Glendenning N.K. After The Beginning: A Cosmic Journey Through Space And Time

World Scientific Publishing (Singapore) + Imperial College Press (London), 2004, 208 pages, ISBN: 1-86094-447-7, ISBN: 1-86094-448-5In "After the Beginning," Norman Glendenning, like Hawking and Weinberg a theoretical physicist, differs with both their points of view. His enlightening, entertaining, sometimes startling story tells how philosophers, astronomers, and physicists have teased out cosmic history right back to the first 10-to-the-minus-43rd of a second, before which time, he observes, we can't know anything, because the laws of physics didn't apply.In a brilliant flash about fourteen billion years ago, time and matter were born in a single instant of creation. An immensely hot and dense universe began its rapid expansion everywhere, creating space
where there was no space and time where there was no time. In the intense fire just after the beginning, the lightest elements were forged, later to form primordial clouds that eventually evolved into galaxies, stars, and planets. This evolution is the story told in this fascinating book. Interwoven with the storyline are short pieces on the pioneering men and women who revealed those wonders to us.