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The State of the Universe: A Primer in Modern Cosmology

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This book is a fantastic cosmology primer. I have a penchant for reading physics books and this one describes all the missing pieces I have about cosmology. Many of you have probably heard of dark matter, he explains why scientists think this exists, rather than just going on about trying to prove it. He lays down some necessary basics like how we measure the distances to stars and galaxies and how me measure the speeds that they are traveling. It uses the vast amounts of new data we now have thanks to Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, COBE and the WMAP satellites and tells the reader with clear explanations what it all means as relating to our current standard model. Or lacking complete understanding of an area, he expounds on the latest theories that physicists are grappling with in trying to unify physics. Overall, this is a great book with a lot of information succinctly delivered to give the reader an excellent primer on modern cosmology.

It wasn't long ago that there was no science of cosmology. Now it is a career path: "I am a practicing cosmologist," begins Pedro G. Ferreira in _The State of the Universe: A Primer in Modern Cosmology_ (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). "My job is to try to unravel the history and workings of the Universe, using a combination of mathematical tools, observations made with powerful telescopes, and above all, educated guesses." He admits that megalomania infects everyone who takes up such a project, but he has to sum up his book eventually with so many "Don't Knows" that it is hard not to admire the humble attacks against huge questions. There will be for readers, even under Ferreira's sure and informed guidance, plenty of "Don't Knows" even as he discusses the well-established ideas of relativity, quantum mechanics, and unimaginably huge stretches of space and time. It is only fair that cosmologists understand this counterintuitive stuff which leaves laymen baffled. It is also a good idea for laymen to try to get some understanding of it, however limited; after all, cosmologists are merely trying to make sense of the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and the Universe that we call home.

The increase of knowledge about where we live has made people uncomfortable over the centuries because it has involved the realization that we are not as supremely important as we might like. Not only is the Earth not the center of everything, the everyday matter that we think of as the building blocks of everything around us is not the main stuff of the Universe at all, despite our telescopic views of planets, moons, and galaxies. Counting up all the atoms in our Universe shows that 99% of them are helium or hydrogen, not at all what we expect in our idiosyncratic and self-centered view. And that's not all. Galaxies, including our own, are bigger and heavier than they appear; the way they spin around shows that there is much more mass circulating within them than we can see. There is a big problem, though: we don't know what the dark matter is. The weakly interacting particle called the neutrino has been proposed, or perhaps the neutralino, or the axion, or other strange matter described here. Don't worry if you can't understand what this dark matter is; your cosmologist guide says, "We have no real idea of what it is or how to see it."

Ferreira's book is an appealing and up-to-date primer. Part of its attraction is that it has an orderly progression of facts and understanding, without the "Gee, Whiz" exclamations of awe that are prominent in other books covering the same topics. He is content to let the explanations, many of them startling and strange, suffice in provoking the awe. His explanations are clear, although the material progresses in increasing bizarreness and difficulty. He eventually mentions such concepts as string theory or an even stranger "loop quantum gravity", and the idea that our universe may be just one of millions out there (just as we discovered that our star or our galaxy was just one of millions of similar objects). And finally, he is careful to show that although there is much we have discovered that is completely reliable, with some properties and constants having been measured to great precision, there are still huge areas of questions that we have barely begun to understand.

I bought this book for a high school grad who had expressed an interest in cosmology -- on a quick scan, it seemed like a good introduction. I also bought a copy for myself, just because I like this sort of thing and find that, since I don't have any training in this field, I usually learn something from even elementary treatments (and it was cheap). Then I started reading it. I got as far as p. 25, where I found the following:

"...Venus has phases, like the Moon. To understand this, let us consider the Moon. The Moon, as any of the other planets, shines because it reflects light from the Sun. At different times of the month, the Earth obscures part of the sunlight in such a way as to cast a shadow on the Moon. If the Earth moves exactly in front of the Sun, the Moon is completely darkened by the shadow. This is what is known as the 'new Moon'. In the exact opposite case, the Moon is completely illuminated by the Sun, with no intervening shadow cast by the Earth. This phase is known as the 'full Moon'. During the intermediate phases, slices of varying sizes are darkened."

I quote the passage at length, just to make clear that the author wasn't talking about some ancient's understanding of the phases of the moon. He was presenting this as fact.

At that point, I stopped reading. How could I trust anything that someone with such an egregious misunderstanding of something as simple as the phases of the moon says? Next time, I'll read the book before I give it to some impressionable youngster.

With this book, Ferreira has given me just what I was looking for: a detailed but accessible description of the current theory about the beginning of the universe (The Big Bang, nucleosynthesis, inflation), its makeup (normal matter, dark matter, dark energy), the nature of space and time (special and general relativity), and the open questions that remain in the field.

The book employs the story of the string of discoveries that lead to our current understanding as a narrative (starting with Aristotle), which makes the discussion not only interesting but also fairly accessible. Even without a solid background in either physics, math or astronomy (I have a university degree in computer science), the book was easy enough to understand for the most part. For example, Ferreira made me understand relativity better than any of the TV documentaries I have seen on the subject.

It is only in the last parts that I lost it, as the discussion about dark energy and some other advanced subjects were too hard for me to understand. That's not a problem for me though. First of all, it shows that while the author went to great lengths to make the (sometimes tough) science easy to understand without "dumbing it down" too much. Secondly, it makes a reread worthwhile (in fact, I have already read the first half of the book twice already).

All in all, cosmology is is one of my favorite fields in all of science, and this book does a great job telling the story of its development, and compellingly makes the case for the current state of our understanding.

This is the best overview of cosmology I have ever read. The author writes very clearly on amazingly difficult topics. He is a natural teacher, and he uses marvelous analogies to explain nearly ungraspable topics (for example, using the way ice sheets form and fuse to explain subtle differences in the nearly homogeneous universal background radiation). I have never before felt so close to grasping this difficult material, though, like anyone without the math, I cannot get truly close. But when I finished this book I felt grateful, and I wanted to read it again from the beginning.

This book is a fair an nice review of the history and state-of-the-art of cosmology. It is very readable, not technical at all.

The drawback of the book, if you are interested in the last findings in cosmology (and this is what the title suggests), is that most of it is dedicated to the history and even ancient history of the topic. Issues such as the non zero cosmological constant and the multiverse hypotesis are treated very fast in the last chapters, just telling the raw facts, not commiting to any interpretation. The final moral is "we still don't know", which may be true, but the reader of popular science books expects something different.

"The State of the Universe" is only worth reading if you have not read similar books previously. Like most popular book on Cosmology, or the newest take on Particle Physics it devotes the first half of the book on the Physics and Astromomy leading up to the various current conjectures. It does a fair job of this, but if you are not familiar with that history there are far better treatments.

When Ferreira finally gets to his topic he lists a mess of the latest guesses without giving much evidence pro and con. He evidently aims at the mathematically most illiterate portion of the public by writng large numbers with with a plethoria of zeros leaving the reader to count them, instead of using simple exponents which most of his readers should have studied in the seventh grade.

The book confirms my opinion that books on these subjects either must go into the math which unfortunately is beyond college calculus, or confine themselves to questionable word analogies which usually do not work. This book does the latter.

This is a good update on the field of cosmology. If you are like most of those who know what the word means, you have already read a number of such books, and depending on when you read the latest, this book will or will not give you some new ideas. I would say you are most likely to enjoy the book if you were out of this area for 5 years or so and want to get back into it again fast.
If you wonder what "cosmology" means, then actually this may be a pretty good book to get your feet wet (cosmology is the part of natural science that deals with the questions on how the universe originated and developed to its current state).
Ferreira writes deftly and pleasantly on difficult topics. He chooses to do without any mathematics or formulas, making the reading easier but his task harder. His writing is fluid but he does not quite make it sparkling in the way that some science popularizers such as Paul Davies have been able to do.
In the end, for me and probably for all readers, it does remain astonishing how mankind has been able to come to an understanding of things that happened billions of years ago, billions of light-years away. That by itself makes the book worth reading.

I was pleased with the efficiency you showed in getting me the book in such a timely manner. Thanks.
The book itself was fine, but in one sense it was "same old, same old."
I did appreciate the chapters on 'dark stuff,' which I know little or nothing about. The author has a style which is readable and almost breezy.

This "Primer in Modern Cosmology" is a generally clear account of modern cosmology for the layman. The visual metaphors and descriptions did not jibe with the concepts and this could be confusing in parts. It is physically a nicely done hardbound book.

Isaac Asimov's now dated "The Universe" is for me the gold standard. It had an unfolding sense of wonder that is hard to match. Perhaps this is what I was hoping for in this book. General interest science writers should read Asimov. It is clear, historically narrative and has a captures that early sixties excitement about space and science.