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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 Ings
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In the 19th century astronomers, geologists and evolutionists first suggested that the Earth and Sun were (at least) millions of years old. By the early 20th century, many assumed that the Universe was infinitely old. Then in the 1920s Edwin Hubble's discovery of the expanding Universe, combined with Einstein's general theory of relativity, pointed to a Universe with a beginning -- the Big Bang. Taken at face value, however, Hubble's early measurements suggested that the Universe was younger than the Earth. And when scientists began to understand how stars work, it really did appear that the stars were older than the Universe itself -- and astronomy was faced with a major crisis. The work and the debate continued in the 1970s and 1980s, with great hopes pinned on the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1994 and 1995 measurements from the HST shattered this hope, by seeming to support a relatively young age for the Universe. The HST measurements concentrated the attention of astronomers worldwide in a renewed assault on the problem. At Sussex University John Gribbin and his colleagues were developing a new technique to measure the Hubble Constant. By mid 1997 they had achieved the elusive breakthrough, which finally established that the Universe really is older than the stars it contains. The Birth of Time is an intriguing tale of false leads, blind alleys, and groping in the semi-dark towards the truth, told by a brilliant science writer who was also involved, as a research astronomer, in the final breakthrough.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is very well written and easy to read. It takes you from early theories on the age of the universe right upto date. The author builds on previous discoveries, so that by the time you reach the present you have a good grasp of the science involved. Being an astronomer on the Sussex University team which dated the universe, John Gribbin is well placed to take us on this tour. One thing this book teaches us though is that all scientific advances are only "fact" until another theory comes along and displaces it. One possible weakness of the title is that it can be a little heavy going in the middle chapters. The complexity of the theories, although written in an easy to understand manner, still took some thinking about before the concepts sank in. But I find this a bonus because by thinking about them I came to a greater understanding of the ideas. All in all a terrific read and a real eye opener to the persistance of scientists.
Format:Hardcover
A very interesting book that is at its best when tracing through the timeline of humanity's efforts to understand the timeline of the universe but also dos well to explain the difficulties in actually doing so.
Written clearly and progressing logically this is an interesting journey through science from the perspective of measuring the age of the universe wihtout being very technical. It is thus quite an easy read without losing the depth of the subject.
Written clearly and progressing logically this is an interesting journey through science from the perspective of measuring the age of the universe wihtout being very technical. It is thus quite an easy read without losing the depth of the subject.
Format:Hardcover
This was one of a number of books that came out when data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Hipparcos satellite began to pour in, leading to revisions and clarifications of existing calculations of how far away distant galaxies are, and so to revised estimates for the age of the universe. But for all Gribbin's high standing a science journalist, it's not particularly well-written or clear for the non-scientist, and rather unbalanced towards the end as the author drills down into then-contemporary research that was refining values for the Hubble constant. In contrast to the excellent `Measuring the Universe' by Kitty Ferguson, Gribbin moves along too briskly and in a prose style that's rarely exciting. Hubble and a few associates aside, he doesn't discuss in much detail the personalities behind the science that can be illuminating; and his text lacks the diagrams where these would have been helpful. You will learn from his book about parallax and Hubble red-shift, and the importance of Cepheid variables and supernovae for calculating the age of the universe, so the book does its job. But it could have done it quite a bit more stylishly and engagingly, in my view.
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