The Birth Of Time: How We Measured the Age of the Universe Book

How long is a piece of string? Or, if you prefer, how do you work out your place in the universe while sitting on a backwater planet in a dusty corner of an unexceptional galaxy hurtling through a space whose fabric is itself expanding, so that some neighbouring galaxies are observed moving towards us and away from us at the same time? Husband-and-wife team John and Mary Gribbin are arguably this country's finest writers of popular science. This time round, though, John himself gets to claim a not inconsiderable footnote in the history of science, as one of the Sussex University team who finally found a way to accurately date the age of the universe. In the 1970s, two rival camps of cosmologists used the same evidence to argue for what seem at a first glance to be radically different ages for the universe: one less than 10 billion years, one more than 13 billion years. Stars, according to one model, were older than the universe described in the other model! But marvel rather, Gribbin argues, that both camps came up with answers with roughly the same number of noughts at the end--a fact that brought considerable relief to both sides of this cordial controversy. Marvel even that we ever worked out--and that only recently--that the universe had any sort of beginning at all! Gribbin, in one of his very best books, takes the reader through a fascinating if claustrophobic tour through earlier models of the universe--models that until this century had no room for other galaxies, nor much happening before 4000BC. Seeing how much extraordinarily hard work and clever intuition brought us from there to our current state of knowledge will have readers spellbound, and not a little dizzy. --Simon IngsRead More