 Great, 2008-09-17
Very well written with some brillant ideas. Excellant read it you like this sort of stuff!
 Frontier science and the ultimate questions, 2008-11-30
This is not the best introduction to concepts like relativity and quantum mechanics (although explanations are offered, and there's a decent glossary). Nor is it a book that flows particularly well from one chapter to the next. It's also not the right book if you're just looking for a summary of our current, most widely accepted cosmological theories.
What it is however is quite an interesting series of chapters in which the author has spoken to "some of the most imaginative and daring scientists in the world", and seeks to relay some of these ideas to the layperson.
I say series of chapters, because each chaper feels somewhat divorced from the next, and there's some strange repetition going on. You get a sense that the author or editor has sprinkled phrases like "as mentioned previously" throughout chapters in a last-minute attempt to make the book work better as a whole. Personally I would have preferred there to have been greater cohesion between chapters, though I can appreciate how the format of the book would have made that difficult. Clearly this book isn't designed to 'flow'.
I enjoyed the last half substantially more than the first, though hopefully the sentence errors in the last chapter will be rectified in future editions.
Highly speculative throughout, but once you accept that, it's easier to enjoy, even if you question some of the conclusions. It unashamedly stretches physics far from its widely accepted boundaries, even pushing it into the realm of theology at times with speculation about the universe's possible creator, and the suggestion - by one physicist - that the purpose of life could be to create an omnipotent and omniscient super-intelligence.
If you're a beginner hoping to learn about the big bang, relativity and quantum theory, then this is probably not the best book for you. A title like Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos would almost certainly offer you a better understanding of these concepts, building your understanding slowly and methodically.
However if you already have a basic grasp of such topics and fancy a highly speculative detour away from established theories into the realm of topics such as whether we might be living in a computer simulation and where we might look for a message from the universe's creator, then you should find this an entertaining read.
 Is this really a science book?, 2008-12-27
I would like to caution those readers who like a lot of science in their popular science books. This book is more about amazement than explanation.
I found Chown's descriptions too general, with not nearly enough background or discussion of the pro and con of each theory. He's clearly excited about the subject, which apparently spread to some readers who enjoyed this book.
Even fans of this publication will concede that it is a collection of essays thrown together pretending to be a book, which combined with Chown's enthusiastic lack of skepticism just annoyed and gradually infuriated me. It just seemed like sloppy work all round.
Apparently a lot of people enjoy Chown's style - I would recommend you read a bit of Chown's work before making the investment.
 Inconvenient for the absolute layman, useless to the others, 2008-10-13
I purchased this book some time ago, but didn't read it until yesterday.
1) IMhO, the book is an overwarmed collection of essays written at different times, roughly stitched together and rushed to printing and publishing. The seams show.
2) Now, this Chown should know what he's writing about. If he really is a former astronomer (but of what kind?), and the New Scientist's
"cosmological consultant", he must -or should I say 'should'?- be competent. He cites a couple of papers that, if he was able to read and understand, as I think he did, put him in the class of lesser scientists, or at the very least, serious amateurs.
3) This said, the book doesn't show it. I repeat a question I sometimes ask myself: for whom is the book written? For the layman genuinely interested in science? Or for people interested in showing off with friends (but who, outside a very restricted community, talks seriously about these matters?) their 'knowledge' about some 'sexy' topics?
To the former, avoid like the plague (strange how customs change: were I to have written "HIV" instead of "plague" I'm sure I'd have been labeled an insensitive Neanderthal). To the latter: pick up the concepts you're interested in from better books, of which, with the cut and paste (rendered now so ridiculously easy by the current IT) epidemic raging in our midst, there must be hundreds. Any 'popular' book by Thorne, Penrose, Whittaker, Ghirardi, Chaitin, Feynmann, Gell-Mann, Davies (except the last, "Goldilocks"), Gribbin, Rees, Kauffmann, Pagels, Rees, Tipler, Lindley, Greene, Kaku, Deutsch, Smolin, Prigogine, Guth, Linde, Gross, even Susskind, etc. etc. etc.) will give you a better, sounder idea of the topics this one rushes throug so breezily and incorrectly (not by ignorance but by distorted and contradictory dumbing down to a level where brane attraction through the fifth dimension -of a Calaby-Yau manifold, presumably?- is as easy and familiar as fish 'n chips). Of course, every book treats some themes in preference to others, so youll' nowhere find a balance similar to the one chosen by Chown; to achieve that, you'd have to read five or six of the above-mentioned authors. But you'd have a much sounder knowledge of topics that the book mangles (for example, the explanation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in page 178 of the PB edition: "The HUP actually states that for any microscopic event, there is a minimum value of particular quantity - the duration of the event multiplied by the energy of the event. An oscillation has a characteristic time associated with it -the duration of a single oscillation- so the HUP dictates it must also have a certain minimum energy associated with it" [everything sic, except for the acronims]. If I hadn't known what decoherence is and supposedly manages to accomplish I wouldn't have understood a word of Chown's explanation his in Chapter 4 "Keeping it Real". The strange thing is, Chown in the Glossary at the end of the book (page 273) gives a clearer and far more conventional definition of the HUP. That reinforces my impression that the book is acollective, badly harmonized effort.
4) Closely linked to the preceding point is the question of the book's quality, which I frankly found wanting.
Besides careless writing (or editing; as one of many examples consider a possible message left by the Creator in the CMB, page 210 on the PBE: "This is how up I built the Universe"), Chown apparently can't bring himself to think coherently. For example he repeatedly presents the Big Bang as the moment everything started, and was concentrated in a singularity, once he even cautions us against likening it to an explosion that happened in space and time; at other times he states that it happened all at once in all of (I suppose infinite) space; most of the time he refers to it as caused by inflation's leftover energy that had nowhere to go except to power the creation of mass-energy and so cause the BB. Since for all we wnow almost anything might be true, one couldn't fault him for presenting ONE idea as true, but this is nowhere done: he writes as if he weren't even aware of his inconsistent statements. (Well, perhaps the book WAS after all put together by helpers and he hurriedly stitched the parts together: have you noticed how often he publishes - and presumably this mustn't be his main occupation-? And the huge number of footnotes and sentences of the type "as we already saw in Chapter ... ", or "for a more thorough treatment refert to Chapter ... ")?.
He also jumps from one argument to another without rhyme or reason: rather in the middle of the book, he defines several times for the presumably least-lower-bound-average reader what are frecuency, amplitude, etc. Yet before that, in pages 57 ff., he presents the brane collision scenario, in a chapter where he "discusses" incredibly advanced conceps (without saying that some of them are more akin to hard science fiction than to science), and even employs exponential notation!
He fails even to mention how physicists categorize leptons, gluons, hadrons, bosons, etc., which he mentions freely but without once explaining how they fit into the general picture, and what the terms mean.
5) The only, for me, good point of the book: his discussion on the origin of mass, in a language more sober and reflective than usual for him, and his thinly veiled but, one feels, rather heartfelt opposition to the Higgs mechanism (let's hope that CERN'S LHC doesn't find the boson too soon!).
So, abstain if you're a complete layman.
In general, avoid unless you're the type that can't resist the chance of finding about a new glamorous field that you hadn't heard about and interests you. In that case, skim through cursorily in one/two days maximum and buy and read toughtfully the bibliography, or surf the articles.
As for me, this is the last (it was the first) book I buy from this author.
Great fun - and deep too, 2008-12-29
I notice that the Guardian (above) called this a limousine among popular science vehicles. I heartily agree. Markus Chown tackles the biggest questions about life, the universe and everything and he does it with authority, style, clarity and humour.
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