19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkable Overview of Cutting-Edge Science, December 10, 1999
By A Customer
This book constitutes one of the best books I have ever read. The manner in which the authors collect and synthesize the information currently comprising the envelope of scientific knowledge in astronomy, cosmology, biology and other relevant fields provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the universe. The first time I read this book I was stunned by the amount of information I absorbed and by the new avenues that this information opened in my quest for understanding the origin of humanity and of the universe. I had to read this book a second time because many of the concepts discussed therein were difficult to truly comprehend initially.
This book is extremely well written, unlike other similar books. The authors anticipated my questions in many cases and addressed them in subsequent paragraphs. A technical/scientific inclination would definitely be helpful while reading this book, but is probably not necessary.
To synthesize, if you are interested in investigating how everything that we observe originated and will vanish in the future, read this book.
Further, if you want to place the existential question of God in a proper scientific framework (as proper as we can devise at this time), read this book. This book shows that science has confined the intervention of "God," (and this God could be our classic biblical god or another intelligent species residing somewhere else in the multiverse) to a fraction of the first second of the Big Bang, if such an intervention did occur at all.
Finally, I admire the restraint exercised by the authors by never explicitly refuting religious beliefs even when the scientific data strongly pointed in that direction. No readers will probably be offended by reading this book, regardless of their religious beliefs.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Four and the 1/2 Stars about The Five Ages of the Universe., November 2, 2001
I love and collect books about cosmology since many years. This one was a great reading. Not only about the beginning and current state, but also about the fate of the Universe in the future.
Time will show how these computer simulated predictions are accurate. But it will not be you or me of course to observe it.
Book as for today is a bit outdated, does not take under consideration new discoveries like dark energy and acceleration of the Universe.
I have asked Professor Adams about it and he e-mailed: "the biggest change to our vision of the future comes in the Dark Era; positronium formation will be less likely, and a vacuum phase transition will be more likely if the Universe has a component of this dark energy. The basic picture however is still correct". What I really like about this book is that it gets even more interesting in the end. Explanation of quantum mechanical tunneling and possibilities of sudden cosmic scale phase transition is so vivid that I had a hard time to fall a sleep. My imagination was running wild ignited by description of space-time foam and multiverses. Summarizing: it was easy, quick and enjoyable learning about not so easy subjects. "References and further reading" list included in this book is worth to have a look as well.
Professor Adams is currently working on his new book.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a sweeping timescape, May 18, 2000
In my former career as a geologist, I was used to contemplating vast stretches of time. The basic unit we used was a million years; the fossil communities I was studying lived about 500 mybp (million years before present). If my students boggled, as they sometimes did, at the thought of the ice ages taking place hundreds of thousands of years ago, I would smugly say, "Oh, that's nothing - just yesterday!" Little did I know, that for truly overwhelming timescapes, you need to turn to astronomy. In their new book "The Five Ages of the Universe" (1999, Simon & Schuster), Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin consider the longest timescales imaginable - not the past only, but the far future of the universe.
Many years ago, physicist Philip Morrison narrated what I think is the finest short science video ever made - "Powers of Ten". This starts at a familiar human scale, and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds until reaching the size of clusters of galaxies; then reverses the process and zooms in to a proton in a carbon atom; in effect creating a logarithmic scale model of the universe. Adams and Laughlin apply the same logarithmic concept to time instead of distance. They speak of "cosmological decade n" when the universe is 10^n years old. For example, we are now living in the tenth cosmological decade, since about 10^10 years have passed since the Big Bang.
The five eras of the universe, then, are:
The Primordial Era (-15 < n < 5) From the Big Bang to 10,000 years later - inflation, the excess of matter over antimatter, primordial nucleosysthesis, the horizon and flatness problems, and the recombination of electrons with nuclei making the universe transparent - the cosmic background radiation.
The Stelliferous Era (6 < n < 14) We are living in the middle of this era, with matter in the universe organized into galaxy clusters, galaxies and stars. Most energy is released from fusion within stars, which provides the opportunity for earth-like life to form. Towards the end of this era, all the gas in galaxies will have been used up, and the heavy and middle-weight stars will have burned out in one way or another. Only miserly red dwarf stars will remain.
The Degenerate Era (15 < n < 39) The universe is cold and dark, with no light from ordinary stars left. Matter is locked up in brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. These objects continue to interact gravitationally, with some being ejected
from the dead galaxies, and others colliding. Very occasionally, two brown dwarfs might collide to create a new low-mass star. Dark matter is swept up into white dwarfs, providing a continuing energy source. At the end of the Degenerate Era, the protons and neutrons themselves decay, and the white dwarfs and brown dwarfs made form them slowly dissipate into radiation.
The Black Hole Era (40 < n < 100) Unaffected by proton decay, only black holes are now left. Even they, however, are not eternal; they evaporate through an even vastly longer quantum mechanical process known as Hawking radiation. A stellar black hole might take 10^65 years to evaporate; a galaxy sized black hole perhaps 10^100. When the largest are gone, the black hole era is over.
The Dark Era (n > 101) No condensed matter is left. The universe consists of extremely long wavelength photons, electrons, positrons, and neutrinos. Nothing much happens.
The book consists mainly of a detailed but non-technical look at the various processes which mediate these transitions. It also considers the possibilities for different kinds of life to form long after life based on liquid water is obsolete. As the temperature of an environment becomes lower, the processes of life and the "rate of experience" (my phrase) of an organism slows down, but the time available to evolution stretches out as well.
All this assumes that the universe is open or at least flat, which seems quite likely at present. It also assumes a lot about modern physics which is still highly conjectural. This book does remind us once again that our universe is surpassingly strange, and that its strangeness is distributed through time as well as through space.
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