Battle of the Big Bang, by Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, is an accessible but not easy account of the current theories on our cosmic origins. It is also quite readable considering the strangeness of many of the ideas discussed.

First I will comment on what I meant with my accessibility comment. We all have some kind of interest in many things. But some of those things we just want someone to tell us the basics, we don't want them to involve much work on our part, namely because we have other things we are willing to put the work into. It isn't about whether we can do the work but whether we care enough to want to. In areas that aren't central to our lives, we make personal hierarchies. If your interest is simple curiosity this book will still be a good read for you but you will find yourself skimming some of the discussion to get to whatever points you want to keep. If your interest level is higher, you will be very happy because the math is minimal (and largely mentioned in a way to express what it did not how it did it) and the analogies (mostly thanks to Halper's role as a science communicator) make the ideas easier to grasp, at least as far as most laypeople want or need to grasp them. I will also mention that you need to go deeper into the book than the first few chapters since it is setting the stage for the new ideas. This book doesn't just start explaining new ideas to a general audience that might not know how we got to the point where these ideas became important. Yes, the first few chapters will be somewhat familiar to many readers, but having read something years ago doesn't mean you would have had it front of mind without the review. Any teacher knows the value of reviewing before moving on to new material. It is the review that helps to make the rest of the book relatively understandable for non-astrophysicists.

I probably touched on the strengths of the book in the previous paragraph, so I won't belabor the points. If you have some understanding but nowhere near astrophysicist level, this will be a wonderful way to get up-to-date. No theory is being argued for here, they are being presented, with their respective pros and cons. This also allows you to seek more information on the theories you might find most interesting, though you may, like I did, have to use a university library to access some of it.

If you have enough interest to be willing to work a little, thinking through the explanations as best you can, you will enjoy this book. I would also recommend this to those pursuing a career in the sciences who might be considering astrophysics, this may just pique your interest enough to point you in a direction.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

Hate to DNF an eARC (from NetGalley and publisher University of Chicago Press), but I just cannot with Battle of the Big Bang. It’s written like a fever dream of a science book, and on every page I was left asking, who is this book for?

Niayesh Afshordi is a cosmologist; Phil Halper is a science comms YouTuber. Together, they’ve teamed up to write a tour of cosmology. They trace the various theories of the origins of the universe, from steady-state to the different Big Bang theories out there. Then the book gets down to the fine details of what cosmologists are battling about today: inflation, spontaneous genesis from nothing, branes, etc. Some of it is stuff I had heard or read about before, though perhaps not in years. Some of it is brand new, and it’s a shame I didn’t finish the book, because I really was interested.

First, a small disclaimer: I was reading this on my Kindle, and it was converted from a PDF galley. Somehow the conversion wasn’t able to read any of the numerals present in the text, so all years and quantities were just … omitted (and quantities are kind of important in physics). Similarly, all ligatures with the letter “f” were gone. So … that made for an interesting read. Yet I persevered, for that is not the fault of the authors, and it’s not why I didn’t finish the book.

No, I DNFed this behemoth because I was a third of the way through the book and felt like I was spinning my wheels. Afshordi and Halper just have no sense of how to tell a story in prose—a complaint I recently levelled at Proof as well. Most popular science books, when they want to tell a story of a complex topic like cosmology, ground each chapter in a singular story, usually with a particular person as a main character. Afshordi and Halper seem to want to do this, but they can’t manage to find their narrative. Instead, they get bogged down in details and gossip and talking about multiple people at once—some of whom are still alive—such that Battle of the Big Bang feels like it’s inside baseball, meant for other physicists.

Similarly, this book is not for the faint of heart. The authors brag about there being no equations, but honestly, we need to dismantle that Hawking shibboleth already: please publish physics books with equations! I am fine with it. I am a mathematician. I get that this is a book from an academic press rather than a big publisher, so maybe it is meant for a more technical audience … in which case, though, why is this a book and not a peer-reviewed lit review paper?

That’s my main complaint. Battle of the Big Bang feels like it’s trying to be popular science when in reality it’s too technical and too much engrossed by insider gossip from the scientific community to be interesting or even comprehensible to lay readers. I now understand why most physicists don’t write popular science books.

"Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins" examines the most profound idea: how did the universe begin?

Although I'm not a physicist, I have read many books about the Big Bang, physics, and the universe.

This book is an in-depth exploration of the competing models that hypothesize about our origins.

I appreciated learning about the Ekpyrotic universe and Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC), two novel ideas. For instance, CCC posits that "the universe is cyclic but never re-collapses. Each eon expands until all mass disappears."

"In the Ekpyrotic universe, the movement of the branes is controlled by a springlike force, operating in a higher dimension. What was being suggested was that this force is felt in our reality as dark energy."

I also appreciated that the book included several illustrations that were essential for grasping these counterintuitive topics.

One of the authors, Phil Halper, is a well-known YouTuber.

The other co-author is Niayesh Afshordi, a cosmologist.

I loved the illustrations! I wish there were more of them!

Disclosure: I interviewed Phil Halper on my WanderLearn Show and received an advance copy of the book from the publisher.

It is always hard to guess at how readable a cosmology book or theoretical physics book will be for the general public. The ideas involved are complicated and otherworldly enough that they take a lot of getting used to and it seems like it would take a lot of math mastery to really follow the various models described in this book for how the universe began, and how it works. That said, this was a fun history of the contending models for what happened at and perhaps before the Big Bang, with enough description of each model to get some idea of what it claims and how it might be tested. I also liked the philosophy of science segment closer to the end of this book, looking at the role of belief/religion in cosmology and cosmological questions, and at what makes something science. This may be a tough read for people new to the subject matter, but for the general reader who has absorbed some cosmology already, this should be a fun book.

So many fascinating concepts introduced, of which I could only understand about 20%. I wish it was dumbed down just a tad for this non-physicist scientist

This is a fascinating book. Maybe a little difficult to parse for the cosmological layman, but full of exciting ideas.

That being said... WHY would the publisher make the BAFFLING decision to encumber the reading experience by uploading a file LITTERED with omissions? If this is an anti-piracy measure, it is misguided at best, and if it wasn't done on purpose—good god, what an editorial oversight! The epub file I read had all dates, years, and numbers omitted—in a book essential about history and math—as well as—arbitrarily—any instance of the letters "f" and "i" when paired together. So, any instance of any variation of the word "infinity", which, in a book about space, was multiple times a page. Unreal how awful a decision this was. It is a testament to how much I actually wanted to read this book that I continued after the first few pages. Eventually my brain started to compensate for the lack of FI, but I was a a loss as far as anything numerical. Seriously, I would confirm the final version of the book wasn't printed from this file before I purchased a copy. Maddening experience.

What happened before the Big Bang? This book explores the leading theories about the universe’s origins, examining their strengths and weaknesses through cutting-edge research and interviews with leading scientists. The book is informative and fairly technical—an interesting read for fans of cosmology and theoretical physics.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

The impression given by many popular accounts is that the Big Bang is the beginning of the universe, springing from a singularity of infinite temperature, density, etc. beyond which there was no time, space, or anything. In other words, the Big Bang is the Beginning, before which was nothing, or at least nothing we can hope to understand, and nothing more can or ever will be said.

<i>Battle of the Big Bang</i> is an attempt to challenge that characterization and clarify how we currently understand the Big Bang. The truth is that we do not actually <i>know</i>. that the Big Bang is The Beginning. The hot Big Bang (that the universe was once smaller, hotter, and denser and has evolved into its current form over billions of years) is uncontroversial, but everything else is up for grabs, despite how cosmologists present it. It’s not that we have no idea of what the Big Bang was and what caused it. Indeed, it is quite the opposite: we almost have <i>too many</i> ideas regarding the beginning, or not, of the universe and the Big Bang. What we don’t have is enough evidence to say if any of them are right, or even on the right track.

On the surface, then, <i>Battle of the Big Bang</i> seems little more than a slightly-more-complicated entry in the popular cosmology genre. It, happily, distinguishes itself, though, in a few ways:

Scientists are people too. Afshordi’s personal experience “in the trenches” as a theorist, combined with Halpern’s extensive interviews with cosmologists, provide no doubt that cosmologists can be petty, stubborn, cantankerous, and downright catty. Cosmological models being in contention can lead to cosmological theorists being in contention. It’s not all high-minded, coldly logical argument, though, in the end, the math, experiment, and observation all have the final say. As with any group of people one is far removed from, accounts of this internecine squabbling can be great vicarious fun.

Perhaps the greatest strength of <i>Battle of the Big Bang</i> is that it doesn’t just focus on the big names, either people or theories, you get in most overviews like Hawking, Guth, and Linde, no-boundary proposals and eternal inflation, but scores of other, less well-known ideas and researchers. That also may be its main drawback, if you can classify it as such: there are a <i>lot</i> of names and ideas flying at you all at once. It can be a bit disorienting and confusing, but worth it.

Those completely new to cosmology might have difficult time, but anyone with half an idea will find <i>Battle of the Big Bang</i> a rewarding and educational work.