The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST, OBSERVER, NEW SCIENTIST, BBC FOCUS, INDEPENDENT AND WASHINGTON POST

‘A rollicking tour of the wildest physics. . . Like an animated discussion with your favourite quirky and brilliant professor’ Leah Crane, New Scientist

‘Weird science, explained beautifully’ – John Scalzi

We know the universe had a beginning. But what happens at the end of the story?

With lively wit and wry humour, astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us on a mind-bending tour through each of the cosmos’ possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, Vacuum Decay, the Big Rip and the Bounce. Guiding us through major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory and much more, she describes how small tweaks to our incomplete understanding of reality can result in starkly different futures. Our universe could collapse in upon itself, or rip itself apart, or even – in the next five minutes – succumb to an inescapable expanding bubble of doom.

This captivating story of cosmic escapism examines a mesmerizing yet unfamiliar physics landscape while sharing the excitement a leading astrophysicist feels when thinking about the universe and our place in it. Amid stellar explosions and bouncing universes, Mack shows that even though we puny humans have no chance of changing how it all ends, we can at least begin to understand it.

The End of Everything is a wildly fun, surprisingly upbeat ride to the farthest reaches of all that we know.

From the Publisher

Three ways the universe might end

What goes up must come down! The incredibly rapid expansion of the Universe that began just after the Big Bang would, it was once supposed, eventually end. What would happen then? At first, not much – the galaxies that are speeding away from each other, would gradually slow, stop, and reverse course. In time, however, their backward trajectory would gain greater and greater energy, until, finally, all matter and energy would be incinerated in the inferno of the collapsing Universe.

What would happen if the Universe continued to expand forever? Well, the space between galaxies would become unimaginably large – leaving each one to float alone. Over billions of years, their stars would burn out. After another long pause, black holes would eventually evaporate, followed by the falling apart of matter, and then, finally, energy itself would fade and disappear. Unimaginable cold, unimaginable dark.

After experiments using the Large Hadron Collider proved the existence of the Higgs Boson, scientists could finally explain how particles possessed mass. But this discovery led them to another potential apocalypse scenario – one that could take place in the next five minutes! They learnt that the process that gave particles their mass was not settled: there was a very small chance that it could, at any moment, change. If this happens, an expanding bubble of a totally different universe would eventually consume the universe – disintegrating everything in its path.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 1 July 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0141989580
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141989587
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 170 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 1.4 x 19.8 cm