I'm about a third of the way through this book so far, and I must say, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Hilton has a pretty engaging style of writing, and his little "science fiction" scenario right at the beginning is a lot of fun and covers off what things would look like given the sorts of cosmology pieces that most of us here agree upon.

I don't want to underplay the good parts of his writing, but there are some things that detract from the book so far:

* He makes a few leaps, unsubstantiated by anything other than what "makes sense" to him - for example, I know a few might agree with him on an infinite universe, and I don't rule it out, but personally, I can't "logically" exclude things like curved universes, mirror universe, extrusions, etc.

* He seems to think that the laws of chemistry must have granted to matter somehow, in the active sense, by - as far as I can tell - some sort of intelligence

* He seems to sign on to some form of nontheistic intelligent design; I can't tell whether it's because he figures the rules of chemistry and the like were 'given', or that he's going from intelligent design to infer that the rules were 'given'

* He seems to make some equivocation errors in equating 'evolution' in a Big Bang sense with a biological sense

...but worst of all...

* He quotes Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box as a source, approvingly

The last is particularly bad in light of the fact that every major example Behe put forth in that book has been torn down in the intervening years and has shown a remarkable ability to claim things for intelligent design and an equal ability to get shot down for his misunderstandings by practitioners in the field (most recently on the evolution of glucocortoid receptor here)

That Hilton uses the "impossibility" of evolving certain things in building up his thesis is hard to pardon, though people on the physics side of things do get biology wrong quite a bit (Penrose on the brain, Hawking on the complexity of DNA, etc.).

After a very weird chapter 5, it's gone back to bubbly and interesting again.

I'll provide further detail as I read on, but he'll have to work hard to get out of my current 3 star-out-of-5 judgment at the moment :)

Further thought: I wonder if there's a common "what ELSE could science be wrong about?" thread that occasionally hits people in the wrong way out on the "edge". For example, I have a quote from an Arp interview:

ARP: Yeah, I think so. I think that these things are impinging on the Earth and planets and then you have to reconsider the Expanding Earth Theory, which is another disreputable theory that's been hammered on for a long time.

...although, truth be told, I can't quite tell how approving he is.