Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins - Hardcover

by Niayesh Afshordi (Author), Phil Halper (Author)

"Excellent."--Steven Poole, The Wall Street Journal - "Terrific."--Liz Else, New Scientist (Best Popular Science Books of 2025 So Far) - "A brilliant overview of the state of modern cosmology."--Alex O'Connor, alexoconnor.com - "This will expand readers' minds."--Publishers Weekly - One of Smithsonian's Ten Best Science Books of 2025

"An intellectual feast."--Carlo Rovelli - "A must-read."--Sabine Hossenfelder - "Wonderfully broad and open-minded."--Roger Penrose - "Remarkable."--Brian Keating

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 a riveting story of scientific debate.

Incorporating insights from Afshordi's cutting-edge research and Halper's original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory's strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these notions. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community--all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past.

Author Biography

Niayesh Afshordi is professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. He has contributed to Scientific American and was a consultant to PBS's NOVA, and his work has been featured in numerous popular media outlets, such as the covers of Scientific American and Science, as well as in The Guardian and The New York Times. Phil Halper is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a science popularizer. He is the creator of the popular YouTube series Before the Big Bang. His astronomy images have been featured in major media outlets including The Washington Post, the BBC, and The Guardian, and he has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals. He lives in London.