After the Beginning
A Cosmic Journey through Space and Time
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
In a brilliant flash about fourteen billion years ago, time and matter were born in a single instant of creation. An immensely hot and dense universe began its rapid expansion everywhere, creating space where there was no space and time where there was no time. In the intense fire just after the beginning, the lightest elements were forged, later to form primordial clouds that eventually evolved into galaxies, stars, and planets. This evolution is the story told in this fascinating book. Interwoven with the storyline are short pieces on the pioneering men and women who revealed those wonders to us.
Contents:Island UniversesThe Large and the SmallBig BangElementary Particles — Fundamental ForcesThe Primeval FireballGalaxy Clusters, Galaxies, and StarsThe Future Universe
Readership: General readers as well as undergraduates, graduate students and academics in cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy and theoretical physics. The book can be used for a general science course at the college level.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Physicist Glendenning recently made the headlines of scientific publications for his theory that quarks may exist in a free state ("quark matter") in the cores of neutron stars. Quarks in general have been bound by the strong nuclear force since the beginning of the universe, so Glendenning's theory, if proven, would be a turning point in our understanding of the universe at its birth. In this book, Glendenning, of the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, takes readers on a tour of the early universe. Much of this material will be familiar to science buffs, but the author is particularly enlightening on early "eras" in the history of the universe (superradiant, hadronic, leptonic, etc.), when elementary particles and then atoms were just starting to come together. Early chapters ramble, but the book comes to life when Glendenning tackles how matter came into existence, the creation of the heavier elements in stellar furnaces and the coalescing of large structures like galaxies. Readers with mathematical expertise will appreciate the boxed material in each chapter written at a higher technical level. Glendenning's last chapter, on the universe's possible fate, is little more than perfunctory. Still, this account will serve a range of readers, from casual browsers to dedicated science enthusiasts. B&w illus.
