Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe

Rating:
Summary: Interesting book that gets ahead of itself
Review: 'Extra! Extra! Scientists have solved the universe's biggest mystery!' Eh? Such a claim would invite derision in most circles, but this is not too distant from the claim that the book uses as a launching statement when it suggests that researchers in the past decade have managed to precisely map out the future of the universe. This is quite inaccurate and the book is thus obviously unable to support it. Unfortunately, the claim also colours the book's entire outlook, which is crammed with overstatements and a writing style that is not balanced enough for a subject of such depth.

In the author's defence, he does not dwell overly on the unsupportably tidy claim that his book makes in the beginning. He is much more in his element when he backs away from it and explains what's currently theorised about spacetime's structure, geometry, and properties and why scientists think so. He has a good grasp of general relativity and an ability to explain it well, but he also works in good discussions of some of the more difficult-to-grasp ideas that involve string theory as well as some of the odder contortions of spacetime geometry. The book's greatest strength is that it helps a reader to visualise and make some sense out of theories that otherwise are expressed only in the form of cumbersome and quite difficult mathematics. Worth taking a look at, at least for the book's middle chapters where most of the explanation takes place.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting book that gets ahead of itself
Review: 'Extra! Extra! Scientists have solved the universe's biggest mystery!' Eh? Such a claim would invite derision in most circles, but this is not too distant from the claim that the book uses as a launching statement when it suggests that researchers in the past decade have managed to precisely map out the future of the universe. This is quite inaccurate and the book is thus obviously unable to support it. Unfortunately, the claim also colours the book's entire outlook, which is crammed with overstatements and a writing style that is not balanced enough for a subject of such depth.

In the author's defence, he does not dwell overly on the unsupportably tidy claim that his book makes in the beginning. He is much more in his element when he backs away from it and explains what's currently theorised about spacetime's structure, geometry, and properties and why scientists think so. He has a good grasp of general relativity and an ability to explain it well, but he also works in good discussions of some of the more difficult-to-grasp ideas that involve string theory as well as some of the odder contortions of spacetime geometry. The book's greatest strength is that it helps a reader to visualise and make some sense out of theories that otherwise are expressed only in the form of cumbersome and quite difficult mathematics. Worth taking a look at, at least for the book's middle chapters where most of the explanation takes place.

Rating:
Summary: Good introduction for non-science types
Review: A fine and clear review of the development of cosmological theory from Ptolemy to the present, definitely written for the curious non-scientist.
Seife has a good feeling for how strange the universe is, and for how unsettling it can be to contemplate it. He takes your hand and leads you through the stories of discovery with respect, but assuming you know little to nothing about the subject.
I had trouble putting it down.

Rating:
Summary: difficult concepts explained in a simple manner
Review: Ever since I read Charles Seife's excellent book "Zero: A Biography of a Dangerous Idea" I have been excited to read whichever book he might publish next. I finally got my change with "Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe". The title tells us exactly what the book is about: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe. In this book Seife informs us about what scientists know about how the universe began, and what they think they know about how the universe will one day end. Charles Seife has a rare talent for taking extremely complex and difficult scientific concepts and explaining them in a way that those concepts are understandable to a lay-reader.

Charles Seife examines what the accepted scientific view of the beginning of the universe was, and he shows how that view has evolved over time until scientists had more data to give a clearer picture of the origins of the universe. Seife also tells us how scientists have figured out how the universe is likely to end. He tells us what scientists know, and more importantly, how they know it. This is very important because it shows the advances made in scientific knowledge as well as because of the fact that it explains the knowledge on a more basic level that makes sense. The theories become more real and less of an alien concept to someone like me who does not have a depth of knowledge in science.

Even though Seife went to great lengths to explain the science in the simplest language possible without losing the depth of the information presented, some of it still went over my head a bit. Seife's volume can be best used as a primer and as introduction to the topic. He has a smooth writing style that makes the book very easy to read even with the difficult concepts presented. This is another excellent book by Charles Seife and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the scientific explanations for the origins of the universe.

Rating:
Summary: Very Enjoyable and Worthwhile Book
Review: How do you explain the cosmos? It depends on when you live. Mr. Seife makes this point in a very enjoyable manner in the first chapters of this book. Unfortunately for all of us (at least those of us without advanced degrees in physics, etc.), we live in a time when the explanations are very technical, and involve concepts that seem implausible, if not just plain impossible.

They're not, of course - and that's why we need books like this that help us to make sense of these concepts, while not making us feel like morons because we need the help to understand them. This book does a very good job of doing that.

Mr. Seife really loves his subject, and writes about it with great zeal. The writing, while sometimes (by necessity) very technical, is never dry or dull. I missed the humor that I found in Stephen Hawking's books of this nature. By the same token, this book is much better written, and in many ways much more enlightening, than Hawking's "The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe" which often left me confused as to where all of the pieces fit.

The key, it seems to me, is that Mr. Seife stays focused on his task at hand: giving the reader the tools necessary to understand current cosmological theories. He doesn't digress into discussions of theories and areas designed to simply boggle the mind, as Stephen Hawking sometimes does. Speaking of Stephen Hawking, I am curious how you can write a book of this type, in this time, and not cite Hawking. Mr. Seife manages to do that. I wonder if there's something below the surface there.

This was a most enjoyable book, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to increase his or her understanding of our cosmos. But, don't forget to bring your thinking cap.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent effort but with major shortcomings
Review: How was the universe born, and how will it die? These are questions asked in other books: what sets Alpha & Omega apart is a focus on the discoveries in science which have led to major shifts in theories about the universe - and the modern discoveries which promise to link new cosmological discoveries to daily living. A fascinating account of how lives and worlds change.

Rating:
Summary: Very convincing
Review: I am a skeptic. I have a mind of my own, and I like authors who treat the reader with respect. If I wanted religion, I would go to church. I want to be convinced.

In particular, I am very skeptical of the whole big bang idea. I've been exposed to some of the evidence, but it has always seemed relatively scant to me.

No longer. Seife has convinced me. The big bang, basically, probably, did in fact occur.

His deep respect for skeptical scientists, my heroes, runs through the whole book. Seife acknoledges that much of the old evidence was really not overwhelming. When he refers to very recent experiments which disprove moribund but reasonable ideas (some of which have occurred even to laymen like me) he does not criticize the scientists who had held out hope. Actually, he seems to admire the tenacity of the iconoclast.

The icing on the cake is the list of ongoing and future experiments. This section may soon be outdated, but for now it has the effect of including the reader in the scientific pursuit. I am now very excited to learn the results of some of these experiments, though they may be years away.

If you just want to admire the insights, go with Hawking. If you want to dream, try Brian Greene. If you want to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new cosmological era, read this book.

Why only 4 stars? The book becomes less convincing in the final chapters. But it is the best I've found.

Rating:
Summary: Trying to elucidate a difficult subject
Review: Science writer Charles Seife, author of the award-wining Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000), begins with two chapters on pre-modern cosmology followed by a chapter on Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe using the new 100-inch telescope placed atop Mount Wilson in 1917. Seife sees Hubble's discovery as "The Second Cosmological Revolution." In Chapter Four we learn, thanks in part to the Hubble Space Telescope, that the Hubble constant is not so constant after all and is indeed larger today than it was in the past. Conclusion: the universe is not only expanding, but is accelerating in its expansion. Seife calls this "The Third Cosmological Revolution." The chapter is subtitled, "The Universe Amok."

Maybe the universe is indeed running amok, or maybe it's the astrophysicists and cosmologists themselves who are possessed. Too much data too soon may have untoward consequences, especially when one is feeling about in the dark with limited instruments focused on an immensity perhaps beyond human comprehension.

First there is the problem of the so-called dark matter. With the curvature of the universe at one, meaning that it will expand forever and eventually after many an eon die a cold and lonely death, there will be no big crunch, no bounce, and no time reversal. This is okay. However, when cosmologists go looking for the correct amount of matter and energy to support this flat curvature they come up a little short. About ninety percent short, in fact. In other words nearly all that there is, is not only invisible to our perception, it is completely mysterious except that it does indeed influence gravitationally the rest of the stuff in the universe. As Seife explains, the stars in a galaxy as they rotate around the galactic center are not moving in concert with Newtonian (or Einsteinian) motion; instead the stars furthest from the center are moving at about the same speed as those near the center, an impossibility.

What to do about this? Cosmologists have postulated some "dark matter" surrounding galaxies like a halo. With just the right amount of dark matter (again approximately a whopping nine times that observed) the speed of the stars is nicely accounted for. There is another solution: reject Newtonian/Einsteinian dynamics. That (as radical an idea as one would like to entertain) has been tried and, as Seife notes, it has failed. (See p. 100) Furthermore, as Seife observes in "Darker Still" (Chapter 7), this invisible stuff cannot be all ordinary (baryonic) matter. It has to be of some "exotic" variety that we can't identify.

Okay, let's put the dark matter conundrum on hold and look at the next problem: something from nothing. It appears that, due to the uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics, there is no such thing as nothing. That is, matter is probabilistically jumping in and out of existence down near the Planck level in the "foam" regardless of how complete the vacuum. Indeed, some theorists have imagined whole universes popping randomly out of...what? It would appear that underneath, beneath, inside of--what?--there is, like an unfelt cauldron beneath our feet or inside the very fabric of space/time, something unimaginably immense and/or unimaginably tiny.

This "zero point energy" is now being postulated as the source of Einstein's cosmological constant (lambda) that is expanding the universe. Lambda was once thought to be an error; now "omega sub lambda" is thought to equal 65% of the matter/energy in the universe. Hello!

Seife's book suffers from that familiar plague on the house of popular science writers: trying to explain mathematical ideas without using mathematics, and trying to explain particle physics and quantum mechanics to people who haven't been trained in those sciences. One must rely on analogy and metaphor. Naturally using such devices things can make things even fuzzier than they already are. Also there is some inexactness in Seife's expression employed for what he calls "the sake of clarity."

Sometimes Seife's metaphors reduce to something close to meaningless, as in his ice cream-flavor-slurping hydrogen atoms from page 179. Such metaphors can send chills down the spine of some scientists, and they can mislead. A slightly different example is his statement that "the Heisenberg uncertainty principle forces nature to create and destroy...particles that appear out of nowhere...in the deepest vacuum." (p. 185) Not to disparage the uncertainty principle, but it is "nature" that is doing the forcing and not the other way around. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a way of explaining to ourselves what is observed (or not observed, as the case may be).

At other times Seife leaps from the uncertainty of a strained metaphor to runaway dramatics, as on page 183 where we find this: "once scientists figure out what really is, they will have unraveled the deepest mystery in physics today...[they will] understand...[what] drove the big bang itself...They will see beyond even the era of the quark-gluon plasma...to a time when the quantum vacuum held the fate of the universe in its grasp."

As for Seife's several attempts at witticism, I will give him a Cheshire cat's smile and applause to extend for the entire half-life of a virtual particle in the foam of space.

Okay, okay. Writing science that is both fair to the science and explicable to nonscientists is no easy task. I don't think Seife is as successful here as he was in "Zero," especially because the writing gets a little beclouded in the latter parts of the book but also because I have the sense that Seife is not as comfortable with physics as he is with mathematics. What is clear is just how removed even well-educated and knowledgeable laypersons are from the cutting edge of physics. Still this is an attractive book that added to my knowledge of cosmology.

Rating:
Summary: Best cosmology book in ages!
Review: This history of modern cosmology is engrossing. The book is clearly, and often eloquently, written and it is up-to-date (till February 2003, the time of going to press). This helps because many important discoveries have taken place recently. It also helps that Seife is a trained mathematician since modern physics is so closely tied to mathematics. So, for example, most popular science books wrongly explain Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but Seife gets it right. The book is particularly strong in describing various experiments and telescopes, how they work, and how they are expanding our understanding of the universe. On the negative side, the graphics could be much better; often, they help little in illustrating the concepts. There are also some spelling mistakes. Overall, however, I recommend this book highly.