Customer Reviews
Inconvenient for the absolute layman, useless to the others - By: WB, Zeno, 13 Oct 2008 
I purchased this book some time ago, but didn't read it until yesterday.
1) IMhO, the book is an overwarmed collection of essays written at different times, roughly stitched together & rushed to printing & publishing. The seams show.
2) Now, this Chown should know what he's writing about. If he really is a former astronomer (but of what kind?), & the New Scientist's
"cosmological consultant", he must -or should I say 'should'?- be competent. He cites a couple of papers that, if he was able to read & understand, as I think he did, put himin the class of lesser scientists, or at the very least, serious amateurs.
3) This said, the book doesn't show it. I repeat a question I sometimes ask myself: for whom is the book written? For the layman genuinely interestedin science? Or for people interestedin showing off with friends (but who, outside a very restricted community, talks seriously about these matters?) their 'knowledge' about some 'sexy' topics?
To the former, avoid like the plague (strange how customs change: were I to have written "HIV" instead of "plague" I'm sure I'd have been labeled an insensitive Neanderthal). To the latter: pick up the concepts you're interestedin from better books, of which, with the cut & paste (rendered now so ridiculously easy by the current IT) epidemic ragingin our midst, there must be hundreds. Any 'popular' book by Thorne, Penrose, Whittaker, Ghirardi, Chaitin, Feynmann, Gell-Mann, Davies (except the last, "Goldilocks"), Gribbin, Rees, Kauffmann, Pagels, Rees, Tipler, Lindley, Greene, Kaku, Deutsch, Smolin, Prigogine, Guth, Linde, Gross, even Susskind, etc. etc. etc.) will give you a better, sounder idea of the topics this one rushes throug so breezily & incorrectly (not by ignorance but by distorted & contradictory dumbing down to a level where brane attraction through the fifth dimension -of a Calaby-Yau manifold, presumably?- is as easy & familiar as fish 'n chips). Of course, every book treats some themesin preference to others, so youll' nowhere find a balance similar to the one chosen by Chown; to achieve that, you'd have to read five or six of the above-mentioned authors. But you'd have a much sounder knowledge of topics that the book mangles (for example, the explanation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principlein page 178 of the PB edition: "The HUP actually states that for any microscopic event, there is a minimum value of particular quantity - the duration of the event multiplied by the energy of the event. An oscillation has a characteristic time associated with it -the duration of a single oscillation- so the HUP dictates it must also have a certain minimum energy associated with it" [everything sic, except for the acronims]. If I hadn't known what decoherence is & supposedly manages to accomplish I wouldn't have understood a word of Chown's explanation hisin Chapter 4 "Keeping it Real". The strange thing is, Chownin the Glossary at the end of the book (page 273) gives a clearer & far more conventional definition of the HUP. That reinforces my impression that the book is acollective, badly harmonized effort.
4) Closely linked to the preceding point is the question of the book's quality, which I frankly found wanting.
Besides careless writing (or editing; as one of many examples consider a possible message left by the Creatorin the CMB, page 210 on the PBE: "This is how up I built the Universe"), Chown apparently can't bring himself to think coherently. For example he repeatedly presents the Big Bang as the moment everything started, & was concentratedin a singularity, once he even cautions us against likening it to an explosion that happenedin space & time; at other times he states that it happened all at oncein all of (I suppose infinite) space; most of the time he refers to it as caused by inflation's leftover energy that had nowhere to go except to power the creation of mass-energy & so cause the BB. Since for all we wnow almost anything might be true, one couldn't fault him for presenting ONE idea as true, but this is nowhere done: he writes as if he weren't even aware of his inconsistent statements. (Well, perhaps the book WAS after all put together by helpers & he hurriedly stitched the parts together: have you noticed how often he publishes - & presumably this mustn't be his main occupation-? And the huge number of footnotes & sentences of the type "as we already sawin Chapter ... ", or "for a more thorough treatment refert to Chapter ... ")?.
He also jumps from one argument to another without rhyme or reason: ratherin the middle of the book, he defines several times for the presumably least-lower-bound-average reader what are frecuency, amplitude, etc. Yet before that,in pages 57 ff., he presents the brane collision scenario,in a chapter where he "discusses" incredibly advanced conceps (without saying that some of them are more akin to hard science fiction than to science), & even employs exponential notation!
He fails even to mention how physicists categorize leptons, gluons, hadrons, bosons, etc., which he mentions freely but without once explaining how they fit into the general picture, & what the terms mean.
5) The only, for me, good point of the book: his discussion on the origin of mass,in a language more sober & reflective than usual for him, & his thinly veiled but, one feels, rather heartfelt opposition to the Higgs mechanism (let's hope that CERN'S LHC doesn't find the boson too soon!).
So, abstain if you're a complete layman.
In general, avoid unless you're the type that can't resist the chance of finding about a new glamorous field that you hadn't heard about & interests you. In that case, skim through cursorilyin one/two days maximum & buy & read toughtfully the bibliography, or surf the articles.
As for me, this is the last (it was the first) book I buy from this author.
Great - By: Simon Bailey, 17 Sep 2008 
Very well written with some brillant ideas. Excellant read it you like this sort of stuff!
Never ending chapters of speculation - By: DP, 26 Aug 2008 
If you enjoy reading the more far-fetched New Scientist cosmology articles then I am sure you will find this book entertaining. However, if you like your science at all Popperian you will probably, like me, find it increasingly irritating as you progress. There is very little criticism of the ideas presentedin the book, some of which are at best controversial & at worst probably nonsense. Furthermore it would also be very easy to go away with a distorted view about the relative importance of various thinkers; for example, Chaitin is virtually put on a par with Godel & Wolfram with Turing. Having said that there was something addictive about this book & I suspect I'll end up buying more of Chown's work.
So what? - By: C. A. Gallagher, 27 Jun 2008 
Is the complexity of the universe the result of a four line computer program?
Will we be resurrected within a computer simulation contrived by an advanced civilisation utilising the energy made available to them as the universe approaches it's ultimate demise?
Are we already living within such a simulation?
Has a message been left for us by the creatorin the background radiation of the universe?
These & other completely unverifiable musings are addressedin this book & that, for me, is one of the problems with it - all of the ideas are so out there that after a while I found myself thinking "Here's another off the wall idea that can't be verified one way or another, so what?".
Having said that, it's well written & the author is very capable when it comes to explaining some pretty complex ideas.
If you want to keep up too speed with the current ideas doing the roundsin cosmology then this book will probably interest you. If, on the other hand, you're one of these people who think cosmologists have far too much time on their hands & should get out more, then this book will probably confirm those suspicions!
Thanks for inspiring me again - By: Pearl Robinson, 10 Jun 2008 I am a part-time physics student & last week finished doing my exams. So, you can imagine, I was sick to death of physics. But a friend urged me to read this book and, against my better judgment, I did. And I'm so glad I did. I couldn't put it down. It's all the fun stuff that wasn'tin my course. It's reminded me of why I did physicsin the first place. Thanks Mr. Chown for inspiring me again!
