An incredible read: Talking about the discovery and investigation of the cosmic microwave background and the resulting consequences to the physics community would have been fascinating enough. Yet the author actually gives a concise and understandable introduction to cosmology and astronomy with many useful illustrations, making this a truly enjoyable read for a student of physics.

Great read of the development and discoveries made by the COBE satellite. Description of the Antarctic episode was very interesting. Very much enjoyed it!

The first part of this book was a slog: Smoot made the history of Cosmology as dry and dull as he possibly could. However, once the story switched to his personal search for the structure in the microwave background it picked up. I was an undergraduate when the COBE results came out in 1992 and I remember how excited people were around the JHU Physics & Astronomy Department. I didn't fully appreciate what these observations meant at the time - but it certainly made it feel exciting to be becoming an astronomer. Big Things were being discovered - we knew so much and so little, there was lots to do and I was heading off to do some of it! It was rather fun to read about all the things going on in the background, all the hard work and persistence that lead up to this momentous announcement.

An interesting memoir covering the more practical side of cosmology, so to speak -- the nuts and bolts of actually carrying out cutting-edge experimentation. And yes, I'll happily admit I found this book thanks to Sheldon Cooper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXV4Cw...

It was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. Basically you get the story of how an important discovery was made - what the scientists had to do to get answers to the problems they were trying to solve and how they had a lot of interesting adventures in the mean time from Brazilian jungles to the South Pole.

A certain thing to take away from reading this book - doing scientific experiments on high altitude balloons is a nerve-wrecking business.

Þessi bók var á einhverjum lista um þær hundrað bækur sem ætti að lesa:) Virkilega skemmtileg barnabók og ótrúlegt að ekki sé búið að þýða hana.

Awesome. First of all, let me say that I was lucky. Why? I bought this from Amazon, a used copy... and I discovered that the book came to me with the author's signature on it, the real one... so, this is my second signed copy of a book. Haha, geeky lucky bastard.

Anyway, ripples and wrinkles in time. What are they? The first glimpse about their probable existence was detected by another pair of lucky bastards, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who discovered the MBR (microwave background radiation). The author (and quoting wikipedia) won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". This is deep.

There was a time in which the big bang theory was attacked, with sharp arguments. This discovery assured that the universe was not isotropic, meaning that it is in fact, dynamic. Thus, letting behind concepts related to "stationary universe" or that it was somehow special. Finding these "wrinkles" let scientists assure that the universe evolved, and will continue to do so.

I heard from the author while watching Sheldon Cooper making fun of him in an episode of the series. It may seem a bit boring at times because it narrates the author's adventure concerning this discovery, that actually occupied 18 years of his life.

As someone who is interested in cosmology and astronomy, I found this book to be very interesting. Smoot does a very good job of explaining the history of cosmology and the background to COBE, his satellite to study the cosmic microwave background radiation. He also adds a little bit of personal experiences to lighten the tone - so it's not ALL science-speak. And then he rounds it off by talking about the experiment and its findings. The book is not very difficult to read, like some science books can be.

I noticed that another reviewer made the comment that Smoot is very self-congratulatory. I would have to agree that, by his writing, he thinks very highly of himself and his accomplishment. But I did not find this to be distracting. He was proud of what he had done and rightly so; this tone did not detract from the book for me.

Covering an impressive depth and breadth of physics at the time, Smoot recounts his involvement in the discovery of the CMB--battling extreme weather in Antartica to build a radio telescope in the ice, searching the depths of a jungle for a downed high altitude balloon, laboring in a race to build the first microwave satellite, and announcing to the world that the CMB is not smooth. It's a wonder one scientist can be involved in so much and still find the time to write an entertaining book.

un buen libro para adentrarse a la investigación sobre el fondo cósmico de microondas.

I am warned that I should take this book with a pinch of salt, since Smoot may not be telling us the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But dammit, I want to believe him. This is what science should be like: go out and look for the data, no matter what it costs you. At several points, you just can't help comparing him with Indiana Jones.

Smoot started off in the early 70s as a particle physicist, where the norm was already for people to work together in big teams. But he was ambitious, and thought he'd never get anywhere as an anonymous member of a giant collaboration. He looked around and got interested in observational cosmology, which was finally starting to take off. In particular, he was greatly influenced by Peebles's book on the subject. People had just found the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - the faint radiation coming from all over the sky that was generally assumed to come from the Big Bang - but no one knew much about it. Peebles urged researchers to find out more.

Smoot started doing cosmology, though he didn't immediately get involved with the CMBR. His first project was an attempt to detect antimatter atoms in cosmic rays, which at the time was another hot topic: some people thought there was a lot of antimatter out there just waiting to be discovered. Maybe there were antimatter suns with antimatter planets orbiting them. (This is for example the premise of Jack Williamson's SF novel n  Seetee Shipn). Now, it's hard to remember that it was ever more than science-fiction, but then it was taken seriously.

Smoot set out to look for antimatter in cosmic rays, flying experiments in balloons to get them high enough to have a chance of catching something. There were all sorts of exotic accidents. One balloon crashes on a farm in the Badlands, and they have to retrieve the tapes from the wreckage. At the end, they have tens of thousands of events recorded, and they analyze them all to try and figure out if they've found any antimatter. They can explain every event as normal, with one single exception; as far as they can see, it's possible that it's antimatter. But the odds are only three to one in their favor, so they decide to run a bunch more balloon experiments. They never find another possible antimatter event - so it's a negative result, but an interesting one which more or less refutes the idea that there are antimatter stars.

As you can see, Smoot is a careful guy who knows how to get things done. He then starts a new project which finally does get to looking at the CMBR; he wants to use it to establish a universal frame of reference, so that he can measure the absolute velocity of the Earth. Everyone tells him this can't be done, since it means measuring temperature differences in the CMBR of around a thousandth of a degree, and there is no way to fly the experiment. But Smoot has heard that old U-2 spy planes are possibly being made available for scientific research purposes, he works his connections, he persuades people to do the incredibly tricky engineering, and he gets data which indicates that the Earth's velocity (indeed, our galaxy's velocity) is far greater than it should be, which has many interesting consequences for cosmology. Unfortunately, skeptics argue that it could be a false signal, and the only way to find out is to redo the experiment in the Southern Hemisphere. He somehow ships everything down to Peru, bribes and wheedles his way into getting approval, and collects his data. It turns out that the signal is genuine.

I haven't even got to the COBE satellite mission, the high point of the book, but you get the picture. In a way, I don't care if Smoot is stretching the truth or exaggerating his role. I think people like him are essential when you have a new field that's just opening up; another example that springs to mind is Galileo, clearly one of his heroes. Smoot advanced the state of our understanding of the universe a great deal by being willing to do whatever it took to find answers to questions that many people thought were too difficult to investigate. He learned tricky theoretical ideas and turned them into concrete experiments, he put together crack teams of engineers and forced them to build devices with ridiculous levels of robustness and accuracy, he sat in budget meetings and persuaded people who didn't like him to give him money, and when necessary he went in person to the Amazon jungle or the South Pole to get the observations he needed.

And all the time, he was careful never to believe he'd found something when it was possible that all he had was wishful thinking. He tried his damnedest to eliminate uncertainties, and at one point towards the end of the COBE project he offered a substantial reward to any member of the team who could show why the current results were not correct. Maybe he wasn't 100% honest, but neither was Galileo. For my money, Smoot will go down in history as another truly first-rate experimental scientist.

All you ever wanted to know about cosmic microwave background radiation.