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Podcast: New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
Episode: Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, "Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Description: A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and...