BOOKS
Cosmology’s Century
PJE Peebles
Princeton University Press £30 • HB
Among astronomy’s many achievements in the 20th century, the prediction and discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) is surely one of the greatest. It not only clinched the case for the Universe’s origin in a ‘Big Bang’ 13.8 billion years ago, but also provided a new means of studying the early cosmos. As a PhD researcher at Princeton in the early 1960s, Jim Peebles was among the team that predicted the CMBR’s existence, while his subsequent career focused on developing ideas about the evolution of cosmic structure and the role of mysterious dark matter, for all of which he was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in
