This post is meant to advertise both my book review which just appeared in Nature Astronomy, as well as the book I reviewed. Two months ago Nature Astronomy asked me to write a book review on The Cosmic Revolutionary’s Handbook, a new popular science book by Luke A. Barnes and Geraint F. Lewis to be published by Cambridge University Press (one of the oldest and most prestigious publishing houses in the world) in March.
This book aims to explain why we cosmologists believe in a bunch of strange stuff related to the Hot Big Bang Theory. The Universe is expanding? Come on! And what’s that dark matter and dark energy crap? Clearly cosmology needs a revolution, and academics are trying very hard to maintain the current establishment which gives them $$$ and banish unconventional ideas from those outside the field! Some new Galileo out there is being silenced by the great powers of modern cosmology!!!
This book lays out the observational foundations of the Hot Big Bang Theory, and is tacitly directed towards the inner crackpot living inside each and every one of us, and who keeps sending me spam emails :) If you are not a professional cosmologists and want to find out more about this incredible field, I would strongly recommend you order a copy of the book straight away, especially if you are the type of person who would make the effort to read up on more complicated concepts (and possibly are not afraid of equations) if you don’t understand them straight away when reading the book.
A note on the title of my review. It was initially supposed to be Vive la révolution cosmologique (with a clear allusion to the French revolution), then Viva la revolución cosmológica (with a clear allusion to the Cuban revolution). The first published version incorrectly blended the two into Viva la révolution cosmologique (a strange mix of Spanish and French!), the next (and current at the time of writing) post-publication version for unclear reasons went a step further to a more confusing Veve la révolution cosmologique (in case you’re wondering, “Veve” does not mean anything in French). Hopefully third time is the charm, and the next and definitive post-publication version should either stick completely to Spanish or French (I think Spanish will be the definitive version). [post-publication edit: a few authors after writing this, Nature Astronomy in fact fixed the title! The current (and hopefully definitive) title is now the 100% Spanish Viva la revolución cosmológica]
I won’t spoil any more of my review, so read it if you want to find out more about this book! My review is publicly available at this link on the Nature Astronomy website, however it is behind a paywall, so if you can’t access it the following shareable link should do the job. Enjoy, share, and let me know what you think about the book and/or my review once you get the chance to read both (drop me a comment or send me an email to sunny.vagnozzi@ast.cam.ac.uk - unless you’re a bot of course)!