Looking at the personalities behind scientific advances.

-- Susan P. Williams

ENDLESS UNIVERSE Beyond the Big BangBy Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok Doubleday. 284 pp. $24.95

Scientists who study the cosmos generally agree that it began with the Big Bang -- an incomprehensibly powerful moment roughly 14 billion years ago when matter, energy and space sprang from an unknowable "singularity." But what, if anything, preceded that moment? The reigning theory is that time itself began with the Big Bang.

Princeton University astrophysicist Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University mathematical physicist Neil Turok disagree, proposing a quite complicated and thought-provoking alternative: Ours is not the only universe, and a potentially infinite number of others have been created through infinite time. Using some of the insights of string theory and quantum physics, they describe a scenario where Big Bangs occur routinely (if at intervals of billions of years) when as yet unidentified and unseen dimensions collide.

While the book was written for a general audience, it is hardly easy reading. Nonetheless, for those intrigued by how two respected physicists came to their revolutionary views, it is worth the effort.

-- Marc Kaufman

THE IMMORTALISTS Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live ForeverBy David M. Friedman HarperCollins. 338 pp. $26.95

Charles Lindbergh was just 25 years old when, in 1927, he became the first person to fly from New York to Paris. But the rest of Lindbergh's life was dominated by an even loftier ambition: a quest for not just cultural but also biological immortality.

David M. Friedman contends that Lindbergh's genius for engine repair inspired in him an intensely mechanical view of the body and a belief that people could live almost indefinitely if old parts could be swapped out for newer ones.