Customer Reviews

The Omega Point: The Search for the Missing Mass and the Ultimate Fate of the Universe

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At the age of 20 this book is a classic:
The "Halo" dark matter of figure 6.2 has only lately been confirmed by observation. Dark matter particles have really not yet been observed.
String and SUSY theories so young and hopeful in this book
haven't born any other real fruit either?
The result is that this book has become a classic
with the omega function becoming a part of cosmology.
More and better observations haven't yielded evidence of an great difference between the world
and the "Standard Model" of physics of the late 70's.
No really successful grand unified theory, no observation of the Higgs particle to confirm the mass symmetry breaking field ideas. Comparing the 40 years 1928 to 1968 to the years 1968 to 2008 and you get a near void
in physics.

One of the great mysteries of our time is to discover how It All Began. Ever since radio astronomy disproved the steady state theory of astronomer Fred Hoyle, cosmologists have pretty well agreed that this universe began in some incomprehensibly colossal explosion that astoundingly enough seems to have come out of nothing to produce the sights that we can see in the sky. As students of science read texts such as THE OMEGA POINT by John Gribbon, they often learn that these books differ more in style than substance. Essentially, this is the theory of the Big Bang (much abbreviated): There was no 'before' before the Big Bang. For reasons not understood, a point in time and space merged out of nothing to produce something. This something was an explosion that did not exist in space but created its own space as it inflated. In the first few billionths of a second, the necessary ingredients of matter were created. These ingredients coalesced into tiny bits of matter, then later into galaxies and clusters of galaxies. And all this happened 15 billion years ago. What Gribbon does is to explain all this in a reasonably straightforward way. His focuses on the ever so delicate balance that the universe teetertotters on between eternal expansion and eventual contraction. An analogy might be to consider lifting a mountain and positioning it on the pointy end of a sturdy needle so as to maintain equilibrium. Gribbin calls this the Omega Point. His core thesis is that during the first fraction of a second when time began, there was a tiny fraction of baryonic (anything that is solid) matter in excess of its anti-matter particle. As the universe inflated exponentially, this excess caused a lumpiness that later caused the growth of stars and galaxies. Gribbon believes that much of this baryonic matter is hidden from the eyes and ears of radio astronomers. In fact, he thinks that there is so much of this 'dark matter' that he is fairly sure that the gravitic attraction of the totality of this dark matter will stall the universal expansion and cause a Big Bang in reverse. Of course, by that time (zillions of years from now) neither we nor our descendants will be around to note the universe's passing.
The charm of this book lies in Gribbon's smooth and lucid style. Unfortunately again, despite his writing ability, the latest in cosmological advances indicate that he is quite wrong in his assertion that the universe will shrink into some impossibly tiny micro-dot. The latest thinking is that the amount of dark matter is not enough to slow down galactic expansion. Our future seems to be a dreary never-ending ride toward what Hemingway would term 'nada,' a big but empty cosmos that once contained at least one sentient species. Not a very appealing prospect to be sure, but somehow still preferable to knowing that the universe allows traffic in both directions.