An Intellectual Mind-Twister . . . Going to the Outer Limits of Cosmology

In a book unlike any other, Colin Gillespie, a physicist, sets out to explore the origin of space and time, examining 47 of the major “problems” of physics for clues, which he examines within the format of a highly literate detective story, . . . a new genre of intellectually interactive literature that invites the reader into active participation.

– The Editor, JSPES

A Book About Physics-as-Cosmology

Colin Gillespie’s Time One casts its intellectual net far beyond physics as such. To be sure, it is loaded with discussions of advanced concepts in present-day cosmology. But the book is more than that, and has the aura of a new genre of communication, one that brings together the arts of a novelist, the learning of a literary scholar, and the intricacies of scientific inquiry – all mixed with a spirit of playful gamesmanship, inviting others into a community of thought that is hoped to continue through blogs on the Internet. The result is so unique that it would seem unpardonable not to alert our readers to it and to let such a book pass unnoticed.

– Dwight D. Murphey

The Origin of Space and Time

The book . . . declines to see space and time as always-existing givens, but rather thinks it necessary to provide a theory to explain how even they came into being. Without space and time, Gillespie reasons, there would be no setting for the Big Bang that most physicists today consider the origin of the universe. Gillespie speaks of a “quantum of space” that he calls a “Fleck,” which is postulated to be so small that nothing can be smaller, and that replicates itself like expanding foam (a process he calls “Fizzion”) to create the space we know. Each expansion is done in a “Tock,” and this is the creation of time.

– Dwight D. Murphey

Review by a space physicist

Much to Think About

[Gillespie] has the narrator comment, “We are far past [the tipping point] for passing on a viable economy, a train that left the station some time back.” A little further down the page he approaches the end of the “Farewell to Arms” chapter by wishing that the new understanding of the Beginning would produce “ideas of such potency as might lead to a new economy as inconceivable as cellphones, CPUs, genetic codes and googling were a hundred years ago.” He thinks that coming generations will need such an economic transformation, or at least the prospect that it will come, to have hope, and then in reference to this possibility he ends by nearly echoing the fictional detective: “It needs a lot of work.”

Even if he does not write any more about the origin of the universe, in this book Colin Gillespie has given people interested in physics and cosmology much to think about.

– David Miller