Review of Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins by Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper

Hate to DNF an eARC (from NetGalley and publisher University of Chicago Press), but I just cannot with Battle of the Big Bang. It’s written like a fever dream of a science book, and on every page I was left asking, who is this book for?

Niayesh Afshordi is a cosmologist; Phil Halper is a science comms YouTuber. Together, they’ve teamed up to write a tour of cosmology. They trace the various theories of the origins of the universe, from steady-state to the different Big Bang theories out there. Then the book gets down to the fine details of what cosmologists are battling about today: inflation, spontaneous genesis from nothing, branes, etc. Some of it is stuff I had heard or read about before, though perhaps not in years. Some of it is brand new, and it’s a shame I didn’t finish the book, because I really was interested.

First, a small disclaimer: I was reading this on my Kindle, and it was converted from a PDF galley. Somehow the conversion wasn’t able to read any of the numerals present in the text, so all years and quantities were just … omitted (and quantities are kind of important in physics). Similarly, all ligatures with the letter “f” were gone. So … that made for an interesting read. Yet I persevered, for that is not the fault of the authors, and it’s not why I didn’t finish the book.

No, I DNFed this behemoth because I was a third of the way through the book and felt like I was spinning my wheels. Afshordi and Halper just have no sense of how to tell a story in prose—a complaint I recently levelled at Proof as well. Most popular science books, when they want to tell a story of a complex topic like cosmology, ground each chapter in a singular story, usually with a particular person as a main character. Afshordi and Halper seem to want to do this, but they can’t manage to find their narrative. Instead, they get bogged down in details and gossip and talking about multiple people at once—some of whom are still alive—such that Battle of the Big Bang feels like it’s inside baseball, meant for other physicists.

Similarly, this book is not for the faint of heart. The authors brag about there being no equations, but honestly, we need to dismantle that Hawking shibboleth already: please publish physics books with equations! I am fine with it. I am a mathematician. I get that this is a book from an academic press rather than a big publisher, so maybe it is meant for a more technical audience … in which case, though, why is this a book and not a peer-reviewed lit review paper?

That’s my main complaint. Battle of the Big Bang feels like it’s trying to be popular science when in reality it’s too technical and too much engrossed by insider gossip from the scientific community to be interesting or even comprehensible to lay readers. I now understand why most physicists don’t write popular science books.