Customer Reviews

Echo of the Big Bang

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Don't be put off by the size and modest production of of this book. This is extrememly well written. There is an honest attempt here to communicate as clearly as possible to the general public. Yes, given the quality of the writing there should have been more diagrams and more money spent in promoting it, but this book is still much better than anything Hawking has written for the general public and certainly much better than Smoot's ...effort on COBE. But it is too short and I wish the author had spent more time on the history of earlier attempts to measure the CMB. I think he was afraid of boring his audience, but I think a little more technical and scientific detail, maybe even a few equations, might have made things clearer. Also towards the end the author introduces ekpyrotic universes without much clarity and he is not very clear on the actual nature of the "acoustic" peaks except to say that they were expected to be seen if the universe was finite and curved...which it apparently is not. Excellent general discussion of the engineering problems involved in actually trying to build something. No book is perfect but if you are interested in the WMAP this is well worth buying. There are several other experiment going up in the future....a European MAP, an infrared background radiation scanner, as well as a series of polarization mappers and gravitational wave detectors. I hope the author stays on this beat because in my opinion he is one of the best science writers for the general public that I have read.

Michael Lemonick's 'Echo of the Big Bang' is a very interesting text that weaves some of the recent history and personality of science into one of the more interesting astrophysical discoveries of modern times.

The last chapter of the book is the one that those readers looking for the 'science' will want to read most, for it contains the summary of the findings of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001. The probe collected data for over a year, looking for the signature of the Big Bang - the background radiation in the universe (Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, or CMB) that was variously discovered and misinterpreted until the 1960s. The probe's findings could be summaries in five key numbers:

1) the universe is 13.7 billion years old
2) Ordinary atoms make up 4.4 percent of the universe
3) Dark matter makes up a surprising 23 percent of matter in the universe
4) The Hubble constant (the rate of expansion per distance) is 71 kilometers per second per megaparsec (in other words, the further out, the fast the expansion)
5) Stars began 'turning on' in the universe 200 million years after the start, much earlier than expected

Okay, so these are fairly simple observations. What do they mean and why are they important?

Lemonick's book takes a longer view toward astrophysical cosmology (as opposed to the more philsophical and theological kinds) - this is a relatively new branch of one of the oldest sciences. Astronomy has been important since the earliest days of literate humanity, and possibly even precedes literacy - charting the stars for theological/religious/superstitious reasons as well as practical reasons (seasons, time keeping) have always been important. However, it has only been since the Enlightenment that major attention has been given to analysing the different components of the sky, and while broad-based interest in the constitution of the universe has been present in philosophical an intellectual history, it has only been since the twentieth century that science has taken on the task of explaining the large-scale structure of the universe. This has led to many fascinating turns, many of which have played out in the popular press, like the astronomic struggle between the Steady State theory and the Big Bang theory.

Lemonick recounts the various near-miss discoveries of the CMB radiation, particularly the various Bell Lab accounts, the various mis-diagnoses from observational astronomers around the world, and finally efforts from ground-based and satellite/above-atmosphere observations to lead to the inescapable conclusion that, whatever it was, there was something out there creating fairly general and stable readings on various instrumentation.

The greater part of the text deals with the formation of the latest mission, which led to the discoveries listed above. Detailing the planning, the formation of the team of researchers, the budgetary issues, the set-backs due to changing NASA priorities and fortunes, and the personality quirks and conflicts that inevitably arise in projects, this is a fascinating glimpse of the human side of the scientific enterprise. The formation of how scientists even decide what to look for and how to look for it is interesting in and of itself; sometimes the scientific process doesn't seem so, well, scientific. How could it be, being run by scientists who are first human beings?

Lemonick also shows some of the aftermath of the discoveries (still a bit new at the time of the writing of this text, or of this review) - he references John Horgan's assertion that all the important discoveries of science have been made; I cannot help but think here of similar statements being made at the end of the nineteenth century, when active speculation about closing patent offices existed as 'everything that can be invented already has been'; history has a sense of irony in that it was a patent clerk (Einstein) who would prove this to be an example of classical physic's hubris. But Lemonick explains the emphasis in astronomy is already shifting; more headlines are made from discovering possible planets around neighbouring stars than grand theoretical constructs or larger-scale explanations. Where science really goes next, in the next decade, is a mystery; much more so is the direction for the next century and beyond.

The main theme of this book is the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). In the first half of the book, the author discusses early predictions of the existence of CMB, its eventual discovery and interpretation as well as attempts at measuring its structure, in particular, the cosmic background explorer (COBE) mission. The second half of the book concentrates on the microwave anisotropy probe (MAP) project which also attempts to measure the CMB structure but with much greater resolution that COBE. The human aspects of the story are also well covered, clearly indicating that scientists, too, are indeed very human. The science and technology is explained probably as well as can be explained in a book of this size for a general audience; however, I feel that a big plus would have been the inclusion of a few extra diagrams to complement the text by more clearly illustrating how one can come to all the presented conclusions about the universe by simply looking at the MAP results. But despite this minor shortcoming, I feel that the book still deserves 5 stars since it is exciting and well-written, and gives the reader a sense of what it's like to be involved in cutting edge science. It is definitely worth the read - I highly recommend it.

Well written and easy to read. But the book is primarily a history of one satellite study of background radiation. The book is heavy on the history and interaction of the scientists (which is very interesting), but is light on explaining what they found and how what they found increased our knowledge about the beginnings of our universe. I was a little disappointed with lack of an attempt to explain the science. For example, the book hypes the fact that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, but does not tell how they arrived at this number. The books says the universe is 23% dark matter, but does not explain where this number comes from. Still I recommend the book for a good picture of how science is conducted. And I should mention that two of the scientists in the story won the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics for this study.

This is a very well written, well explained, well researched story of the WMAP probe that is providing us with precision measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The author presents the story in a classic timeline, starting before Penzias and Wilson, proceding through COBE, and climaxing with the WMAP results. The author focuses on the people and events, more than the science; but does not neglect the science either. We learn about the personalities, rivalries, friendships, and feuds of the people involved. We also learn about the science of the big bang, and the importance of the miniscule fluctiations in the CMB.

I found some of the pages to be a little dry; but nothing that caused me to yawn or skim. Overall the book moves along at a good pace, and it fun to read.

I was just a little annoyed by the author's minor tendency to sensationalize. For example, he started the book with a flash-forward to the end where one of the investigators (Dave Spergel) is poring over his data in trepidation about making a "shocking claim". We don't find out what this shocking claim is until the end of the book, where we find out that, in fact, the flash-forward was to a period when Spergel was speculating about the results based on data that was not fully analyzed.

Anyway, it's a fun read and certainly worth the time and money. It's good to know facts like the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that the hubble constant is 71km/s/mpc, and that the first stars turned on about two hundred million years after the big bang.

Readable account of cosmology and the role of the cosmic background microwave radiation. The book is weakened by containing several undocumented statements that the author (a journalist, not a scientist) couldn't possible know from his own experience. For example:

Henrietta Leavitt's "...study was ignored, in part because the researcher was a woman and thus unqualified to be a "real" scientist." (Lemonick's quotes around 'real')(p. 22).

"...observational astronomers don't tend to spend much time studying up on theoretical physics." (p. 38).