The Universe: A Biography — John Gribbin’s Life Story of the Cosmos
How did it all begin? The Big Bang remains the best science-based answer we have to that oldest of questions, and John Gribbin sets out to tell it the way a biographer would: birth, childhood, growth, the people it produced, and how it might die. The Universe: A Biography first appeared in the United States in 2006 as The Origins of the Future; the Penguin paperback under its current title followed in 2008.
Author: John Gribbin (born 1946), astrophysicist and science writer
Title: The Universe: A Biography (US title: The Origins of the Future, 2006)
Format: English paperback (Penguin, 2008), 256 pages
Scope: Ten chapters, each a question: from how we know what we think we know, through the Big Bang, galaxies, the elements and life, to how it will all end
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0141021470 (ASIN 0141021470)
A Life Story in Ten Questions
Gribbin organises the book as a series of questions a curious reader would actually ask. How do stars and galaxies form? How did life appear on our planet? Will everything end in a Big Crunch, or a Big Rip that tears space itself apart? Could we be wiped out if another large meteorite hits the Earth? He trained at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge before becoming a science writer for Nature and New Scientist, and the book shows both sides: a researcher’s grasp of the physics and a journalist’s instinct for the next question.
From Photons to Stars
In the beginning there was light. The young universe was a hot soup of radiation and particles, and it took around four hundred thousand years of expansion and cooling, down to about three thousand kelvin, before atoms could form — the so-called era of recombination. Only later did gravity begin to gather that matter into structure.
Stars are born from clouds of gas and dust made mostly of hydrogen and helium; some swell into red giants and eventually blow off their outer layers, forming nebulae. A good object to look up while reading is the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbouring galaxy of the Milky Way, and one of the most spectacular star-forming regions we can see.
Where the Enthusiasm Outruns the Evidence
A central theme is the origin of life, which cosmology approaches through the search for what Gribbin describes as the building blocks of life. The clouds that give birth to stars contain molecules that can lead to amino acids and simple sugars, and meteorites have been found to carry sugars, glycerol, amino acids and carboxylic acids. Even so, the richest meteorites still lack some of the ingredients a primitive living cell would need, so a biologist may find it hard to share the author’s enthusiasm for these undeniable advances.
The same caution applies to the long menu of modern physics the book serves up: particle physics of the earliest moments, string theory, dark matter and dark energy, the nucleosynthesis that turns one element into another inside stars, interstellar dust, and the formation of galaxies and of our own solar system. Several of these dishes, string theory above all, are still purely theoretical, not yet backed by experimental evidence and extremely hard to put to that test any time soon.
Who Should Read It
That is the honest verdict: a biography of the universe today can only be a mix of abundant theory, limited observational evidence and a good dose of imagination. Read with that in mind, Gribbin’s book is a clear, wide-ranging tour for anyone who wants the whole story in one volume — and an invitation to keep asking how we know what we think we know.
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