The Restaurant at the Beginning of the Universe

One of the world's leading cosmologists confronts the issue that is overturning our understanding of the cosmos: the inexpicable speeding up of the universe just at the moment when, and at the places where, according to conventional wisdom it should be slowing down. It is the problem presented to physicists and cosmologists: why is the universe speeding up? Where does the energy come from? Why have we failed to perceive it until now? What is the significance of the discovery in 1998 that the universe shows no signs of wanting to collapse back on itself but is expanding ever more vigorously? How might an understanding of time and the Universe fit with the ideas of superstring theory? Andreas Albrecht has written a beautiful, accessible entry to the mysteries of the arrow of time that have fascinated him since he observed the difference between the macroscopic world, in which milk added to coffee makes a white coffee and the microscopic one in which the collision of particles is seemigly unaffected by the change -- and is indeed reversible.
In an argument encompassing entropy and gravity, and ranging from the smallest sysytems to the behaviours of galaxies and the universe itself, Albrecht examines what happened immeditately before and after the Big Bang. the shared moment in the life of the Universe that allows us to appreciate the arrow of time -- and to make a cup of coffee. And he'll look at what's cooking in the cosmic microwaves of the Big Bang, where the quintessence of the universe is perhaps to be found, which might be the source of our free lunch in The Restaurant at the Beginning of the Universe.