Fred Adams (1) (1961–)

Not quite 4 stars - perhaps because it was written 20 years ago and covers a lot of ground I have read about already (although I'm not claiming to understand it). A valuable lesson in timescales and size as the knowable universe both gets bigger and we see more of it. Or might be valuable if we last long enough! I really like the idea of cosmological decades where the first 10 billion is the first decade, the next 100 billion is the second and so on. Gave me a nice feel for how young the show more universe is at 14 billion years and the earth being four and a half billion - but I need to brush up on just how much bigger a billion is than a million. Billions frighten me a lot - think I'll order Tim Hardford's book 'How to Make the World Add Up'. show less

Devotes most of its chapters to physics and cosmology before getting around to biology. (After the usual explanation of how all the non-hydrogen atoms in our bodies were made by fusion processes in stars, Adams reminds the reader of a good smugness-puncturing line: Yes you can say that we are made of stardust, but you could equally well say that we are made of nuclear waste materials!) Adams doesn't shrink from considering developments up to 10^100 years in the future, as mapped out in his show more earlier work _The Five Ages of the Universe_. show less

An interesting paragraph from the book; ".... the fact emerges that our universe does indeed have the proper special features to allow for our existence. Given the laws of physics, as they are determined by the values of the physical constants, the strengths of the fundamental forces, and the masses of elementary particles, our universe naturally produces galaxies, stars, planets, and life. With only a slightly different version of the physical laws, our universe could have been completely show more uninhabitable and astronomically impoverished." They ask why it's this way.

The vast scales of evolution in space and time are very well explained. e.g. towards the Dark Era single positron particles (the remnants of protons) will each be alone in a space 10 power 104 times larger than our present universe. Unimaginably large and empty .

The earth has existed for the cosmologically miniscule time of 4.6 billion years but at least for 4 billion of these, life has been thriving as shown by fossils in the worlds' oldest known sedimentary rocks. However, it's only in the last instants of this time that humans (and the scientific method ) have arrived and a text like this can be written.

Highly recommended as a unique book. show less

Stealth-reading this guy right now, but I really don't want to add it to "currently reading" because I'm already in the middle of too many books.