Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos
Haegel, Nancy M.
THE UNIVERSE AS SAGGING MATTRESS LONELY HEARTS OF THE COSMOS Dennis Overbye HarperCollins, $25,430 pp. Nancy M. Haegel he title conjures up a romantic novel, but the romance is...
...Box 37844, Cincinnati, OH 45222-0844 (513) 948-8733 Direct orders add $1 shipping per book...
...What will happen to it...
...THE WORLD OF ISLAM GOD I S ONE The Way of Islam By R. Marston Speight Highlighting the common factors as well as the important issues of faith and life that divide us, God Is One confronts barriers to understanding the Islamic way with concern and accuracy...
...4.95 At bookstores, denominational supply houses, or directly from: FRIENDSHIP PRESS Distribution Office P.O...
...How did stars and galaxies come to exist from an amazingly uniform initial condition...
...What is most enjoyable is learning how scientists even begin to try and answer them...
...If the setting is sober, the narrator is not...
...No one with a sense of past or future can fail to be stirred by those questions and the story of how modern scientists pursue them...
...Overbye's engaging and insightful book is guaranteed to provide the general reader with a good base from which to appreciate the progress and the surprises that are no doubt in store in the years ahead...
...Includes examples of Islam's contributions to science, art, medicine, architecture and literature...
...Answers to some of these questions are contained in the Hubble constant, the ratio between the redshift of a galaxy (a measure of the rate at which it is moving away from the observer) and its distance...
...He reiterates key points and is tutorial without being tedious...
...Orders under $25 must be prepaid...
...L SINDBAD THE SAILOR II THE LAST VOYAGE OF SOMEBODY THE SAILOR John Barth Little, Brown, $22.95, 573 pp...
...How did the universe come to be here...
...Hubble wanted to be Einstein...
...Overbye shows how the daily labor of men and women enables them to make statements about an event that occurred 15 to 20 billion years ago...
...in place of Prince Shahryar, modern medicine--figured (well-figured) in a resident: auburn-haired, green-eyed, available--and a born listener...
...To no less purpose and with no less skill does the narrator of John Barth's retelling of part of Scheherazade's repertoire, the seven voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, interweave those stories with the stories of his own life's voyages, seeking to find which name among the many he's given, which self among the many that he's been, he is...
...Shoot an arrow or a light beam infinitely out in any direction and it would eventually come back and hit you in the butt...
...Sometime around 1980, Sandage said, he converted to Christianity...
...It is a dramatic story, and Overbye tells it in dramatic prose...
...And, if you don't know exactly how old the universe is or how it will end, you will find it both comforting and challenging to realize that, even among the best minds, you are not alone...
...The world is bigger after one asks such questions...
...Crystal Gromer he Arabian nights were only as long as Scheherazade was clever, and she was very clever as it turned out, keeping death one night away by telling stories whose endings she promised the next night, and then the next, and the next--until there were a thousand and one nights, a thousand and one stories, and death had slipped away, an ending no longer necessary...
...But in place of palace, we have hospital...
...48 pp...
...This is John Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor, Chimera, and many more), after all, and his hero is variously exuberant, obnoxious, funny, self-conscious, and, not sober at all, but thoroughly intoxicated with sex, love, and story telling, especially with their commingling...
...One feels the struggle of people with both brilliant minds and yet the familiar limitations of the human condition...
...5.95 (5th Printing) NEIGHBORS Muslims in North America Interviews by Elias D. Mallon Neighbors shatters the stereotypes of fear and suspicion as Muslims in North America talk in lively interviews about their families, their work, and their spiritual journeys...
...What happened 10 -43 seconds after the Big Bang, an inconceivably short period of time that is less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second...
...One of Sandage's colleagues muses, "Allan Sandage wanted to be Hubble...
...144 pp...
...All my life," he writes, "I had been looking for some way out of the gray doom of ordinary existence...
...Hubble died too young and left me with a burden, an incredible burden...
...Overbye handles adroitly a complex and often confusing story...
...Like his predecessor the Porter in Scheherazade's version, this new Sindbad is summoned to his namesake's court when he is overheard singing his complaint: We all commence our journey as a little sperm and egg...
...How close to the original "creation event," the big bang, can we approach through the history written in the heavens...
...Each night for six successive nights, the narrator, a pseudo-Sindbad, a Somebody the Sailor, and his host, Sindbad the Sailor himself, tell the stories of their voyages...
...You will learn a great deal about what is known about the universe...
...Autobiography, fiction, travelogue, adventure, romance, fable: the tales of the voyages parallel each other, until, more parable than parallel, they converge into the one story...
...Men and women have always pondered such questions, but only during the past seventy years, since Einstein's theory of relativity, have astronomers and physicists had a framework within which to pursue the answers...
...48 pp...
...Named for its discoverer, the Hubble constant becomes "the most amazing scientific discovery of all time.., the cipher that would haunt him (Hubble) and Sandage and future generations of cosmologists and drive them to the sky clawing for patterns in the darkness between the galaxies, seeking the signatures of particles, forces, dimensions, and energies only a heartbeat from eternity, demanding from the black crumpled night some explanation of the origin and fate of time itself...
...The great ones pay...
...He crosses oceans, he crosses centuries in his search...
...Sandage is a gifted man, taking on a large task...
...Like any popular science writing, the book contains analogies and descriptions which attempt to make such concepts as redshifts and quarks accessible to those with earthly experience...
...For this narrator there can't be too much commingling...
...He would not divulge any more details...
...The rotable bezel of his Seiko (a bargain at a tax-free port) is his magic carpet, sending him back, mid shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, to the Iraq presided over not by Saddam Hussein but by the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, where, though wealth is still counted in jewels, the world is not innocent, and where stories are the order of the day---or night...
...Allan Sandage is an exception among his peers in this regard, as years of gazing into the heavens turn a religious child into a religious man...
...Repeated attempts to show that "scientists are people too" become a bit tedious...
...He didn't want to be a nihilist...
...One is not surprised to learn that physicists eat pizza, or take time out for snorkeling when attending conferences in Hawaii...
...These scientists find their deepest motivation in questions that many people wouldn't think to ponder...
...For the author, the fate of the universe is more than an intellectual puzzle...
...4.95 ONE GOD, TWO FAITHS When Christians and Muslims Meet A Study Guide on the World of Islam By Sarah Klos Six excellent sessions combine participatory activities, clear instructions and useful resources for adult and older youth study groups...
...Allan Sandage is Hubble's successor, and Overbye traces Sandage's career to show the interplay of ability and personality that fuels scientific progress...
...And Einstein wanted to be a peacemaker...
...Overbye recounts the contributions of many other scientists, and some, such as Stephen Hawking of recent best-seller fame, will be familiar to readers...
...Life was not a dreary accident...
...It is a combination of intuition, time-consuming surveys of the sky, and the mental gymnastics of giants like Hawking that leads scientists to envision, for example, a universe that will "expand forever but not a day longer...
...Will it expand forever or collapse on itself...
...For most of the scientists involved, however, the 340: Commonweal questions, though profound, are not religious...
...Some are highly instructive: "The universe, Einstein realized, was the ultimate sagging mattress.., the weight of the whole cosmos could wrap space-time back around on itself, rather like the surface of a balloon...
...He has a long job of it...
...It would be as if you were appointed to be copy editorto Dante...and then Dante died...
...Overbye, a science writer who studied physics at MIT, surveys recent progress on the key questions of cosmology: How old is the universe...
...17 May 1991:341...
...Given that scientist~ themselves are often confused about the collective status of their thinking, the author appreciates that readers may feel the same...
...Overbye's analogies range widely in their effectiveness...
...Nancy M. Haegel he title conjures up a romantic novel, but the romance is philosophical in Dennis Overbye's Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, a nonfiction survey of cosmology, the search for the origin and destiny of the universe...
...And yet the author does illuminate an area of mystery for many nonscientists, as he conveys the sense of wonder and "wanting to know" that drives scientists, and the almost ecstatic joy that can accompany a breakthrough in understanding...
...Others are forced, and occasionally, a well-worn metaphor hurts: "For physicists, truth has always been beauty and beauty has always been truth...
...Within the frame, the novel unfolds in alternate chapters,with alternate narrators and alternate times: the "present" of Sindbad's court, when he describes his famous voyages for his dinner guests, and the "past" of Somebody, this fifty-or-so-year-old-man who has been William Simon Behler, Simmon, Persimmon, Simon, Sy, William Baylor, Bill, B., Bey-el-Loor, Sindbad the Still-Stranded, and who is now playing Sindbad the Landman to Sindbad the Sailor...
...Not that he means to...
...Like Scheherazade, our twentieth-century narrator narrates against the hand of death...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
