Author Blurb -- Charles Seife

Seife shines!

Another project is currently taking up much of my time and leaving little time for reading/reviewing, but one book I did finish recently is an older Charles Seife selection, "Alpha and Omega," on the possible beginning and end of the Universe as theorized by modern day cosmologists. Charles Seife is an author and freelance science writer who's previous books "Zero," and "Decoding the Universe" (which I especially liked, on information theory) received excellent reviews, and his latest work, "Sun In A Bottle," on fusion research, is now in the bookstores.

Seife's homepage is here:
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~cgseife/index.php

For any layman interested in cosmology "Alpha and Omega" is a great read with the usual mind-blowing content about dark energy, dark matter, M-theory, particle zoos, inflation, gravitational waves, quintessence, the nature of vacuums, supersymmetry, etc. etc. --- Ideas that will confound and amaze most lay readers and leave them wondering how even the professionals are able to forge such bizarre, yet scientific, notions (the discussion of "vacuums" in particular left me mentally reeling). This is Star Trek stuff on steroids. Modern cosmology is so beyond human conception or imagination that it really only reduces to pure mathematics and logic and a faith that the mathematics is correct. I won't attempt a full review of the volume here, but just say I'd rate it an A-, for those interested in this science genre (if cosmology doesn't interest you than pay no heed to this volume).

Here is someone else's online review of the book:

http://wkaa.net/article.php?articleid=36&ret=articlelist.php&cat=GA

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Quote... Unquote

"Cosmologists are shaking their heads in disbelief, because experiment after experiment is showing that the universe is entirely different from what astronomers had assumed since the beginning of modern science. Ordinary matter is the exception, and unknown, exotic matter [dark matter] is the norm. Our universe is mostly dark, and most of that dark matter is unknown, ineffable stuff that has never been seen directly. Had there not been so many experiments forcing cosmologists to accept this picture, it would seem utterly ridiculous. Chicago cosmologist Michael Turner asks, incredulously, "Who ordered this?"

-- Charles Seife from "Alpha and Omega"

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