Dr. Halpern regales us with another magisterial creation that combines both basic cosmological physics along with biographically salient aspects in the lives of two much under appreciated giants of the 20th Century: George Gamow and Fred Hoyle. The book is highly engaging and captivating. The storyline is unusually entertaining for the subject: humorous at times, but occasionally tragic and sad. From the scientific perspective, the focus is centered primarily on the initial controversy about universal expansion versus steady state as well as the creation of heavy atoms. Dr. Halpern superbly takes us by the hand and helps us sort out from the very beginning, every thinker and idea that contributed to the development of those two key concepts: the Big Bang and stellar nucleosynthesis.
As advertised, the work is based on the lives and achievements of Gamow and Hoyle, however, like the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London, all the big names are there: Lemaître, Hubble, Pauli, Cockcroft, Born, Landau, Feynman, Bethe, Bohr, Arno Penzias and Wilson, of course, but also Fowler and Chandra, Thorne, Penrose, Guth, and many more.
From the humanistic perspective, the book enlightens us about how science and academia can be utterly unfair. We learn, for instance, that Jocelyn Bell did not get the Nobel in physics in 1974 for for the discovery of pulsars just because… she was a woman? Really? Also, that neither did Hoyle, despite being the leader, the incontrovertible pioneer in the study of heavy element formation at the core of stars, just because he had upset some people in Stockholm? What?? At any rate, and more importantly, Dr. Halpern shows us how life can be overwhelming and sometimes tragic for those whose quest is the pursue of science. He inspires us by magisterially retracing their lives and by showing us their work to decipher the most profound secrets of our ever expanding universe. A true gem of a book!