Before the Big Bang

the long version

In Before the Big Bang, Sternglass conducts a brief tour of modern particle physics and cosmology. He describes how the theories of Kant, Godel, Einstein and others led to the idea of an expanding but ultimately stable, rotating universe. And he recounts his firsthand exchanges with scientific greats such as Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman. Drawing on decades of experimentation and theorizing, Sternglass discusses his idea for the nature of the "primeval atom," and the fundamental entities in the universe: the electron and its oppositely charged "twin," the positron. From these two particles, everything else evolved. The universe began with a single such pair, rotating close to the speed of light - containing the entire mass of the cosmos in a volume less than a trillionth of an inch in diameter, long before the explosive formation of ordinary matter in the Big Bang.