertaining and lively in style. But in my opinion this book misses the mark, and is full of errors, ambiguities and sloppy language. It is plain bad!
For instance, when talking about the naked eye view of the sky, she indicates that the planets in their various motions "would get even larger, as if they were coming closer". I presume the author means "brighter" rather than "larger" since to the naked eye, none of the planets subtends a disc. This is typical of the sloppy language used throughout - to those who know, the sloppiness is recognisable as such, but to the true novice, how potentially misleading!
The book frequently wanders into the relationship between philosophy, religion and science, not only in regard to the early cosmologies, but also the acceptance (and lack of acceptance) of the Big Bang in the 1950's and 60's as it and the science of cosmology became more well established.
The second part of the book addresses the Big Bang Theory and its "problems" subsequent to the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This introduces inflationary Big Bang models, and the curvature of space as a function of the mass content of the Universe and so on. In attempting to describe how the expansion rate of the Universe can be deduced from the observed properties of the distant galaxies, the author becomes thoroughly confused and confusing (even more so than is usual for this tome).
In terms of the various post-COBE higher resolution balloon and land based CMB experiments which successfully resolved the first and subsequent peaks in the anisotropy spectrum of the CMB over the last few years, these are within a couple of lines, initially declared as being "comforting" in one sense as they "hit just where the maths predict..." and then are effectively dismissed as "...but other instruments haven't found peaks at all". No conclusions are reached, and the author lumps all her cosmological "eggs" into the basket of the Microwave Anisotropy Project (MAP) spacecraft, which "will" collect data for two years. That's funny, by 2001 MAP was launched and in 2002, MAP was already collecting data, wasn't it?
Even worse, the author trots out "alternative" non-cosmological interpretations of the expansion driven red-shift data such as "tired light" - she does not rebut these ideas, but says effectively that scientists regard general relativity and its description of the way light behaves so highly, that they do not wish to scrap their existing beliefs - potentially implying of course that the "tired light" alternative has some credence, which it doesn't.
A brief discussion of the observations of distant supernovae reported in the late 90's, which concluded that the expansion of the Universe was now accelerating, requiring the reintroduction of something akin to Einstein's cosmological constant is mentioned, but couched more in terms the equivalent of ".. how dare the scientists just re-work the Big Bang Theory to incorporate this new idea, rather than chuck it (the theory) out...". The author recognises that the energy of this repulsive field nicely solves the "missing mass" problem to provide a Universe at critical density as required by the inflationary Big Bang theories, but more in a "...how convenient..." tone.
In "conclusion" the author effectively claims that some alternative theories fit the data as well as the Big Bang theory, but because the alternatives don't fit the data better, they have been ignored by 99% of the world's scientists, who want to stick to their biases.
It is only after the above "conclusions", that there is some information on "Current and Future Research" which includes Dark Energy, Quintessence, the CMB Spectrum expected to be measured by the MAP spacecraft, some details of the results of high resolution balloon and land based CMB measurements, and an admittedly speculative foray into the ekpyrotic alternative to the inflationary beginning of the Universe. The latter material is relatively up-to-date, but presented in an episodic manner.
This book shows all the signs of being originally written in the mid to late nineties, and then having been updated with the addition of a few extra chapters on more recent work in 2001 - except none of the results of the more recent work are used to change or modify or limit any of the previous conjecture or conclusions in the earlier text.
Do not buy this book - as an introductory level text it is potentially extremely misleading in many areas. Far better introductory guides to the subject for the same outlay are available.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
I'm disappointed, May 4, 2005
This review is from: The Big Bang: What It Is, Where It Came From and Why It Works (Paperback)
Wow, this is a brief presentation! Einstein's theories of relativity (both special and general) get four pages -- and this includes a bio. The period from Plato to Kepler (about 2000 years) gets all of fourteen pages. I can only assume we're supposed to know all this stuff already, because one couldn't become more than introduced to names given the author's treatment of the topics. On top of this, many "facts" are plain wrong. E.g., the author claims that Hans Bethe knew nothing of his name's addition to the famous Alpha-Beta-Gamma (Alpher-Bethe-Gamow) paper (p. 61). Not true.
There are many much better presentations of this material; for one, see Singh's _Big Bang_. It's better researched and a lot more thorough.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Explaining the Unexplainable, Deftly, March 18, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: The Big Bang: What It Is, Where It Came From and Why It Works (Paperback)
Who among us has not wished to know more about the creation of our universe and the fantastic nature of how we all got here? Who also has not felt his eyes quickly glaze over and wanted to scream "no mas" when we actually enlisted the help of a scientific type to try to explain such a complicated topic? Well, Karen Fox has devised the magic bullet to slay such dilemmas with this book! Ms. Fox explains science's most well-known theory with a clarity and deftness that causes the complexities of the matter to be transparent to us curious laymen. With a thorough yet thoroughly readable style that is ceaselessly engaging, Ms. Fox rewards our curiousity by serving up a delectably fun and informative serving of information that goes down easy and causes no heartburn. Whether or not you were able to get past Intro Physics, if you want to know all you should want to know about astronomy's biggest mystery and enjoy doing it, this is the book for you.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
