Something goes wrong, damaging her lab equipment, and an odd reflective sphere is formed in the accelerator after an explosion. Cosm is an interesting story about a professor, Alicia, from UCI (Benford is a professor at University of California, Irvine) who is conducting particle physics experiments with uranium at Brookhaven. Gregory Benford has written quite a bit of good hard science fiction over the years, and I've collected a number of his books. It plays into my wheelhouse as a science nerd and is RECOMMENDED for anyone who loves this stuff! For others: your mileage may vary. The book is a real page-turner and even has the occasional graph (which should not turn you off) as this is the hardest of hard SF. After a lot of measurement and speculation with a theoretical physicist Max Jalon, they arrive at the astonishing deduction that they have a pinched-off piece of a daughter Universe - one where time runs millions of times faster than our own, and which stellar and universe evolution may be observed. When an experiment colliding uranium atoms in the RHIC supercollider produces a strange metallic-looking sphere about a foot across after an explosion in the lines, she suspects it is important and smuggles it back to UC-Irvine from Brookhaven. Alicia Butterworth is a black physicist struggling with being at the same time a poster girl for minority science and impostor syndrome. Gregory Benford does what he does best in this fine novel - show real scientists doing real science against a background of mind-boggling cutting-edge concepts. While I enjoy the field, I wanted some read-fast-don't-think book, and that's the reason I didn't enjoy it that much.

It was maybe a little too detailed in physics. I think it was a good idea to set the future not so far away.īut. This fact is noted in details, but not that much. The discoverer, a physicist from UCI, lives through university stuff, bureaucracy and the perks of being a black woman in the field.Īlthough this book was published in 1998, the author says he finished writing it in 1997, setting the novel in 2005. It was interesting to see science fiction narrated from another point of view, making it more believable. It narrates the discovery of a weird object in an experiment, and how the discoverer tries to find out what on earth is it and how it works. I did some research and apparently this book is not among the bests of the author, and partially I can understand why. Considering I spent the whole day reading to finish this book, this review is probably far from being objective.

Cosmo gregory benford