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An ambitious, young physicist is running an experiment on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) using streams of elliptic uranium. At first everything is fine but then the readings seem to slow down. Suddenly there is a massive explosion. Amidst some of the wreckage is a reflective sphere about the size of a bowling ball. The physicist knows this has something to do with the explosion and takes the sphere for observation. Unfortunately she is a little too secretive and charges of theft and impropriety are raised.
The sphere is an enigma. It feels solid but doesn't seem to be made of anything. It has no spectrum. Light can penetrate is slightly. It emits photons as if it were at four-thousand degrees. It seems to have a tidal effect near the surface. What is this object? The physicist teams up with a theorist to try and solve the mystery. But as the mystery becomes clear bit by bit, the political and scientific climates intensify. Finally, a theory is arrived at that seems to take into account all of the facts. The object is a pocket universe with an internal time that is accelerating.
Soon the sphere becomes transparent and the birth of galaxies can be witnessed. As time speeds up in the sphere, now called a Cosm, it becomes more and more important to continue observations. But as the experiment demands closer inspection and more time, the charges against the physicist also demand more time. Although the physicist warns against it, the Brookhaven Lab repeats the experiment and creates a much larger Cosm. Unfortunately this one is too big to move and is obstructing repairs to the RHIC. The story's threads all build and collide in an ending that brings about a number of interesting questions about the nature of our own universe.
COSM is a very good novel that Gregory Benford first had the idea for in the late 1980s. A number of theories, studies, and publications are mentioned in this novel and they are all real. Even if you are not a promising particle physicist the story is very easy to follow. The characters all seem to act consistently and I found no obvious flaws that detracted from the novel. If you like hard science that is located right on the edge of current research then I would strongly recommend COSM.
