Cosm

By Gregory Benford

First a note about the author. Gregory Benford is a physics professor at UCI, the institution featured in the book Cosm. So when he talks about physics and about being a professor at UCI, he speaks from personal knowledge.

Cosm is about a scientist who accidentally creates a universe during a physics experiment at a particle collider. During the experiment, a small explosion occurs and the scientist, Alicia, discovers a strange shiny ball about the size of a bowling ball in the wreckage. Instinctively she knows that this is something special, and wanting to protect her claim on the object, sneaks it out of the building and back to California, to UCI, to study. In the course of study, an assistant is killed when the object emits a burst of energy.
A lot of the book is concerned with the wrangling between Alicia and the collider lab over who has the best claim to the object. Alicia and her team figure out that the collider experiment somehow created a new universe, smaller than our universe and that the object is a sort of bubble off that universe that lets us peer into it. As they study and measure the ball they realize that the this new universe is running on a time scale much faster that ours so they can watch the growth and evolution as billions of years pass there in a matter of a few weeks here. Eventually, the government gets involved and tries to commandeer the object but Alicia is able to spirit it away and out to the desert.

This book is really Benford's speculation on the formation, growth, decline and eventual death of our own universe presented in the form of a novel. He never explains why the bubble was shiny silver and touchable and then why it suddenly became transparent so the galaxies could be seen with the naked eye. He also advances some theory that intelligence life is responsible for the creation of the universe in a sort of natural selection for universes with intelligent life.
It may sound rather dry, but it was a surprisingly readable and even exciting book as I read what new things Alicia and her team discover about their pocket universe. The conclusion was kind of a let down since it follows the little universe to its (and possibly our) ultimate fate. But, all in all, I enjoyed it.