Book Review: Understanding Cosmology, by the Editors of Scientific American

Understanding Cosmology by Scientific American

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I got bumped from the Russian Soyuz. They overbooked, I guess. Anyway, $40 million was a little steep, I think. So before I make that mistake again, and book a flight with Boeing-Space Adventures, I thought I’d check out what all the hubbub was about. Actually, I was interested in the idea of whether today’s Cosmologists were nothing more than modern day alchemists. Also, it would be interesting to see if there was any theology threads weaved through this tapestry of science. “Understanding Cosmology,” in the most pedestrian language scientists are capable of (many times completely incomprehensible) attempts to bring the reader closer to the truth of how the universe formed, evolved and developed, and what it means to us. During the parts that I could understand, I found out that the Big Bang Theory is old news. There is so much more that they know now, like what happened before the Big Bang. WHAT? Yeah--before. What you come away with is that there are whole new worlds of thought, which are now unimagined, and will eventually become commonplace theories in the future. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that the Cosmologists are in fact closet alchemists—the big question for them being: is if there could be a theory of everything so simple and so elegant that its basic concepts could be understood by a child.



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