BEFORE THE BIG BANG, by Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass

"Sternglass offers his own provocative technical answers to the most exciting questions of all. And he interweaves his cosmic panorama with an informative reportage of valuable exchanges with such figures as Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman." — Adolf Grünbaum, Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh

"This warm and engaging book is a personal account of the career and ideas of one serious physicist who has marched lifelong to the beat of a different drummer." — Philip Morrison, Institute Professor of Physics Emeritus, M.I.T.

What is the nature of the universe? How did it begin, and what is its future? To consider these questions is to delve into the riddle of our very existence.

Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass envisions a universe like a system of immense whirlpools, where not only the Earth spins on its axis as it revolves around the Sun, but our Solar System, the Milky Way galaxy of which we are a tiny part, and finally the universe itself all spin, in a sort of grand cosmic dance. His theories address the following issues, among others:

In this updated edition of Before the Big Bang, previously released only as a hardcover, Sternglass conducts a brief tour of modern particle physics and cosmology. He describes how the theories of Kant, Gödel, 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.

Before the Big Bang also explains some of the most intriguing discoveries made by the Hubble Space Telescope, such as why galaxies first appear spherical, and then over the eons expand and eject spiral arms — like those of our own galaxy.

Born in Berlin in 1923, Ernest J. Sternglass emigrated with his family to the U.S. when he was a boy. Scientific director of the the Apollo Lunar Scientific Station program at the Westinghouse Research Laboratory from 1960 to 1967, Dr. Sternglass is the recipient of many honors. Elected a Member of the Astronomical Society and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, he is professor emeritus of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh, where he established the Radiological Physics and Engineering Laboratory. He has done research at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris and Stanford University, and taught at the universities of Cornell, George Washington, Indiana, and Pittsburgh.

Sternglass holds thirteen patents in the areas of electronic imaging systems for nuclear medicine and astronomy. In addition to over one hundred articles and scientific papers on nuclear particle physics and astronomy, Sternglass has published Low-Level Radiation (Ballantine, 1972) and Secret Fallout: Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island (McGraw-Hill, 1981).

Once a member of the innermost circle of scientists promoting the use of nuclear energy, he gradually came to the realization that it was an unmanageable energy source doing irreparable harm to the environment and the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of human beings. He has since devoted many years to working towards the ultimate eradication of nuclear bomb tests and nuclear utilities.

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