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Origins: The Quest for our Cosmic Roots

Posted on: Saturday, 2 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Origins: The Quest for our Cosmic Roots Tom Yulsman, 384 pages, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, England, 2003; ISBN 0- 7503-0765-X; softcover, $21.99.

The grand adventure of this book begins in Horseshoe Canyon, Utah. There, Yulsman, clutching a handful of sand, reflects on each grain's incredible journey from the birth of hydrogen and helium in the Big Bang to the Utah stream nearby. The canyon connects him to the cosmos; for the rest of the book, he connects the cosmos to the reader.

Starting with the mind-bending concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics, Yulsman demonstrates a remarkable ability to express complex, counterintuitive ideas with straightforward language and insightful analogies. From the first instant after the Big Bang, when the universe was as small in relation to a proton as today a proton is to New Jersey, to the current profusion of life on Earth, he emphasizes the crooked intellectual path by which theories are created, challenged, modified, and recreated.

He introduces us to the very human scientists responsible for those theories as they bound up the summit of Mauna Kea to watch the sunset or "cook" the stuff of interstellar gas into pre-biotic goo. He paints science as the human activity it is, at one point describing an argument between two astronomers about the evolution of star-forming molecular clouds. "Watching the two of them go at it at five in the morning, I wonder whether I've misunderstood how new scientific knowledge is created," he writes. "Maybe the traditionalists who emphasize a neat, orderly method consisting of experiments, observation, and testing are missing the intangible but more important dimension - a personal dimension. . . . The traditional picture of cool, detached observers drawing pure conclusions from raw data just doesn't fit what I'm seeing here in the control room of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope." Yulsman reveals not only the scientists' intensity and excitement, but also their sense of wonder at how the universe works.

In the last few pages, readers can experience this fascination through the researchers' own words. Astronomer Sandra Faber describes our planet as "a tiny mote in a hostile void," and Yulsman argues that it would be tragic if humans, crowded onto the surface of this mote, made ourselves extinct. Thus, he divulges a motive for writing the book - his hope that the more we understand about the amazing events that led to our existence in the cosmos, the more reverence we will have for this world and its inhabitants.

- AILEEN A. O'DONOGHUE is an associate professor of physics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. She studies radio galaxies and stars.

Copyright Kalmbach Publishing Company Aug 2003

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