13.8: The Quest to Find the True Age of the Universe and the Theory of Everything

One of the two or three best science books I have ever read

13.8 billion years (± .021 billion years): That is the age of the Universe. In this book John Gribbin tells how that figure was determined -- with the most recent input coming in 2015. He also tells how it was determined that the oldest stars in our Galaxy (the Milky Way) are a bit more than 13 billion years old. He concludes that "the discovery that the ages of the oldest stars and the age of the Universe are almost the same, with the stars (crucially) being slightly younger than the Universe in which they live is * * * one of the most profound discoveries ever made." Moreover, it "powerfully suggests that both the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics are correct in some fundamental way, and might one day be unified." For me, reading 13.8 was immensely educational as well as exhilarating. I am not a scientist and my once decent facility in mathematics long ago withered away from disuse. Over the past three decades I have occasionally tried to read, and learn, about quantum mechanics and the more recent cosmological theories, but the books or articles I consulted overwhelmed and defied me. Not so with Gribbin's 13.8. It is exceptionally well and lucidly written for a work of hard-core science. (Gribbin is an astrophysicist and a long-time Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex; he studied or worked with several of the scientists mentioned in the book, and he participated in several of the studies or projects contributing to its conclusions; he also is reputed to be one of the finest science writers active today.) Gribbin begins his story with the discovery, in 1965, of cosmic microwave background radiation, with a temperature of 2.712 K. "The essential point is that this radiation * * * tells us that the Universe as we know it had a definite beginning a finite time ago." The question then becomes, how long ago? Before addressing that, Gribbin, in Part One, recounts the story of determining, first, the age of the Earth, Sun, and Sol...