Echo of the Big Bang by Michael Lemonick, Princeton University Press, £17.95/$24.95, ISBN 0691102783 Reviewed by Marcus Chown
ONCE upon a time astronomers devoted whole careers to measuring the cosmological parameters that characterise our universe to an accuracy of within 10 or 20 per cent. Now they read off everything – from the Hubble constant to the amount of invisible, “dark”, matter – to a fraction of a per cent from the cosmic background radiation, a kind of cosmic Rosetta stone.
It’s been a long and hard road getting to this happy point and, in Echo of the Big Bang, Michael Lemonick describes the milestones along the way,…
