Battle of the Big Bang

Niayesh Afshordi is professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. He has contributed to Scientific American and was a consultant to PBS’s NOVA, and his work has been featured in numerous popular media outlets, such as the covers of Scientific American and Science, as well as in The Guardian and The New York Times. Phil Halper is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a science popularizer. He is the creator of the popular YouTube series Before the Big Bang. His astronomy images have been featured in major media outlets including The Washington Post, the BBC, and The Guardian, and he has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals. He lives in London.

• Preface: Before Our First Memory1. The Beginning: Cosmology from Thales to Hawking2. The Multiverse and the Ultimate Free Lunch3. Hawking’s U-Turn and a Universe from Nothing4. String Theories and Colliding Branes5. The Big Bounce6. Déjà Vu and the Cyclic Cosmos7. Born from a Black Hole8. Speeds of Light9. Holograms and Missing Dimensions10. Can the Universe Create Itself?11. Science of Religion, Religion of Science12. The End of the BeginningAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Big Bang Models Cheat SheetNotesIndex

"[This] excellent book promises to map the 'quiet revolution' of twenty-first-century cosmology and introduce us to the revolutionaries. . . . What distinguishes this book from others on the subject . . . is that [Afshordi] and Halper are generously curious about alternatives and warn against the excessive skepticism of other scientists toward rival theories. Afshordi and Halper readily admit that we don’t know enough to rule out much at all. Maybe there are two dimensions of time. Maybe the whole universe is a hologram. Maybe 'geometry is an illusion.' Battle of the Big Bang brilliantly humanizes such abstract speculations by highlighting the powerplays and publicity struggles of competing scientific teams."