Cycles of Time

An Extraordinary New View of the Universe

By: Roger Penrose

Narrated by: Bruce Mann

Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

From the best-selling author of The Emperor’s New Mind and The Road to Reality, a groundbreaking book that provides new views on three of cosmology’s most profound questions: What, if anything, came before the Big Bang? What is the source of order in our universe? What is its ultimate future?

Current understanding of our universe dictates that all matter will eventually thin out to zero density, with huge black holes finally evaporating away into massless energy. Roger Penrose - one of the most innovative mathematicians of our time - turns around this predominant picture of the universe’s “heat death,” arguing how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating, expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the “Big Bang” of a new one.

Along the way to this remarkable cosmological picture, Penrose sheds new light on basic principles that underlie the behavior of our universe, describing various standard and nonstandard cosmological models, the fundamental role of the cosmic microwave background, and the key status of black holes. Ideal for both the amateur astronomer and the advanced physicist - with plenty of exciting insights for each - Cycles of Time is certain to provoke and challenge.

Intellectually thrilling and accessible, this is another essential guide to the universe from one of our preeminent thinkers.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2011 Roger Penrose (P)2011 Random House

Terrible as an audiobook

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

Someone who already knows about the subject and just wants equations he can't see.

What was most disappointing about Roger Penrose’s story?

There is no story -- at least for the first 30 minutes when I gave up. It's more like a math textbook, and that translates horribly to storytelling, especially for audio, when it requires looking at equations and mentions diagrams we can't see.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Bruce Mann?

I don't know, but this narrator came off as pretentious which didn't help this subject.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Cycles of Time?

These kinds of subjects -- quantum physics, relativity etc. -- can work but you have to tell a story. You can't get into equations and diagrams when you can't see them. For audio, you must tell a compelling story instead of just be a reference book.

Any additional comments?

Four similar books that know how to tell a story are: The Age of Entanglement, Quantum, Parallel Worlds, The Grand Design.