Product Description
The cosmic microwave background radiation is the afterglow of the big bang: a tenuous signal, more than 13 billion years old, which carries the answers to many of the questions about the nature of our Universe. It was serendipitously discovered in 1964, and thoroughly investigated in the last four decades by a large number of experiments. Two Nobel Prizes in Physics have already been awarded for research on the cosmic background radiation: one in 1978 to Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who first discovered it, the other in 2006, to George Smoot and John Mather, for the results of the COBE satellite. Most cosmological information is encoded in the cosmic background radiation by acoustic oscillations in the dense plasma that filled the primordial Universe: a "music" of the big bang, which cosmologists have long been trying to reconstruct and analyze, in order to distinguish different cosmological models, much like one can distinguish different musical instruments by their timbre and overtones. Only lately, has this amazing cosmic sound been unveiled by such experiments as BOOMERANG and MAXIMA and, more recently, by the WMAP satellite. This led to a giant leap in our understanding of the Universe, but the investigation is not over yet. The book focuses on how the exploration of the cosmic background radiation has shaped our picture of the Universe, leading even the non-specialized readers towards the frontier of cosmological research, helping them to understand, using a simple language and captivating metaphors, the mechanisms behind the Universe in which we live. "This non-technical tour of the discovery and significance of the whispers of creation, the fossil radiation from the Big Bang, is a delight to read." Prof. Joe Silk, University of Oxford, a pioneering contributor to understanding the structure of the cosmic background radiation.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 2 reviews)

A delicious little book about the information gleaned from the CMB by Jaume Puigbo Vila (Barcelona, Spain)

5 Stars
November 17, 2009
This is certainly a delicious little book (about 150 pages) about the wealth of information that is extracted little by little from the different observational tools used to study the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, specially from the graph of the so called acoustic oscillations (caused by the radiation pressure) in the primordial plasma according to the different angular sizes. For example, the difference between the two highest peaks of the graph is related to the amount of baryonic matter. Apparently the Wilkinson probe only extracted about 10% of the information to be thought contained in the CMB. The Planck surveyor, recently launched by ESA, will provide more information that will help us to understand better dark energy and the topology of the universe, among other things. The observable universe seems to be nearly flat, but then it can be either infinite like the standard Euclidean space we study in the college mathematics textbooks or it can be one of the 17 classes of flat compact spaces that mathematicians have classified. In an infinite universe every event happens an infinite number of times, a hard-to-swallow consequence of quantum mechanics. But if our universe is compact then we would live in a house of mirrors and the topology would be similar to that of those primitive PC games. The incompatibility of the two major physics theories, general relativity and quantum field theory, which normally can be used separately, but not at the time of the Big Bang, makes it difficult to understand the first nanoseconds. But this is important as when we approach the initial moment more and more things happen on shorter and shorter timescale. String theory is an attempt to have a "theory of everything", but, so far, it has not been tested experimentally so that one of its main contributors obtained the Fields Medal, but not the Nobel prize. There are some approaches to test some consequences of string theory by studying the CMB radiation. The book is written in a very didactic manner as when the author compares deaf Beethoven capable of composing great music without hearing with astronomers obtaining information of the sounds of the primordial plasma by looking at the CMB. A highly recommended book for those interested in the recent advances of cosmology.

Was it a Bang and a Boom? by Wojciech Langer (Toronto, Ontario)

5 Stars
January 21, 2009
New observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation show that early universe resounded with harmonious oscillations (acoustic sound). How loud it was can only say the One who witnessed it. Not much I can add here to Product Description (Editorial Review). But let me tell you - this is very, very well constructed, short and easy to read popular science book. Of course it is mostly about CMB, how it was detected and has become arguably the most important source of information helping cosmologists understand the geometry and contents of the Universe (other complementary source of cosmological knowledge are observations, such as the distant type supernovae or the distribution of galaxies in space). We will learn what has been concluded and corroborated by studying the acoustic signals in the CMB provided by previous missions like COBE or BOOMERANG, as well as what is expected by Planck/Herschel space mission and what the obtained results can potentially reveal. But this is not all. This text covers almost all other important topics of large scale cosmology/astrophysics, among them (although briefly)intriguing controversy of cosmic topology (see "The Wraparound Universe" by Jean-Pierre Luminet).It is possible that we live in finite Poincare dodecahedral space giving impression of living in a space 120 times larger. Many scientists (including Amedeo Balbi) are skeptical of it, but if you read Luminet's excellent book, WMAP measurements fall well below the plateau in the range of the lower wave numbers, named quadrupole and the octopole (far left part of the power spectrum of CMB). The infinite Euclidean cosmological model (giving the theoretical plot for curve: 'angular size or wave number' vs. 'temperature fluctuations') cannot explain this, while well proportioned finite model for the universe with multiply-connected topologies explains it very well ! Planck spacecraft, with its 10 times as many measurements with good signal-to-noise ratios as WMAP, will undoubtedly penetrate this part of the spectrum, therefore will solve topology question among many others. Highly recommended cosmology gem !

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