Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe (ISBN 0061344443)

Highly recommended: how Smoot earned the physics Nobel Prize:
Berkeley experimental astrophysicist George Smoot received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2006, and `Wrinkles in Time' is a wonderful telling of the work that is seen as rigorously securing the `big bang theory' and rightly brought him physics' most prestigious award. This is the story of real world, hard-fought, hardheaded science at the largest scale. Smoot has directed various experimental teams and `big science' (big budget, big staff of technicians, analysts, etc) investigations culminating in the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite project. Theory had predicted that extremely subtle "wrinkles" in the background radiation must account for the uniform non-uniformity of galaxies and galaxy clusters on cosmic scales. It could be no minor thing to experimentally confirm this prediction, that is, to somehow detect or witness these illusive `wrinkles', but this is what Smoot and his team accomplished. `Wrinkles in Time' is a fascinating story at both personal and cosmic scales. A relevant digression: Experimentalists are not considered to be very sexy in many physics circles lately, certainly not in popularizations (note that readers are not flocking to Smoot's excellent book). Popular accounts of `brane-world' conjectures and the so-called M-theory, especially when packaged with slick graphics, have landed authors like Hawking and Greene on best-seller's lists. Theorists, pitching non-falsifiable conjectures and often immodestly grandiose claims as physical "theories", lately seem little concerned that their ideas cannot be experimentally treated in any significant way at all. This state of affairs IS reason for serious caution, at the least, and the legion readers of Hawking, Greene, or Susskind will be wise to notice their own reluctant disclaimers and to thoughtfully examine Peter Woit's excellent `Not Even Wrong'. Do something different, read an eminent experimentalist's account of a theory that CAN be treated experimentally. This is real science, science that great theorists like Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and Gamow would recognize as being real science! Read this book.

This is one of my first cosmology books..:
...I bought it in 1995. Since then I have cherished books about cosmology, especially chronicling the most important discoveries based on observation. We have had currently three major important milestone developments, changing our perception of the space-time: --In 1981 Alan Guth and Andre Linde introduced rapid, exponential, near zero time "inflation theory". It was crucial theory explaining why it is natural for the Universe to be expanding close to the critical rate today. Today inflationary model still prevails over other models among majority of cosmologists. --Scientists were able to obtain a background measure at all in the Universe, using COBE satellite. In 1992 George Smoot announced existence of primordial seeds of modern-day structures such as galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so on. Later these infrared readings were called "face of God". --In 1998, acceleration of visible space expansion (that occurred about 6 billions year ago and still continues) was officially acknowledged as a breakthrough of the years. Robert Kirshner- supernova guru from Harvard, is one of the most important scientists studying this "acceleration" phenomena. Dark Energy component has been introduced. George Smoot's work belongs to this category of essential "collector's item". Reader will learn first hand how COBE project has been planned, completed and its results confirmed by measurements of Milky Way's radio emissions taken at the South Pole. Book delivers substantial amount of basic information about Universe as well. As for today, it is a bit of outdated info because COBE project had been completed before we gained knowledge of acceleration and concept of dark energy. Still - author's writings about personal life, work and experience are definitely recommended and by all means worth of perusal. Alan Guth's "Inflationary Universe" and Robert Kirshner's "Extravagant Universe" will be two other milestone books being written by directly involved scientists.

Cosmic microwave background radiation:
There has been a fair amount of news about the satellites COBE and WMAP and the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation or CMB (sometimes called Cosmic Background Radiation or CBR). This book describes how the COBE satellite was finally launched to study CMB. The author, George Smoot, is a delightful writer. The book is fun to read as well as informative. George Smoot won the Nobel Prize for his work on COBE. However, before COBE were high altitude balloons. His descriptions of trying to launch the balloons, especially in Antarctica are not only very descriptive, but also very funny. If you want a book about science that is fun and interesting to read as well as learning a lot about cosmology, this one if for you.