Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe

This has got to be the best book on physics ever written!! What an adventure, man!!! Smoot is the greatest science adventurer I have ever read. He goes everywhere on this planet, and sends balloons into space, goes to Antarctica, all over, all in the name of science!!! People, if you read one book this year, make it "Wrinkles in Time"! JCM

The TV show that is. In a recent episode Leonard is seen reading this book, and, of course, Smoot has also appeared as himself on the show.

I enjoyed this book for not only the adventure of discovery involved with the COBE project, but also the clear explanation of the history of cosmology and the concept of the expanding universe and spacetime. Before I read this book my idea of the "Big Bang" was matter flying out in all directions from a giant explosion. The concept of spacetime means that space was being "created" with time. A difficult concept to grasp that is not well treated in most high school text books. I found Dr. Smoot's story most interesting and I gained an appreciation of the subtle and difficult nature of modern scientific research.

George Smooth is one of those brilliant scientists you expect to write a book with a lot of equations and boring text, the scientific stuff. Well, Smoot does a wonderful job in this text by getting his readers to start out with the basics of science and scientific history in a simple and easy-to-understand-and-comprehend way, and gradually leading you on in a very interesting manner to the subject of the book: the big bang and the echo of the noise it made. No boring stuff. That was the first reason I liked the book; the second was that it shows you that to prove something in science is not easy: it takes one heck of a lot of grunt work and time-consuming experimentation along with a lot of travel and a lot of trials to prove your point. In this book, Smoot shows us that the apparent (to us) "boring" life of a scientist or learned professor is actually not boring at all, but persevering and exciting (and at time disappointing and frustrating), and, if you prove your hypothesis, quite ennobling. - This book also does something that few other authors has attempted: he lists in the back of the book many hundreds of those who have helped him in his task, which makes you realize that in today's world no scientist operates alone, but necessarily acts as the leader of his/her scientific project. A really nice guy and superb author.

Thrilling! This is, to my knowledge, the only book where the adventure that sometimes accompanies the scientific deeds, receives its credits. The numbers of things that must be controlled so that a subtle experiment like that of COBE be realized beggars the imagination. This is a great book. If you wish you can also learn quite a bit of the very fundamental physics of the early universe.