Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

A perfect book for cosmology enthusiasts. This book has a perfect balance of coarse and detailed explanations, that is, this book is not exactly for laymen but also not for people with physics degrees (well, this is subjective, but you need at least a background knowledge of high school math and physics). It is rare to find a book like this.

It is bold of the author to write a book that will convey the reader, through a logic ladder, one step at a time, from understanding how to determine the age of the Earth, to the mechanism of how our universe starts. Nevertheless, I would say, the author is successful to bring us to the beginning of the universe.

I love the fact that there are some parts of the book (they called it boxes) where the author gave a more detailed explanation. It is up to the reader to read this part or not; you can basically skip it if you are not interested in the greater details, but if you want to understand more about what was described in the main text, it is necessary to read it. Sometimes the author presented a few equations to support the flow of explanation, which I really appreciate.

On top of it, the illustration and the graphs are top-notch. Real photos and real graphs from real data are presented in this book. Moreover, they are there not only for aesthetics, but the author explains them in detail. I was overwhelmed when the author explains how to read the CMB power spectrum (which supports inflation theory and confirms past energy-matter distribution observation) for pages, including boxes; things that are missed in most cosmology books.

One thing to note that confuses me half of the book: the term Big Bang that is used by the author is not the time of ‘creation', but rather the time when photons start to escape the primordial plasma, i.e. when recombination happened. It is actually emphasized in the first chapter, but silly me, I missed that sentence, and find out when I reread the first chapter.