Ebook Download | The Music of the Big Bang: The Cosmic Microwave Background and the New Cosmology | 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.
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.
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