From the jungles of Brazil to the tundra of Antarctica, from weather balloons flown within our atmosphere to satellites launched into space, Wrinkles in Time takes you on the awe-inspiring journey of George Smoot and his team of researchers to unlock the mysteries of our universe. Chock full of pictorial representations of the cosmological effects being described, even a lay person can follow along as they search for the answers to our origins. "For we are all star-stuff.  A way for the universe to know itself."  And so too with this book, can we start to know the universe.

Good account of the Smoot et al. work on experimental measurement and interpretation of the CMB.

It is interesting, but it gets me tired. So I read a little and leave it alone, and them pick it again...

The first part is a standard expositon of the Big Bang. The last and best part is the development, deployment, and analysis of the COBE satellite that confrimed a major aspect of the Big Bang.

I finally got around to reading this because it was referenced in n  About Timen. This was not nearly so well written, but it was an interesting companion read nonetheless.

Both book cover some of the same background, bringing the reader up to speed on certain necessary concepts and the history of astronomy and cosmology. The focus here is a bit more narrow, however, as well it should be since the author is dealing with the story of his own contributions to the science, rather than providing an overview. Still, it felt a bit more disjointed, jumping through history seemingly at random to set up elements of what amounts to Smoot's professional biography as much as, if not more than, the story of the COBE project and its sister-studies.

Nevertheless, that personal touch made it a more... well, personal story, which assuredly is less dry than the usual science book. Astronomy can seem like a very straightforward study, and not particularly exciting in any way other than the wonder of the stars, but the stories of Smoot's failures as well as successes, and the obstacles—financial, administrative, and competitive—he and his fellows faced lend an air of urgency that scientific discovery tales often lack.

Not to mention that I now have a much better understanding of the then-current evidence for and against the standard "big bang theory" of the origin of the cosmos. The two books together served well to stitch the fabric of space-time together in my mind in a way my academic studies never did.

The first 1/3 of this book, giving a brief, easily comprehensible overview of astronomy/cosmology up through Einstein, is so important and so well written that it should be required reading from middle school on. It's very sad how few people actually know the progression of this field, even after high school graduation.

The rest is dedicated to Smoot's long and sometimes tedious search for micro fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation. The book is not tedious, it's tightly written and never drags. It does an excellent job of giving the sense of what it is actually like, and takes, to do quality work in any scientific field. He found his "wrinkles" and deservedly won the Nobel prize for it. That is rarely the ending for many great scientists who go through everything Smoot went through.

If more people knew what "science" actually looked like day-to-day, and all the work that goes into putting out a new theory or presenting new evidence, maybe we'd have less of a problem in our country from people rejecting scientific principles. If more people saw the rocky, pitfall strewn road that scientific ideas like the Big Bang Theory, which was under constant fire from other scientists from the day it was proposed, had to travel to prevail, they'd realize that nobody proposes these ideas without a firm reason, and that firm reason is never just to attack someone's personal religion.

Not merely a great book, but an absolutely essential reading for any physics and wholly Science curious explorer. A certainly must buy and must read.

This is a book on physical cosmology intended for the general public. After the briefest of introductions to the field the issue at hand resolves to defending the big bang theory by accounting for the formation of structured matter (galaxies, nebulae and the like) in the cosmos. The portion of this work done by Smoot and colleagues is detailed.

In fact, much of this book would not be readily accessible to the general public. Personally, I found much of it dull and obscure, though I did appreciate his treatment of 'dark matter.'

Very good book if you like science and people who love it.

This was my first book about cosmology / astrophysics. Smoot (and friends) tell the full story of the COBE experiments and data, and explain the consequences of the data very clearly.

I found this book well written and provocative. The author's description of time and its lack of smoothitude (a word I just made up) has occupied my thoughts a great deal since I read the book. It's the sort of book that, and this is the best compliment I can give, made me want to have lunch with the author.

Loved it, but then I'm a nerdy geek, or maybe a geeky nerd. I thought it was a good, straight-forward read on what was known when, and then what was done to add to the knowledge base. The end result is that the cosmic background radiation, once thought to be uniform, is not really uniform, but patchy. And the patches are where the galaxies were formed, which leads to the present day non-uniformity of the distribution of galaxies.