Three great scientific revolutions have shaped our understanding of the cosmos and our relationship to it. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the Copernican Revolution, which bodychecked the Earth as the pivot point of creation and joined us with the rest of the cosmos as one planet among many orbiting the Sun. Three centuries later came the second great scientific revolution: the Darwinian Revolution. It removed us from a distinct,...

"Honorable Mention for the 1997 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Physics and Astronomy, Association of American Publishers" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1997" Helge Kragh is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oslo. His works include a biography of P.A.M. Dirac. For over three millennia, most people could understand the universe only in terms of myth, religion, and philosophy. Between 1920 and...

"Roger Penrose, Co-Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences" Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Roger Penrose is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and the author of Cycles of Time and The Road to Reality (both Vintage). He is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Oxford. From two of the world's great physicists-Stephen...

Brian Greene, one of the world's leading string theorists, peels away layers of mystery to reveal a universe that consists of eleven dimensions, where the fabric of space tears and repairs itself, and all matter--from the smallest quarks to the most gargantuan supernovas--is generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy. The Elegant Universe makes some of the most sophisticated concepts ever contemplated accessible and thoroughly...

The Big Bang theory--the leading explanation for the origin of the universe--posits that space and time sprang into being about 14 billion years ago in a hot, expanding fireball of nearly infinite density. Over the last three decades, the theory has repeatedly had to be revised to address such issues as how galaxies and stars first formed and why the expansion of the universe is speeding up--let alone what caused the Big Bang in the first place. This...

Why is there a world rather than nothing at all? This question remains the most curious and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Moving away from the narrower paths of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking who insist that science alone is capable of explaining how our cosmos came into being, the author enters this debate as he examines our efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. He takes on the role of cosmological...