A more detailed review by Charles Lineweaver, a research astronomer at the University of New South Wales, Australia, appears in the August issue of Physics World.
If the big bang eventually becomes a new religion, then it is books like this, written by its founding fathers about the genesis of the idea, that will show that it started out as a science.
If you find the arrogance and flamboyance of many defenders of the big bang annoying, then this book is for you. Alpher and Herman are at their best in their sober, articulate assessment of the big bang. Instead of hyperbolically marketing the big bang (with expressions such as "More proof of the big bang!" or "The face of God" and so on ) these authors offer the reader this prudent Popperian assessment: "The big bang continues to survive the challenges of observational falsification."
The preface is also straightforward: "Our goal is to present a picture of the expanding universe and to delineate from our own unique vantage point the story of the development of the Big Bang model as we have seen and lived it." And that is what Alpher and Herman have written - an insider's first hand account of the genesis of the big-bang model.
Robert Herman died in February 1997, and Ralph Alpher is now 80 years old. This book has been long in the making in a fast-moving field. But it is nevertheless an interesting glimpse of the development of the big-bang model by two researchers who were there - two men who in their youth performed some heroic and pioneering calculations that turned cosmology into physics.