The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity

I thought this book was very fascinating! I enjoyed reading not only about theories regarding the past and present eras of the universe, but also about future eras. As the title implies, authors Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin divide the lifetime of the universe into five eras, and we're living in the second. It was fun to imagine what the night sky should look like trillions of years into the future, and many more. It was also fun to read about the time when it can be expected that only black holes will be left, and to go even beyond that. This is the only book I know that deals much with the question of the far future of the universe.The authors also brings up questions which are probably beyond our ability to know the answer to(for example, whether our universe is one of many), but such an idea is interesting to think about. They do mention a few ideas that I'm skeptical of (for example, the idea of a "Darwinian view of universes"), though they also acknowledge that this remains speculative.Although this is a scientific (not a theological) book, I will also mention that I am a believing Catholic. So I believe that God created all things, including the whole universe. However, I also believe that the scientific theories mentioned in this book are compatible with Catholic Church teaching, provided we understand that everything that happens is in the providence of God. Of course we should also understand that theories are not doctrines, and so theories could be subject to change upon future discoveries.I highly recommend this book, at least for those who have some general knowledge of astronomy and physics.

In my former career as a geologist, I was used to contemplating vast stretches of time. The basic unit we used was a million years; the fossil communities I was studying lived about 500 mybp (million years before present). If my students boggled, as they sometimes did, at the thought of the ice ages taking place hundreds of thousands of years ago, I would smugly say, "Oh, that's nothing - just yesterday!" Little did I know, that for truly overwhelming timescapes, you need to turn to astronomy. In their new book "The Five Ages of the Universe" (1999, Simon & Schuster), Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin consider the longest timescales imaginable - not the past only, but the far future of the universe. Many years ago, physicist Philip Morrison narrated what I think is the finest short science video ever made - "Powers of Ten". This starts at a familiar human scale, and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds until reaching the size of clusters of galaxies; then reverses the process and zooms in to a proton in a carbon atom; in effect creating a logarithmic scale model of the universe. Adams and Laughlin apply the same logarithmic concept to time instead of distance. They speak of "cosmological decade n" when the universe is 10^n years old. For example, we are now living in the tenth cosmological decade, since about 10^10 years have passed since the Big Bang.The five eras of the universe, then, are:The Primordial Era (-15 The Stelliferous Era (6 The Degenerate Era (15 from the dead galaxies, and others colliding. Very occasionally, two brown dwarfs might collide to create a new low-mass star. Dark matter is swept up into white dwarfs, providing a continuing energy source. At the end of the Degenerate Era, the protons and neutrons themselves decay, and the white dwarfs and brown dwarfs made form them slowly dissipate into radiation.The Black Hole Era (40 The Dark Era (n > 101) No condensed matter is left. The universe consists of extremely long wavelength photons, electrons, positrons, and neutrinos. Nothing much happens.<p>The book consists mainly of a detailed but non-technical look at the various processes which mediate these transitions. It also considers the possibilities for different kinds of life to form long after life based on liquid water is obsolete. As the temperature of an environment becomes lower, the processes of life and the "rate of experience" (my phrase) of an organism slows down, but the time available to evolution stretches out as well.<p>All this assumes that the universe is open or at least flat, which seems quite likely at present. It also assumes a lot about modern physics which is still highly conjectural. This book does remind us once again that our universe is surpassingly strange, and that its strangeness is distributed through time as well as through space.

This book constitutes one of the best books I have ever read. The manner in which the authors collect and synthesize the information currently comprising the envelope of scientific knowledge in astronomy, cosmology, biology and other relevant fields provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the universe. The first time I read this book I was stunned by the amount of information I absorbed and by the new avenues that this information opened in my quest for understanding the origin of humanity and of the universe. I had to read this book a second time because many of the concepts discussed therein were difficult to truly comprehend initially.This book is extremely well written, unlike other similar books. The authors anticipated my questions in many cases and addressed them in subsequent paragraphs. A technical/scientific inclination would definitely be helpful while reading this book, but is probably not necessary. To synthesize, if you are interested in investigating how everything that we observe originated and will vanish in the future, read this book.Further, if you want to place the existential question of God in a proper scientific framework (as proper as we can devise at this time), read this book. This book shows that science has confined the intervention of "God," (and this God could be our classic biblical god or another intelligent species residing somewhere else in the multiverse) to a fraction of the first second of the Big Bang, if such an intervention did occur at all. Finally, I admire the restraint exercised by the authors by never explicitly refuting religious beliefs even when the scientific data strongly pointed in that direction. No readers will probably be offended by reading this book, regardless of their religious beliefs.

This fascinating book is the latest in a series of speculations about the progression of the universe through time. My first contact with books on this topic was Frank Tipler's Physics of Immortality. That book prompted me to Freeman Dyson's Infinite In All Directions and later Paul Davies The Last [Final?] Three Minutes. The Five Ages of The Universe is based on a continually expanding universe scenario -- the scenario best supported by current evidence -- through five so called cosmological ages from the beginning at 10 x e-50 to 10 x e150 -- ten followed by 150 zeros years! Strange possibilities are proposed along the way such as black hole computers. The writing is compelling and occaisionally even unexpectdly poetic. Sorry I can't comment on the Physics I don't have the background, my interest is primarily the subject of consiousness, which I have come to realize most serious thinkers now believe to be bound by Physics. This is the kind of book that stimulates the reader to want to learn more Physics -- a creditable achievment. The fact that topics such as the future of life are more satisfactorily approached by Science than Religion is a major cognitive change I have been going through for about 5 years, since I started reading the general readership orientied science books that are becoming so plentiful. The Five Ages...is very accessible to the non-scientist yet presents some very latest thinking on cosmology, I recommend you read it.

This book changed the way I look at the universe around me. Although it didn't enter my thoughts daily, I used to occasionally experience the feeling of isolation associated with contemplating the position of the earth within our unimaginably large and sparse universe. After reading what is to come for our cosmos, however, I'm filled with optimism about the density and energy of the space we live in today. I am, like many people, I think, interested in the prospects for life in the universe's past, present, and future. This book handily incorporates this discussion, even contemplating a lifeform whose "atoms" are black holes, when all regular matter has faded away. I would have liked to read more about the even more distant "Dark Age," when the only "matter" left in the cosmos is the "compound" positronium, whose "atoms" are the size of our current known universe. If any intelligent life exists at that time, could it possibly conceive of the life of today? Could we ourselves even imagine a life form existing in the cosmic blast furnace of the first seconds following the Big Bang? "Five Ages" left me with as many questions as answers, and my head was spinning, but it was an E-ticket ride.