Origins – Our place in Hubble’s Universe – John Gribbin and Simon Goodwin

In words and breathtaking pictures, this book tells the story of the birth of the Universe. Apocalyptic events occurring at distances unimaginably huge are revealed – and they are no less awesome for being clearly explained.

It is seventy years since the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the Universe is expanding. The dramatic implication of this discovery, not fully appreciated for decades, is that since the Universe is getting bigger, not only was it smaller in the the past but, if you go back far enough, it must once have had no size at all. One of the most dazzling achievements of human thought has been the development of an understanding of how the Universe evolved from a superhot, superdense state – the Big Bang – into the state we see today.

Until recently, the observational evidence of these theories was largely in the form of fuzzy images from space, and data analysed by machines. In the 1990s new technology was applied to telescopes both on the ground and in space and the result is here for all to see: pictures of events that previous generations of astronomers could only see in their mind’s eye – and which non-astronomers could not even imagine.

The photographs are unbelievably strange and beautiful and show the birthpangs of creation in the Universe at large.