September 24, 2005

The Origins of the Universe, by John D. Barrow

BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP  (September 24, fourth Saturday, 10 AM)

MEETING PLACE: University Unitarian Universalist Society, 11648 McCulloch Rd: From University Boulevard go north on Rouse Rd. 1.0 mi; east on McCulloch Rd. 0.5 mi. QUESTIONS?: Contact Steve Hall, Program Chairman, University UUS Home Phone: 407-681-5066 I hope to see you there.

Book Description

The Origins of the Universe, by John D. Barrow

Publisher Comments: There is no more profound, enduring, or fascinating question in all of science than that of how time, space, and matter began. Now John Barrow, who has been at the cutting edge of research in this area and has written extensively about it, guides readerson a journey to the beginning of time, into a world of temperatures and densities so high that we cannot re-create them in the laboratory. With new insights, he draws us into the latest speculative theories about the nature of time and the inflationary universe, explains wormholes, showing how they bear upon the fact of our own existence, and considers whether there was a singularity at the inception of the universe. Here is a treatment so up-to-date and intellectually rich, dealing with ideas and speculation at the farthest frontier of science, that neither novice nor expert will want to miss what Barrow has to say. He shows how scientists, by exploring crucial points of contact between the behavior of matter during its early history and the observed structure of the universe today, came to understand more fully all the entities in the universefrom elementary particles to great clusters of galaxies.

John Barrow is Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Hailed as "the Stephen Jay Gould of the mathematical sciences" (Sir Martin Rees), he is the author of 15 popular science books, including Pi in the Sky, Theories of Everything, The Origin of the Universe, and The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (with Frank Tipler).

Other related book suggestions:

THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead

by Frank J. Tipler, Macmillan, 528pp

SCIENCE AS SALVATION: A Modern Myth and its Meaning

by Mary Midgley, Routledge, 239pp

THE ORIGIN OF HUMANKIND

by Richard Leakey, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 171pp

THE LAST THREE MINUTES

by Paul Davies, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 162pp

SHADOWS OF THE MIND: The Missing Science of Consciousness

by Roger Penrose, Oxford University Press, 457pp

Interesting Web Site:

Talk Reason: Web site presents a collection of articles which aim to defend genuine science from numerous attempts by the new crop of creationists to replace it with theistic pseudo-science under various disguises and names.

Three Reviews from GHS Physics

This book, though claiming to be introductory was very hard to follow in parts. The book investigates a wide range of cosmological questions, and then tries to explain in plain English, the latest theories, discoveries and speculations about the universe and its origins.

I often found myself having to read and then reread just to follow some of the harder concepts. This was due to various reasons. Even though the book made good use of simple and easy to look at diagrams the explanation of the diagrams were not too clear. I often felt a lack of interest while reading the book. While the beginning had all the ingredients to keep me wanting to turn the page, the end became tedious and lacked the pizzazz that the author had at the start.

While the book does lack in interest and explanation I must admit when I did understand a concept (usually due to some small background knowledge), I was able to really understand it. The book to its credit did do well in explaining the possibility of wormhole links between disconnected parts of time and space, the future of the way the universe could expand and also some meaning of Einstein's theories. The lack of complicated mathematical equations and explanations were also a bonus, as I doubt one year of A-Level maths would help in the understanding any mathematical models thrown at me.

Overall, this is not a fun or well-written read aimed at a 17-year-old physicist. Only pick this book up when you really want to know about the subject in mind.

Reviewed by Tyrone McGrath - 1999

Origin of the universe takes the reader through the known data scientists have collated about the universe. The way it is receding and how that is linked to Hubble's Law, (which states that the recession speed of galaxies µ to their distance) and possible explanations, ideas, and predictions of the big bang, the point at which people believe the universe, as we know it stemmed from.

It may seem from the introduction the ideas are not very quantitative and that is certainly the case, cosmology is plagued with so many uncertainties scientists find it hard to pin point exact times in the history of the universe.

This may be why so many theories about our universe have evolved and been rejected over time as the understanding of science and many of these are included in different chapters of the book.

The first crucial idea to be faced is the expansion of the universe, the fact that there is only a tiny portion of time in the expansion of the universe where life can evolve. If the galaxy fails to recede at a great enough speed the gravitational force of matter will pull the galaxy into contraction. The result would be a big crunch the destructive opposite to the creative big bang, this case is referred to as a Closed universe; no stars are able to form.

Open systems recede with a larger velocity then gravity can affect; these universes are infinitely large and expand forever, galaxies never form as gravity cannot draw together material to form them, between these two is a critical area at which our universe lies.

If the speed of recession is enough to enable the system to expand but with a small enough force so matter can be drawn together with the force of gravity galaxies and stars and planets such as our own are able to be created.

The following chapters explain other theories of expansion, the big bang and the state of the universe before our big bang! It has been thought that the universe is continually bouncing from creation to destruction and so on. Scientific conclusions that confine the possibilities of different theories such as the regular isotropy of the expanding universe and the increasing entropy are given which helps the reader to understand the principles of the theories and why some may have been disregarded in the past.

Recent NASA experiments such as the COBE satellite has also helped establish the data such as the background radiation diffusing from the big bang. All these progressions of technology and science enable cosmologists too look back into the early microseconds of the beginning. The first few seconds, which are so hard to unravel, are vital to the understanding of the evolution of the universe, and the process, that caused the huge big bang explosion billions of years ago but which can still be heard echoing around the confines of the universe.

Future hopes concerned with the creation and possible end of the universe lie with the ability to detect WIMPS (Weakly Interacting massive Particles) in the particle collider in Geneva.

The destiny of the universe, whether it is closed or lying in the critical area which allows the universe to recede and form but not to collapse into a big crunch, will hopefully be calculated by finding the relative proportions of all the various types of matter contained within space.

The Origin of the Universe is a comprehensive book containing explanations of many theories and facts some of which it expands in further areas. Due to the depth I found it listed too many ideas, leading to confusion, before you had taken in one idea it was confused with a new idea, which often was so similar. It was hard to keep a grasp of the definitions and explanations, which needed to be fully comprehended, especially for a person like me with limited cosmological knowledge.

Reviewed by Trystan Emery - 1998

This book describes the picture of the universe as viewed by many of the present day cosmologists and goes on to explain how these findings allow us to shed light on the events at the beginning of time. It gives the latest explanation of the Big Bang theory as well as trying to explain "dark matter", and considers the possible future of the universe by trying to answer the biggest that cosmologists are still yet to answer, what was the origin of the universe?

John Barrow starts off in a quite simplistic way by explaining all the fundamentals of the modern cosmological theories in use today but he soon starts to get a bit complicated when he starts to explain about "Inflation and particle physics". Nevertheless I kept reading and found out what "wormholes" are as well as the many possible theories about inflation of the universe and the how universe will end up.

The trouble with this book was that it started to get a bit technical with all it's theories on inflation and universe singularity in the 3rd and 4th chapters but as I kept reading the book I began to make sense of these theories so by the end of the book I had a small idea of what the book was going on about.

I would probably recommend this book to someone who cared about the universe and how it began but if you're not interested then it be a waste of time reading about the origin of the universe when according to the author, John D Barrow, "We can never know the origin of the universe".

Reviewed by Sean Walsh - 1998