Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor

I finished reading Losing the Nobel Prize the weekend after an exciting week of Nobel announcements. In it, cosmologist Brian Keating tells the story of how scientists since Galileo have been trying to see back to the birth of the universe. He is one of those scientists, and his work on the BICEP2 telescope, which searches for signals from the early expansion of the universe, brought him close to winning a Nobel prize. But it wasn’t to be.