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Scientists believe that we would not be here if it were not for three great cataclysms in the early history of Earth and of the universe. This is the first book to explore the deep connection between the catastrophic events that shaped life on Earth: the "Big Bang" that spawned an entire universe; the catastrophic explosion of a supernova, which seeded the solar system with heavy elements; and the crash of a gigantic comet or asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and cleared the way for the evolution of the mammals. In July 1993, the theoretical basis of this third big bang was lent dramatic support by the collision of the comet Shoemaker-Levy with the planet Jupiter. If such a comet had collided with Earth, civilization as we know it might have been destroyed.
In a compelling narrative, Dauber and Muller take us first to the most recent big bang -- the "dinosaur killer" rock from outer space that smashed into our planet, causing a "nuclear winter"-like pall of darkness over the entire Earth which led to the extinction of almost half the animal and plant species on it. Scientist believe this took place sixty-five million years ago. Then we go back another four billion years to the mammoth explosion of a nearby massive star, which spread the heavy elements made inside its thermo-nuclear core into space and our just-forming solar system Finally, we go back twelve billion years to the creation of all that we know –the entire universe -- in the original "Big Bang."
The Three Big Bangs concludes with a survey of the current theories of the origin of the universe, and the promise of those theories for uncovering our own origins as thinking beings in the vast ocean of galaxies.
Philip M. Dauber is a former researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California, where he studied time reversal and antimatter. He received an Oscar nomination for his short feature Spaceborne.
Richard A. Muller recipient of MacArthur "genius" award, is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Nemesis: The Death Star.
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