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Volume 0: The First Second: A Coat Rack for Knowledge
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 23 2025
Pages: 324
Weight: 1.28
Height: 0.68 Width: 7.44 Depth: 9.69
Language: English
Yes, this book's title reads 'Volume 0', now do yourself a favor and, if you haven't read it, go back to volume one. I know this sounds somewhat counterintuitive, but what you have in front of you is sort of an unexpected add-on to this series. True, all three volumes are fairly independent from one another, and can be read that way, but I just wanted to let you know that the title of this one can be kind of misleading. Let me explain.
Volume one deals with the story of how our world, and everything we see around us was actually put together, one step at a time. In that one we go from the Big Bang, to the formation of the earth, to the emergence of life, and end when our own species bursts into the scene. Volume two deals with what we usually think of as history, i.e. the story of our own kind, because at the end of the day we remain convinced that it is all about us. That was supposed to be the extent of this project, except I couldn't figure out a way to dumb the Big Bang down enough to make it fit into a single chapter, especially because that one is a lot more complicated than most of us tend to believe (no, it is not just a matter of 'back in the beginning everything was compressed into a single point, then that point went 'BOOM!' and boom, we had a universe), so I decided to add a third title to this series to deal with that one... though of course, and because I have the attention span of a gnat, it also includes a number of related (and not quite related) subjects. In fact this thing can be divided into four sections, and the story of the Big Bang is, oh, about a tenth of the length of this particular brick.
In fact part one has very little to do with science at all, as it looks at the creation narratives we have inherited from a dozen cultures or so. Section two can be described as 'From the Bible to the Big Bang', and deals with the history of astronomy, with how our understanding of the cosmos has changed over the centuries. Part three deals with the other side of this story, one we sometimes forget is intimately related to it, and that is the history of the atomic model, because at the end of the day space is not just about space, but also about matter, and the question of how were those atoms actually put together is literally at the heart of the matter, and with that we come to the fourth and final section, which is the one that wraps all these threads together into what is, with a bit of luck, an almost understandable explanation of what happened in the first second in the history of the universe. Okay, so I did carry the story a bit beyond that, and actually had a quick look at the events that led to the birth of the first stars.
Now, a fair warning. I am not a scientist, I am a science fiction writer at heart, and one thing no one expects a science fiction writer to provide is a detailed bibliography. If that is a dealbreaker from your perspective this book (or rather this series) is not for you. In fact you can think of this series as my attempt to revisit everything I was taught (or should have been taught) in high school as I wish my teachers had gone about it, and without splitting knowledge into itty bitty pieces because at the end of the day eating a bun, followed by a leaf of lettuce, two tomato slices, a bit of onion, a slice of cheese, and finally a patty will never be the same as eating a burger. Reality is one, so let's take a bite out of it together.
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