Wrinkles in Time

"Wrinkles in Time" is a book on cosmology by the Nobel laureate physicist George Smoot and Keay Davidson, a science writer for The San Francisco Examiner. It was published in 1994 by William Morrow in hardback.

Summary

On April 23, 1992 a scientific team led by astrophysicist George Smoot announced that they had found the primordial "seeds" from which the universe has grown. They analyzed data gathered by NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite and discovered the oldest known objects in the universe - so called "wrinkles" in time - thus finding a long-anticipated missing piece in the Big Bang model. In this book, Smoot tells the remarkable tale of his quest for what has been called the cosmologists' Holy Grail. His quest for the seeds of structure in the universe consumed about twenty years. The book traces the obstacle course of discovery. In the book Smoot describes the adventure and along the way he brings the reader up to date in cosmology, giving brief introductions to some important concepts and discoveries in Physics and Cosmology.

The research in the book eventually resulted in Smoot winning the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics; and the book was reprinted in 2007 as a result of the new interest generated by the award. On the cover of the reprint, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking calls Smoot's observations in the book "the scientific discovery of the century, if not all time".

Contents

Preface

1. In the Beginning 2. The Dark Night Sky 3. The Expanding Universe 4. Cosmological Conflict 5. In Search of Antiworlds 6. Spy in the Sky 7. A Different Universe 8. The Heart of Darkness 9. The Inflationary Universe 10. The Promise of Space 11. COBE:The Aftermath 12. First Glimpse of Wrinkles 13. An Awful Place to Do Science 14. Toward the Ultimate Question

Appendix: Contributors to COBE To Dig Deeper: Further Readings Acknowledgments Index

References

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