Customer Reviews

The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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Book as for today is a bit outdated, does not take under consideration new discoveries like dark energy and acceleration of the Universe.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.

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.

The Five Ages of the Universe showcases the grandeur of the universe in all its glory. Because the time scales are so far-removed from the world as we observe it, time is measured logarithmically. This allows us to see farther into the past -- and the future -- than many of us could have dared to imagine.

Throughout the course of this book, late-breaking scientific material is introduced, and yet -- although it is accurate -- the material is not so technical as to be intimidating. Indeed, it turns out to be quite the opposite, a dazzling show where nothing is made up.

But the authors do not stop there. They also continually extrapolate the scientific points into the implications of those points. For example: The proton matter in the nuclei of atoms in our universe is currently thought to be slightly unstable. Well, okay, you say to yourself... I think that's something which can safely be ignored. NO! What that means, is that the core of the stuff that makes the stars, the rest of the universe, and us, is destined to dissolve! This is similar to dissolving a complex substance, with an acid, into its most simple components. Read the book to see the profound implications of that point -- and many others.

One of the most important parts of this book is that it is not dry. The authors often spice up the already fascinating description of the universe with many further "What if"'s. What if life had less energy? Could it compensate for this problem by lowering its rate of metabolism? What if a star collided with our sun? You'd be surprised how many erroneous assumptions you probably make on a regular basis, and how happy you'll be to learn the unexpected -- but beautiful -- truth.

This book paints a very colorful and, I believe, optomistic, picture of our future. The ideas are daring and original, and they are collectively very powerful. This book is like a journey, one very valuable to make.

So why, you may ask, did I not opt to give this book five stars if I am such a solid fan? The answer is that I am a harsh critic, and I like to be honest. This book did not force me to read when I had to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom. If a book can do that to me, I'll give it five stars; but until that time comes four will be the highest number possible on my rating scale. Once again, a great book, and more than deserving of the four stars it has received.

This book changed the way I look at the universe around me. Although it didn't enter my thoughts daily, I used to occasionally experience the feeling of isolation associated with contemplating the position of the earth within our unimaginably large and sparse universe. After reading what is to come for our cosmos, however, I'm filled with optimism about the density and energy of the space we live in today. I am, like many people, I think, interested in the prospects for life in the universe's past, present, and future. This book handily incorporates this discussion, even contemplating a lifeform whose "atoms" are black holes, when all regular matter has faded away. I would have liked to read more about the even more distant "Dark Age," when the only "matter" left in the cosmos is the "compound" positronium, whose "atoms" are the size of our current known universe. If any intelligent life exists at that time, could it possibly conceive of the life of today? Could we ourselves even imagine a life form existing in the cosmic blast furnace of the first seconds following the Big Bang? "Five Ages" left me with as many questions as answers, and my head was spinning, but it was an E-ticket ride.

The dustjacket blurb sets off all the warning bells of junk science. And the authors do seem a bit too sure of themselves. But the structure and flow of this book are both terrific, and a bit of checking shows it is based on sound research.

The cosmological decade (10expN=the Nth cosmological decade) is a great idea, and leaves you breathless as to the sheer amount of time the universe is going to be worth living in for. One worry - that after the big bang section it'd get a bit boring - was assuaged; in fact the later sections on the death of the stars were even more absorbing, possibly because this era rarely gets explored.

Well worth shelf space next to Greene's "The Elegant Universe" and David Deutsch's "Fabric of Reality."

Five Ages is a magnificent tour through modern astrophysics, from the flitting realm of elementary particles to the grandest imaginable scales of space and time. The range of focus is bold and fascinating. For example, the authors relish in discussing evolutionary processes that are so slow that the current age of the universe is merely an inconsequential fleeting moment.

Most readers will find most of the explanations of widely diverse phenomena and theoretical concepts illuminating. The authors do, however, in a few instances, wield terms that most uninitiated readers will not recognize. But, considering the extremely broad scope and limited length of the book, limiting such infractions to a few isolated cases demonstrates considerable skill.

I recommend this book to anyone who is even mildly interested in cosmology and is looking for a good mind stretcher.

I thought this book was very fascinating! I enjoyed reading not only about theories regarding the past and present eras of the universe, but also about future eras. As the title implies, authors Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin divide the lifetime of the universe into five eras, and we're living in the second. It was fun to imagine what the night sky should look like trillions of years into the future, and many more. It was also fun to read about the time when it can be expected that only black holes will be left, and to go even beyond that. This is the only book I know that deals much with the question of the far future of the universe.
The authors also brings up questions which are probably beyond our ability to know the answer to(for example, whether our universe is one of many), but such an idea is interesting to think about. They do mention a few ideas that I'm skeptical of (for example, the idea of a "Darwinian view of universes"), though they also acknowledge that this remains speculative.
Although this is a scientific (not a theological) book, I will also mention that I am a believing Catholic. So I believe that God created all things, including the whole universe. However, I also believe that the scientific theories mentioned in this book are compatible with Catholic Church teaching, provided we understand that everything that happens is in the providence of God. Of course we should also understand that theories are not doctrines, and so theories could be subject to change upon future discoveries.
I highly recommend this book, at least for those who have some general knowledge of astronomy and physics.

This fascinating book is the latest in a series of speculations about the progression of the universe through time. My first contact with books on this topic was Frank Tipler's Physics of Immortality. That book prompted me to Freeman Dyson's Infinite In All Directions and later Paul Davies The Last [Final?] Three Minutes. The Five Ages of The Universe is based on a continually expanding universe scenario -- the scenario best supported by current evidence -- through five so called cosmological ages from the beginning at 10 x e-50 to 10 x e150 -- ten followed by 150 zeros years! Strange possibilities are proposed along the way such as black hole computers. The writing is compelling and occaisionally even unexpectdly poetic. Sorry I can't comment on the Physics I don't have the background, my interest is primarily the subject of consiousness, which I have come to realize most serious thinkers now believe to be bound by Physics. This is the kind of book that stimulates the reader to want to learn more Physics -- a creditable achievment. The fact that topics such as the future of life are more satisfactorily approached by Science than Religion is a major cognitive change I have been going through for about 5 years, since I started reading the general readership orientied science books that are becoming so plentiful. The Five Ages...is very accessible to the non-scientist yet presents some very latest thinking on cosmology, I recommend you read it.

I am simply a general reader who enjoys reading about cosmology so I have no way to judge whether the physics in this book is sound, but I suspect that it is. There are a great many divergent views on various aspects of what is discussed in this book. Since the boundaries of this science live in speculation and searching for evidence it isn't surprising that people as well respected as Stephen Hawking change their mind about Black Holes and so forth. This means that some things that were speculated in this book may have become generally accepted by now, or may have been made obsolete by new observations.

In any case, for those of us who want to gain some sense of the broad sweep of what are Universe is, what happened at its beginning and how it might end, this book is a fine read. The authors are able to present complex ideas clearly enough to make me believe I have some grasp of them (when I likely do not, but the sense of belief is comforting). The language is never condescending for the general reader and is not so long that the detail becomes overwhelming.

It is a fine book and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the broad sweep of the existence of our Universe.