The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe 1st Edition by John Boslough (PDF)

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In the early 1990s, a NASA-led team of scientists changed the way we view the universe. With the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) project, they showed that the microwave radiation that fills the universe must have come from the Big Bang — effectively proving the Big Bang theory beyond any doubt. It was one of the greatest scientific findings of our generation, perhaps of all time. In The Very First Light, John Mather, one of COBE’s leaders, and science writer John Boslough tell the story of how it was achieved. A gripping tale of big money, bigger egos, tense politics, and cutting-edge engineering, The Very First Light offers a rare insider’s account of the world of big science.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐One is reminded of visiting friends at their newly-built house. The process of its building was doubtless enormously stressful for them, and a brief history of the various traumas along the way would be welcome, but one’s prime interest is the finished result. The first 60% of this book is devoted to the traumas along the way in this project and, after stripping out the doubtfully relevant final chapter and the completely superfluous epilogue, far too little is devoted to the science achieved. For all that, it is well written and much of the first 60% was interesting, as was the description of the the Nobel ceremonies. Nevertheless, I really would have appreciated much more devotion to the science. He is reasonably forgiving of Smoot’s deplorable behaviour, but makes it clear that other members of the team – i.e. those who *didn’t* share the Nobel – are feeling significantly less charitable. Happy to recommend it, but a different mix would have got five stars out of me.

⭐Mather, later awarded the Nobel prize for his work on the COBE satellite, tells the story of how that satellite came to be. Not only does he discuss the reasons why it was important to fly that satellite, he describes the people to people issues that really go into the creation of any major endeavor.Mather doesn’t present himself as any kind of special person, just a hard working and dedicated individual, a man not only with science on his mind but humanity in his heart. He comes across as someone it would be enjoyable and an honor to have as a friend.It is important, though, to follow reading his book with George Smoot’s book, Wrinkles In Time. Smoot, who won the Nobel prize with Mather, writes on the same topic but with a different and consequently interesting slant.Mather comes across as not a major admirer of Smoot’s, and Smoot’s book endeavors implicitly to explain some of the actions he took.

⭐John Mather has created a really wonderful window into the most pivotal investigation to-date of the origins of us all. He draws the reader in from the first moment, his many years of honing a clarity tinged with his personal exuberance on these subjects showing clearly. For those who love the idea of creating instruments to change forever our view of our universe and its beginnings, or simply going along for the intellectal adventure of the century, this book is for you!

⭐If you are into astrophysics, you will like this book. Provides a very plausible consequence of the Big Bang!

⭐Loved the science, some of the politics were good

⭐Enjoyed hearing Dr. Boslough speak about his book. Enjoyed reading it as much.

⭐As a retired engineer who worked in High Energy Physics this is a refresher for someone who likes to watch the night sky.

⭐When first published in 1996, “The Very First Light” received a warm reception as a singular explanation for a non-technical audience of the work of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). Most important, COBE’s instruments provided data verifying the Big Bang theory of the universe’s origins 13.7 billion years ago. John Mather led the science team that announced in 1992 that COBE had detected minuscule fluctuations in the temperature and density of cosmic background radiation, a microwave energy suffusing the entire universe that is generally considered a remnant, or “afterbirth,” of the Big Bang. It was a stunning achievement, one for which John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center shared the Nobel Prize in 2006 with George F. Smoot of the University of California. Mather, lead author of this book, is the first NASA scientist to receive the Nobel Prize.”The Very First Light” relates a history of COBE, its origins, approval, design and development, flight, and analysis of the results. It is a worthwhile examination of the process of big scientific pursuits in modern America, and both the priorities and the pitfalls of working in the confines of a bureaucracy where one is not free to pursue everything that might be desired. As one example, one member of the science team, decided to violate some of the strictures about group publication to pursue individual renown.At the center of this book is the question of how to design and build instruments to search for remnants of the Big Bang, now the standard explanation of how the universe originated. Mather and Boslough offer a useful short history of this effort, as background for COBE. The Big Bang theory’s adoption came in the heady years following World War II when new technologies offered startling new scientific understandings. Using radio telescopes and advances in spectroscopy, scientists discovered that the uneven distribution of galaxies in the universe called into question other models of origination. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson proved to be the critical scientists in collecting and interpreting this data, finding that background radiation existed in the cosmos and gaining the Nobel Prize in 1978 for this discovery. Others research followed.The most important was the effort of NASA’s COBE satellite in the early 1990s, which discovered background radiation of varying densities clumped in various parts of the universe. These probably fostered the formation of galaxies, and through this connection Mather and others on his COBE science team were able to draw the connection between the Big Bang and the present universe. It mapped the distribution of matter across the sky, and discovered infrared and submillimeter background light, the possible faint emission from the first generations of stars and galaxies. COBE recorded how the radiant energy of the Big Bang gradually cooled and diluted as the universe expanded in all directions from the point of origin. Even so, it still fills the universe almost uniformly in every direction. It was a stunning discovery, one truly altering the course of scientific knowledge about the cosmos.A new concluding chapter in this second edition of the book, entitled “Stockholm Calling,” relates the reception of the COBE findings and John Mather’s personal history since the completion of COBE studies. He offers his perspective on the announcement of his receiving the Nobel Prize and the manner in which the knowledge generated has become part of the everyday understanding of cosmology. He also relates his experiences with the Wilkinson Microwave Anistrophy Probe (WMAP), which determined the age of the universe as 13.7 billion years with and accuracy of +/- 200 million years. It also determined that “the universe is composed of 4 percent ordinary baryonic matter (atoms), 23 percent an unknown type of dark matter that does not emit or absorb light, and 73 percent a mysterious dark energy that seemed to be responsible for accelerating the universe’s expansion” (p. 273). This fascinating discovery suggests that we know far less about the universe than previously thought. Mather also discusses the Next Generation Space Telescope, now known as the James Webb Space Telescope, where he is currently leading the science team. Scheduled to be launched in 2014, will improve by at least an order of magnitude current capabilities image the universe in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.Mather and Boslough conclude: “What do we know with certainty? Only that the universe exists and is vaster than we had ever imagined: A great firmament of galaxies and quasars, nebulae and dust, luminous stars, planets, and people, along with the unknown if not unknowable dark matter and, now, a dark energy, intersecting gravitational fields, and powerful force fields deep within the fundamental particles of nature–all endowed with an evolving creative power of both great simplicity and great complexity, suffused with an ancient glow of magnificent uniformity and surprising beauty and containing, in our scientific concept of creation, the seeds of everything to come” (p. 282). No one else could have said it better.

⭐An inspiring story of a struggling team to apply big-science to measure and verify our understanding of the first evolutionary steps of the universe.Great overview of an endeavour.John Mather won the Nobel for his work using COBE to find the cosmic background radiation, which painted a picture of the early universe.

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