A more detailed review by Bernard Pagel of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) appears in the January 1998 issue of Physics World

Some 30 years ago, the hot big-bang paradigm was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of the microwave background radiation and its precise black-body nature. Since then, cosmology has advanced at a rapid and accelerating pace. It has also developed widening contacts with related sciences, notably particle physics.

The Whole Shebang by Timothy Ferris is enlivened by imaginative chapter titles, literary quotations, personal anecdotes, and interviews with many of the leading protagonists in the field. Without any mathematics in the main text, the author explains difficult concepts with remarkable lucidity and conciseness, while the end-notes and glossary are invaluable mines of information.

There are, however, a few technical inaccuracies in the book. For example, Ferris ascribes the time-dependence of the Hubble “constant” to deceleration, and gives an uncharacteristically inadequate explanation for the Sunyayev-Zeldovich effect. He also suggests that all carbon survives when it acts as a catalyst in the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle of hydrogen-burning in stars, and says that a single photon going through a double slit makes a complete interference pattern.

These criticisms do not, however, seriously detract from the overall picture. This is an outstandingly learned, well written, lively and thought-provoking book – and a great read.