Born with a Bang, Book One: The Universe Tells Our Cosmic Story

I have raved about this book to everyone I know. Actually there are two in the series. As a parent, it feels good to give my child lessons on how we are all cosmically connected. These books are stunningly beautiful, rich with meaning, truth, science and laced with spirituality.

It takes a great deal of skill to reduce as complex a concept as the creation of the universe to a form a five year old child can understand. My grandson was captivated and asked many questions and I learned a few things also. We promptly read the second book in the series and have ordered the third.

Jennifer Morgan is a brilliantly eccentric writer. I read this book with my daughters when they were in kindergarten - I helped with the big words, of course, and with some of the scientific concepts. Morgan's unusual idea of introducing cosmology to young children by treating the origin and development of the universe as an autobiographical tale, narrated in first person by the Universe herself, actually works. The brilliantly colorful illustrations are a great complement to the text, and kids (and, I suspect, most adults) can acquire some serious knowledge while enjoying themselves by going through this book. Most importantly, the book is startlingly accurate. It is all too tempting for children's authors to cut corners and present over-simplified half-truths when trying to explain serious science to young kids. Morgan avoids that trap. I have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford, and I looked through the book carefully for any scientific errors. I found none. I do wish Morgan had discussed the "inflationary scenario," now generally favored by cosmologists, that suggests that the Big Bang was precipitated out of the frenetic expansion of a much larger super-universe. But, Morgan might reasonably object that the inflationary theory is still speculative, whereas the information she presents in this book is solidly established science. Some parents might also object that treating the Universe as a person reeks too much of New Age nature-worship pantheism. Such a criticism would be unwarranted - Morgan, after all, knows that the Universe is not actually a human being, and even young readers should be able to see this as simply an engaging storytelling device. Any child who enjoys watching talking planes or a purple dinosaur on TV, while knowing that neither is real, can appreciate Morgan's narrative approach. This book should be of value to any family, regardless of religious or philosophical orientation, who possess a serious interest in science or nature. The educational theorist Kieran Egan has argued that the best way to educate children is to center their education around grand stories. It is hard to imagine any story grander than the birth and development of the universe. Our kids learn all sorts of stories in school and through popular culture. But too few of those stories serve one of the central needs of education - encouraging the student to transcend his own childish egocentrism and acquire a broader, transcendent perspective. To become an educated person, indeed to become a mature adult, requires such a perspective, but our society and our educational system too rarely nurture it, despite the fact that children are hungry for grand and exotic stories that transcend their own narrow lives. It is all too easy to graduate even from a prestigious university in America with no comprehension of the stupendous discoveries human beings have made during the last hundred years concerning the nature of

I'll preface this by saying that i'm an experimental cosmologist (working on weak gravitational lensing to determine galaxy cluster dark matter profiles) and have also worked in high energy particle physics, so i come at this book from a particular angle of having a fairly in-depth background of the subject matter. Having said this, i want to *strongly applaud* this book, and would like to point out that of the several reviews given above, most are quite positive, and the only two highly negative ones are simply *missing the point* of the book -- it is *not* supposed to give anyone a detailed explanation of cosmology as we understand it scientifically today. there are plenty of other books to do that. rather -- this book is supposed to try to make some sense of what our current picture is in a much more organic, humane, emotional, spiritual, and yea, *cosmic* sense than most of the popular or scientific literature of cosmology out there today does. For those familiar with Carl Sagan's work, and particularly "Cosmos" from the 1980's -- this is very much done in that vein, and i am pretty sure Carl would have heartily approved. As a reader might gather from my words, i do *not* fit into the classical stereotype of scientist with a mechanistic, rational, Universe-as-clockwork type view that has been the primary paradigm in science since Cartesian times, but then, neither did Carl, and neither do more and more modern scientists. and Carl's manner of conveying science resonated with the public and inspired them likely more than *any* other modern physical scientist. Further, i have thought deeply about the human aspects of science also in my journey along the scientific path, and it's clear to me that the paradigm one uses to describe whatever our scientific picture of the Universe and how it came into being and how it evolved up until today is, at any given time in human history, is critical in how we approach not only science, but every aspect of our lives, from our interactions with Nature, to how we treat non-human animals, to our picture of and dealings with others of our own species. when it comes down to it, how we picture the non-living aspects of our Universe and its whole history, *matters*, a lot. And i love the way that J. Morgan and D. Andersen picture it in this book (and i also hope to communicate directly with them sometime). i love how they interpret and explain their understanding of everything from the Big Bang itself, and what came "before", to the limitations in our current picture of cosmology, to the specific aspects of BBN (Big Bang Nucleosynthesis), initial star formation, galaxy evolution, and supernova processes, leading ultimately to *us*. No, this is not going to appeal to every scientist out there, nor every person -- but i would suggest this is from not a lack in the *book*, but from some measure of the imagination needed in our species and society to evolve to a more mature species in our wondrous Univer

A wonderful, beautiful, exciting, dramatic book. The creation of the Universe (Big Bang theory) explained in a story form for children by the Universe itself. Fantastic illustrations. I bought a copy for my son's Montessori school and a copy for myself I loved it so much. Ties in quite nicely with Dr Maria Montessori's Great Stories. Probably would not suit fervent creationists.