The Nine Numbers of the Cosmos by Michael Rowan-Robinson, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198504446, £16.99/$32.50
IN THE beginning was the big bang. Our Universe began at a finite time in the past in a state of unimaginably high density and temperature. And it’s been expanding and cooling ever since. Cosmologists try to work out what’s happening in the evolving Universe from this model. But it’s incomplete. Because we don’t understand the big bang itself, we can’t predict many important parameters of the Universe—such as its age and density. Instead, we have to rely on observation.
For decades, astronomers have…
