Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe

If it's possible to write a literary treatment of cutting-edge cosmology, groundbreaking physicist Bojowald has done it, complete with illustrations of abstract sculpture and quotes from thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Heller. Bojowald, a professor of physics at Penn State, explores loop quantum theory, an idea he developed as a postdoctoral student in 2000, to fill in the gaps left by 20th-century physics. Despite advances like relativity theory, curved space, and quantum theory, physics falters when it comes to explaining what happened before the Big Bang, when time, space, matter, and energy were all shrunk into a bizarre entity called a singularity, where math and logic as we know them failed. Later, string theory, with its extra dimensions and elegant equations, offered promise, but only with loop quantum cosmology were physicists able to see the universe be born, expand, shrink, and be reborn, over and over again. Bojowald largely avoids mathematics for accessibility, but that can leave his writing dense with rigor as he strives to cover "the Whole Story." Readers willing to meet his challenge will find a fascinating new universe revealed by his enthusiastic firsthand approach. 37 illus. (Nov.)