The Shape of the Cosmos

ALEJANDRO GANGUI

AMERICAN SCIENTIST

Sigma Xi

Lugar: North Carolina, USA; Año: 2002 vol. 90 p. 475 - 476

0003-0996

Many of us enjoy the night sky. We like to stay outdoors and call the planets, stars and constellations by their names. After half an hour in the darkness, new stars pop up to our eyes. These bright dots multiply by thousands with the aid of even a small pair of binoculars, and looked at through a professional telescope, each tiny patch of night sky unfolds in a myriad of marvelous galaxies. Will the stars continue forever? Some may say, Of course! But then, the universe, is it infinite? At that point, we might like to stop and think twice. . . . No infinity has ever been observed around us. Is it that nature abhors infinity? Most cosmologists live comfortably with the idea that everything, including of course space and time, came from a "Big Bang." Could that singular event have created an infinite universe from just nothing? Janna Levin thinks that it could not have, and in this lovely, utterly original book-which begins as a series of letters written (and never sent) to her mother and mutates into a running diary of her life-she takes us on a cosmological tour of her "small universe." She advances the idea that our universe is edgeless but finite-a huge, but not unending, cosmos. [...]Essay review on How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space, by Janna Levin, Princeton University Press 2002.[September-October 2002. See also: http://cms.iafe.uba.ar/gangui/difusion/americanscientist02/02-09Tunivspots.html ]