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Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Good book
Good book about one of the newer ideas in cosmology. Accessible does not assume deep background knowledge. Explains ideas and needed background clearly. You will come away with an understanding of the cyclic universe idea. I thought was a quick read too. Well worth the time invested to read.
Rating: - Instead of the big bang, it was more like the big crunch
"Endless Universe - Beyond the Big Bang" by Dr. Paul J. Steinhardt and Dr. Neil Turok." Can any one tell me please how much distance there is between the dimensional membranes (brains)? I can't find a physicist that seems to know!
Each new scientific data point seems to throw a curve ball on our best laid plans and theories. The newest discovery (announced Sept 2008) that our universe seems to be rushing into a suck-hole by some "unseen force" at 2-million miles an hour, really puts a crimp in Steinhardt and Turok thesis of two flat planes ("brains" - short for membrains) of energy colliding in multiple points on a large scale ever trillion years and starting us all over again.
I liked their idea and fair treatment of the scientific method (conjecture, observation, proof) and new interpretation for old and new data. But how can we possibly integrate in these latest released observations of the giant suck-hole way, way out there on the edge?
http://www.peaceandconflictresolution.org/
Rating:  - Cosmology in a scientific process
The book presents an interesting alternative to the mainstream theory of the inflationary big bang cosmology. It even indicates possibilities for experimentally deciding between the two theories.
What also discerns this book from many popular science books is that the two authors present not only their ideas, but also tha path by which these were reached. This not only makes the book very readable, but is also demonstrates the trial and error process which characterizes real science.
Rating: - An infinitely old universe?
The big bang theory of the origin of the universe has been almost unchallenged for about half a century. Once the discovery of cosmic background in 1963 disposed of the steady-state model proposed by Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold in the 1950s, it was essentially the only game in town. Oscillatory models never entirely went away, but the inflationary model seemed to explain nearly all the data. At the same time it had some flaws that would not go away: it left the first second after the big bang a total mystery; it left the highly homogeneous distribution of matter and energy after the violent beginning unexplained; it seemed to require absurdly precise values for the physical constants (giving apparent support to the "strong anthropic principle", allowing some physicists to claim that the universe must have been designed by an external intelligence so that it could have us living in it); it failed to explain the origin of the "dark energy" driving the expansion; and so on. Any one of these difficulties could probably be explained away in terms of incomplete knowledge and understanding, but taken together they require so many arbitrary assumptions that it becomes hard to escape the conclusion that the big bang universe has become a patchwork of arbitrary assumptions, added ad hoc to cope with a series of problems.
Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok have developed an alternative way of seeing the universe, in which the big bang was not the beginning but simply a cataclysmic moment in a history of cycles, with no beginning and no end, and in their book they explain all this in terms that are by no means too difficult for the non-physicist to understand. Their model explains everything that the inflationary model explains, but it does so on the basis of fewer and less arbitrary assumptions. It is too soon to feel confident they are right, but if they are right they provide two comforting thoughts for non-physicists: we no longer need to think of time as something that began for unexplained reasons 14 billion years ago, but can return to thinking of it as something that stretches as far back into the past and future as we like to consider, and we don't have to take the strong anthropic principle as a serious argument for an intelligent designer.
This is a book that I enjoyed enormously. If I could give it six stars I would.
Rating: - A Convincing Alternative to Conventional Wisdom
Steinhardt and Turok masterfully outline and simplify their "cyclic model" of the universe in Endless Universe. This book could also serve as an introduction to M Theory, which unifies numerous string theories. Even if you don't buy their theory, you should buy this book because it addresses a number of issues that the traditional big bang theory (or the "inflationary model") fails at answering or explaining. Although the authors' own theory seems a bit far fetched (the first two stages of the model take only a few billion years while the "dark energy" stage takes a trillion), it is a needed rebuttal to the shortcomings of the inflationary model.
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