THE UNIVERSE AT MIDNIGHT: Observations Illuminating the Cosmos.(Review)(Brief Article)

KEN CROSWELL. Free Press, $27 (352p) ISBN 0-684-85931-9

The battles to ascertain the values of three little "constants," whose importance far surpasses their size, form the center of this first-rate survey of cosmology's development over the last 100 years. They are the Hubble constant, or the universe's present expansion rate; the universe's matter density, or omega; and lambda, the cosmological constant, which counteracts gravity and pushes the universe apart. Croswell (Alchemy of the Heavens; Planet Quest) dishes surprisingly engrossing intergalactic dirt on the cutthroat competition among cosmologists, few of whom will be familiar to most readers. Some readers, …