Echo of the Big Bang

A tight-knit, high-powered group of scientists and engineers spent eight years building a satellite designed, in effect, to read the genome of the universe. Launched in 2001, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) reported its first results two years later with a set of brilliant observations that added focus, detail, and insight to our formerly fuzzy view of the cosmos.

For more than a year, the WMAP satellite hovered in the cold of deep space, a million miles from Earth, in an effort to determine whether the science of cosmology--the study of the origin and evolution of the universe--has been on the right track for the past two decades. What WMAP was looking for was a barely perceptible pattern of hot and cold spots in the faint whisper of microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang, the event that almost 14 billion years ago gave birth to all of space, time, matter, and energy.

The pattern encoded in those microwaves holds the answers to some of the great unanswered questions of cosmology: What is the universe made of? What is its geometry? How much of it consists of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that continue to baffle astronomers? How fast is it expanding? And did it undergo a period of inflationary hyper-expansion at the very beginning? WMAP has now given definitive answers to these mysteries.

On February 11, 2003, the team of researchers went public with the results. Just some of their extraordinary findings: The universe is 13.7 billion years old. The first stars--turned on--when the universe was only 200 million years old, five times earlier than anyone had thought. It is now certain that a mysterious dark energy dominates the universe. Michael Lemonick, who had exclusive access to the researchers as WMAP gathered its data, here tells the full story of WMAP and its surprising revelations. This book is both a personal and a scientific tale of discovery. In its pages, readers will come to know the science of cosmology and the people who, seventy-five years after we first learned that the universe is expanding, deciphered some of its deepest mysteries in the patterns of its oldest light.

I found some of the pages to be a little dry; but nothing that caused me to yawn or skim. Overall the book moves along at a good pace, and it fun to read.

I was just a little annoyed by the author's minor tendency to sensationalize. For example, he started the book with a flash-forward to the end where one of the investigators (Dave Spergel) is poring over his data in trepidation about making a "shocking claim". We don't find out what this shocking claim is until the end of the book, where we find out that, in fact, the flash-forward was to a period when Spergel was speculating about the results based on data that was not fully analyzed.

Anyway, it's a fun read and certainly worth the time and money. It's good to know facts like the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that the hubble constant is 71km/s/mpc, and that the first stars turned on about two hundred million years after the big bang.

The last chapter of the book is the one that those readers looking for the 'science' will want to read most, for it contains the summary of the findings of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001. The probe collected data for over a year, looking for the signature of the Big Bang - the background radiation in the universe (Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, or CMB) that was variously discovered and misinterpreted until the 1960s. The probe's findings could be summaries in five key numbers:

1) the universe is 13.7 billion years old
2) Ordinary atoms make up 4.4 percent of the universe
3) Dark matter makes up a surprising 23 percent of matter in the universe
4) The Hubble constant (the rate of expansion per distance) is 71 kilometers per second per megaparsec (in other words, the further out, the fast the expansion)
5) Stars began 'turning on' in the universe 200 million years after the start, much earlier than expected

Okay, so these are fairly simple observations. What do they mean and why are they important?

Lemonick's book takes a longer view toward astrophysical cosmology (as opposed to the more philsophical and theological kinds) - this is a relatively new branch of one of the oldest sciences. Astronomy has been important since the earliest days of literate humanity, and possibly even precedes literacy - charting the stars for theological/religious/superstitious reasons as well as practical reasons (seasons, time keeping) have always been important. However, it has only been since the Enlightenment that major attention has been given to analysing the different components of the sky, and while broad-based interest in the constitution of the universe has been present in philosophical an intellectual history, it has only been since the twentieth century that science has taken on the task of explaining the large-scale structure of the universe. This has led to many fascinating turns, many of which have played out in the popular press, like the astronomic struggle between the Steady State theory and the Big Bang theory.

Lemonick recounts the various near-miss discoveries of the CMB radiation, particularly the various Bell Lab accounts, the various mis-diagnoses from observational astronomers around the world, and finally efforts from ground-based and satellite/above-atmosphere observations to lead to the inescapable conclusion that, whatever it was, there was something out there creating fairly general and stable readings on various instrumentation.

The greater part of the text deals with the formation of the latest mission, which led to the discoveries listed above. Detailing the planning, the formation of the team of researchers, the budgetary issues, the set-backs due to changing NASA priorities and fortunes, and the personality quirks and conflicts that inevitably arise in projects, this is a fascinating glimpse of the human side of the scientific enterprise. The formation of how scientists even decide what to look for and how to look for it is interesting in and of itself; sometimes the scientific process doesn't seem so, well, scientific. How could it be, being run by scientists who are first human beings?

Lemonick also shows some of the aftermath of the discoveries (still a bit new at the time of the writing of this text, or of this review) - he references John Horgan's assertion that all the important discoveries of science have been made; I cannot help but think here of similar statements being made at the end of the nineteenth century, when active speculation about closing patent offices existed as 'everything that can be invented already has been'; history has a sense of irony in that it was a patent clerk (Einstein) who would prove this to be an example of classical physic's hubris. But Lemonick explains the emphasis in astronomy is already shifting; more headlines are made from discovering possible planets around neighbouring stars than grand theoretical constructs or larger-scale explanations. Where science really goes next, in the next decade, is a mystery; much more so is the direction for the next century and beyond.

Henrietta Leavitt's "...study was ignored, in part because the researcher was a woman and thus unqualified to be a "real" scientist." (Lemonick's quotes around 'real')(p. 22).

"...observational astronomers don't tend to spend much time studying up on theoretical physics." (p. 38).