The Universe
Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos

It's said (several times in this book) that Cosmology is living a golden time. Indeed this collection of texts mentions huge ideas and changes that came out in the last 10 or 5 years. All this progresses do not point in the same direction though. On the contrary, there are many different theories an......more

Written by several leading scientists. - Alan Guth and Andrei Linde explain the Inflationary Universe theory. - Lee Smolin discusses the nature of time. - Lisa Randall and Neil Turok elaborate on the theory of branes, two-dimensional structures arising from string theory—whose existence is central to t......more

Who would have thought a series of essays written by multiple scientific experts could have been as spell tingling as this book was? I know I didn't expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. Part of the reason this book works so well is because none of the essays are that recent. We've learned a l......more

Color me surprised. I've enjoyed all the Brockman curated Edge Club books up until now. But this one, aside from a few bright spots in some of the essays, was so bad that I literally couldn't wait for it to be over. It's called 'The Universe,' but the focus of the contributors was almost entirely on......more

There's some very interesting topics here, but are unfortunately very hard to read. A few chapters, for example, seem to be transcriptions of lectures and as such were meant to be spoken and not read. This is an important difference. This is a pity, specially because the topics covered are interestin......more