On April 23, 1992, NASA's $150 million COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite made one of the most monumental scientific breakthroughs of our century: the discovery of the long-sought "ripples in the fabric of space-time," brief fluctuations in microwave radiation still echoing from the first trillionth of a second after the cataclysmic birth of creation. The first book to explore and explain the significance of this dramatic discovery, John Gribbin's In the Beginning uses the results to synthesize a startlingly new understanding of the Universe. His portrait gives us a glimpse of the Universe's first birth pangs, the nature of life and the way evolution works, the geography of the Universe and all it contains, and the way in which the "black hole bounce" enables the Universe to reproduce itself. Along the way we learn why the laws of physics should be as they are and whether human beings have a special place in the living Universe.Drawing on the latest measurements, John Gribbin also goes beyond the Big Bang to address the questions of how and why the Universe came into being, and what its future evolution holds in store. His controversial contention is that the Universe itself can be regarded as a living entity which is not unique, but has evolved through Darwinian selection among a multitude of universes competing for existence in space-time.His analysis unravels the riddle of anthropic cosmology, the vision of the Universe as a product of evolution by natural selection, echoing and extending the Gaia principle that all the living things on earth form an interlocking web which can be regarded as a single living organism. Gribbin also contends that whole galaxies of stars, like our own Milky Way system, can be seen to possess properties usually associated with living systems and to show signs of evolution. Read Less