Well a great primer on all science is Bill Brysons “a short history of nearly everything”. Though not exclusively a cosmology book it is an excellent place to begin.

I personally like Brian Greens “The Fabric of the Cosmos” for an up-to-date discussion of cosmology from Newton through strings.

Yes, I’ve read Bryson’s book, and it is an excellent overview of science.

I’ve heard of Green’s book. I guess I’ll need to add it to my reading list.

Paul Davies is interviewed last week on Science Friday, shedding some very interesting light on some of this…maybe a good guest for POI? Though I am afraid some of his hypothesis may cause questions of cause and effect—- before and after to seem even more incoherent.

I have to say I think Davies sounded like an atheist mystic, desparately striving to make humans the center of the universe without admitting that only belief in the supernatural could do that. His vague quantum mechanics mumbo jumbo is hardly evidence for the a priori assumption that consciousness must be integral, rather than incidental, to the universe. I’m not sur eI have an opinion on the multiverse idea, but I certainly am not impressed with Davies’ ideas, and I was disappointed that he got a pretty free ride from Sci Fri in terms of intellectual or scientific rigor.

there is nothing fundamentally wrong with assuming that the big bang popped up in different places, but it then leads to the question of what that would resolve? basic physical law says that if something is moving, like our universe for example, it had to initially start moving and it had to initially start somewhere. so, that rises the question of what that beginning actually is… it seems that people have a hard time believing in the big bang, or some sort of actual start of the universe because we do not yet know exactly how it started but i strongly feel that it was due to energy fluctuations in a perfectly symmetrical energy field. current theories floating around now suggest that universes pop in and out of existence all of the time, essentially an infinite number of universes. science does not claim to know the whole truth about the origins, and we accept the fact that we don’t understand everything fully, and thats where we differ from the religious viewpoints….the unknown is what keeps us going, keeps us asking questions while the unknown for a religious person is scary and therefore brings a god into the equation to fill the gap.

source: three years of physics and math research