The View From the Center of the Universe: Discovering ... (ISBN 1594482551)

The View from the Center of the Universe:
I have not finished reading this book but already find it VERY INTERESTING AND "FOOD FOR THOUGHT" ! I am enrolled in a Senior Adults class at the local University which is using this text for discussion and study. So far this is a very new ..for most of us..way of looking at the importance of the role we play in the universe. The authors challenge us with modern scientific facts that open up a whole new view of our potential in our wonderful Universe !

The View from the Center of the Universe:
A must read for anyone with an interest in who we are, what we are and where we came from. It is worth the struggle to understand the complexities it works to explain.

Keeping Up With the Universe:
What an exciting read! Any intelligent layperson who wants to keep up with the latest science about the universe, including the Big Bang, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, will learn much. I have already bought 4 copies: 1 to underline (underline - haven't done that since college days!) and 3 to give as gifts. I've re-read this book 3 times. Kudos to the authors for helping me vision my place in the universe.

A difficult book to review:
I find this to be a very difficult book to review. It is actually two books that may appeal to different readers. The first section of the book, which takes up about a quarter of the book, deals with topics like creation myths and the evolution of scientific thought. The second section, which encompasses half the book, deals with the scientific view of the universe. The final section (one quarter of the book) is titled the meaningful universe. I purchased this book because of the middle scientific section. It clarified many points for me and was worth the price of the book. It is a completely non-mathematical treatment of modern cosmology. It is highly readable and I now understand why we can consider ourselves at the center of our visible universe (as can every other point in the universe). I have always been puzzled as to why, even though initially the universe was microscopic is size, that light from the early universe (whose wavelength has increased to the microwave range due to the expansion of space), has taken 13 billion years to reach us. This part of the book has given me a much better feeling of why this is so. According to the cosmic inflation model, the universe was initially expanding faster than the speed of light (which is allowed for, but not for things in space) and the universe has continued to expand while the light was moving towards us. There is a good discussion of dark energy and dark matter and why they makeup almost all of the mass in the universe. Cosmology has recently become an incredibly fast moving field. This book was published in 2006, so it covers topics like dark matter and dark energy. In contrast, a book published in 1996 would not cover these topics. The middle of the book should appeal to those who want an overview of modern cosmology and I recommend it as such, but such a reader might not be interested in the first and third sections of the book. I found the first section interesting, but I found the third section to be unfocused and uninteresting. All in all I enjoyed only about half the book, hence I can give it only four stars. (Also note, the hard cover version of this book is available as a bargain book and is a better deal than the soft cover version.) Note - I have just finished Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos", which covers some of the same topics. Greene does a much better job of explaining why some of the statements made in "the View from the Center of the Universe" are so and if I could only recommend only one of these books it would be Greene's.

2/3 OK:
The fist two parts of this book are excellent and show some good scientific research. The 3rd part, however, delves into conjecture and pure mysticisms and has llittle scietific relationship to the other two. I was surprised that the 3rd part was even inclkuded in this book and I'd recommend that readers just simply skip it.