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| The Big Bang. A View from the 21st Century | Buy a book...
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| Author(s): | D. M. Harland |
| Publisher: | Springer |
| ISBN: | 1852337133 |
| Format: | softback |
| 262pp | |
| Price: | £24.50, $39.95, €39.95 |
| Review Date: | 19 August 2003 |
| Review: | Here the author follows the history of the quest to discover the origin and evolution of the Universe from the Greek philosophers in the third century BC, up to the present day. In the first half of the book he looks at the forces of nature, including: the ‘discovery’ of the mysterious aether, the theories of the structure of the atom, nuclear forces, symmetries and phase changes and the search for a ‘theory of everything’. The second half of the book centres on the discovery of the Universe: the spiral nebulae, cosmology, probing the furthest reaches, supermassive black holes; how the pieces fit together; and the Big Bang itself. The author concludes by surmising the fate that awaits the Universe as its rate of expansion accelerates – to decay into a tenuous sea of leptons and chilly radiation. |