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THE FIVE AGES OF THE UNIVERSE: INSIDE THE PHYSICS OF ETERNITY by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin The Free Press, 1999 251 pages; $25.00
SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END in fire, / Some say in ice," wrote Robert Frost in 1920, as if he could foresee, with uncanny prescience, the two doomsday scenarios envisioned by the cosmology of the 1990s. According to one-what astronomers call the closed universe-gravity will slow the expansion that began with the big bang and eventually turn it around, causing everything to collapse into a final inferno of unimaginable heat and compression: the big crunch. For those who favor ice, there is the open universe, in which the current expansion simply goes on forever. The galaxies disperse, the stars go out, and wintry darkness reigns supreme.
Earlier this century, the evidence favoring one theory or the other was so sparse that the opinions of poets were as reliable as those of scientists. In an ironic play on his name, Frost preferred fire, while his contemporary T.S. Eliot anticipated a world that would end "not with a bang but a whimper." But as the millennium draws to a close, the...