The Birth of Time: How Astronomers Measured the Age of the Universe - Hardcover

Gribbin, Dr. John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300083467 ISBN 13: 9780300083460

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2000

Synopsis

The age of the universe has been one of the great scientific mysteries of our time. This engrossing book tells the story of how the mystery was recently solved. Written by a brilliant science writer who was involved, as a research astronomer, in the final breakthrough, the book provides details of the ongoing controversies among scientists as they groped their way to the truth?that the universe is between 13 and 16 billion years old, older by at least one billion years than the star systems it contains.

In clear, engaging language, Gribbin takes us through the history of cosmological discoveries, focusing in particular on the seventy years since the Big Bang model of the origin of the universe. He explains how conflicting views of the age of the universe and stars converged in the 1990s because scientists (including Gribbin) were able to use data from the Hubble Space Telescope that measured distances across the universe.

About this title

About the Author

John Gribbin, visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex, is the author of many bestselling books of science, including In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality; The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry and the Theory of Everything; Almost Everyone's Guide to Science: The Universe, Life, and Everything; and Stardust: Supernovae and Life—The Cosmic Connection, the last two published by Yale University Press.

From Kirkus Reviews

How old is the universe? The answer (and the story of how the answer was determined) is the subject of this demanding but not overwhelming account of astronomers at work. The prolific Gribbin (Almost Everyone's Guide to Science, 1999), an astrophysicist turned science popularizer, has a special interest in this question, for a project that he initiated at the University of Sussex contributed to the answer. He traces the search for the age of the universe from the early 17th century (when the Christian establishment pronounced 4004 b.c. to be the date of creation) through the ensuing encroachment of scientists into what had originally been the domain of theologians. He shows the difficulties faced by early geologists and physicists who grappled with the issue (Kelvin calculated the age of the sun at 20 million years, while shortly thereafter Rutherford estimated the age of the earth at not less than 500 million years) and outlines the work of the 20th-century astronomers who created the Hubble Space Telescope. The central character is Edwin Hubble, who built a cosmic distance ladder outward from the Milky Way to the globular clusters, the Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The subsequent controversy over the best estimate of the number known as Hubble's Constant (from which can be calculated the date of the Big Bang) is the topic of Gribbin's later chapters. He explains why one side in the debate argued for a value twice as large as the other side, the differences in the various measuring techniques employed to find the correct answer, and the technical advances that made such work possible. The absence of unnerving mathematical formulas and the use of everyday imagesthe movement of a swarm of bees, for example, or a person walking down an up escalatorto depict unfamiliar cosmic phenomena help smooth the way for the nonscientist reader. Close attention is required, but the fascinating story Gribbin has to tell is worth the effort.-- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0300083467
• ISBN 13: 9780300083460
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224