Product Description

This is a tale of false leads, blind alleys and groping in the semi-dark, all of which lead to the discovery of the elusive evidence of the age of the universe. The author, as a research astronomer, was involved in the work with the Hubble Space Telescope which lead to the final breakthrough.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1016806 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

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 seemed 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

About the Author
John Gribbin has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Cambridge, and is now Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex and consultant to New Scientist. His books have been translated into many languages, and have won awards in both Britain and the United States. He also writes science fiction.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating insight into the race to date the universe.
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.

How can the Universe be younger than the stars?
This book addresses the apparent paradox, aired in the media a couple of years ago, that the Universe appeared to be younger than the stars in it, and sets out to explain the methods by which the age of the Universe is estimated. The first part deals with the history of the scientific research that gradually pushed back the age of the Earth from the 6,000 years originally calculated by Martin Luther in the Sixteenth Century to the current estimate, based on radioactive decay, of 4.5 billion years. The rest of the book deals with the problems of measuring the age of the Universe as a whole, relating this to the growing perception of the true scale of the cosmos and the difficulty of knowing even roughly how far away anything is.

As a non-specialist who has read a few books on cosmology, I found this an interesting discussion in more detail of issues that are ussually glossed over by popular science writers. Finally the book describes how, with the aid of the Hubble Space Telescope, the paradox was resolved in 1997. Altogether this is a fascinating story. The general reader, looking for a general description of cosmological concepts, might find it too narrow in focus, but for those who already have some familiarity with the idea of Doppler shift and the Hubble constant it provides a lot of background material in a fresh and readable form.