Battle of the Big Bang
The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
“Excellent.”—Steven Poole, The Wall Street Journal • “Terrific.”—Liz Else, New Scientist (Best Popular Science Books of 2025 So Far) • “A brilliant overview of the state of modern cosmology.”—Alex O‛Connor, alexoconnor.com • “This will expand readers’ minds.”—Publishers Weekly • One of Smithsonian’s Ten Best Science Books of 2025
“An intellectual feast.”—Carlo Rovelli • “A must-read.”—Sabine Hossenfelder • “Wonderfully broad and open-minded.”—Roger Penrose • “Remarkable.”—Brian Keating
A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.
By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.
Incorporating insights from Afshordi’s cutting-edge research and Halper’s original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory’s strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these notions. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community—all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Afshordi, a physics professor at the University of Waterloo, and Halper, a Royal Astronomical Society fellow, debut with a heady overview of scientific efforts to understand the events surrounding the big bang. The authors note that while few astronomers doubt that an explosion forged the cosmos 13.8 billion years ago, many challenge the idea that this explosion emerged from a "singularity of infinite density, pressure, and temperature" that marked the beginning of time. Surveying alternative explanations, Afshordi and Halper describe how researchers led by physicist Abhay Ashtekar forwarded the "big bounce" theory in the mid 2000s after running computer simulations that indicated the universe alternates between periods of collapsing and expanding. Each of the more than two dozen proposals is wilder than the last; for instance, the 4D black hole theory posits that "our universe is a membrane, expanding out of the horizon of a higher-dimensional black hole," while the cosmological natural selection explanation holds that "a universe is born inside every black hole, each with slightly different laws of physics." With helpful diagrams and illustrations, the authors succeed in breaking down for lay readers the mind-bending physics behind each theory. This will expand readers' minds. Photos.
