The Book of Universes

Nov 16, 2024 9:54 AM

Author:John D. Barrow

This is a book about universes. It tells a story that revolves around a single extraordinary fact: that Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity describes a series of entire universes. Not many solutions to Einstein's tantalising universe equations have ever been found, but those that have are all remarkable. Some describe universes that expand in size, while others contract. Some rotate like a top, while others are chaotically unpredictable. Some are perfectly smooth, while others are lumpy. Some permit time travel into the past. Only a few allow life to evolve within them; the rest, if they exist, remain unknown and unknowable to conscious minds.

Here, in The Book of Universes, we are confronted with the most fantastic and far-reaching speculations within the entire realm of science.

Reviews

There can be few better guides to the bewildering array of potential universes, and none so readable or entertaining

—— Independent

Engrossing... He has a fluent and engaging style of writing and a good eye for an unusual quotation, and as a popularising historian of science, he is second to none

—— Sunday Times

A stunning tour of potential universes, introducing us to the brilliant physicists and mathematicians who first revealed these startling possibilities... [and] the latest insights that physics and astronomy have to offer about our own universe

—— Guardian

Gould strives to outline a more peaceful, mutually supportive view of the realtionship between the sciences and the humanities

—— Nature

One of the best essayists in the business. He uses his wide background knowledge...as a bridge to entice non-scientists into sharing the excitement of scientific discovery and the curious, convoluted path of new ideas through history

—— Scotsman

A fitting tribute to his career, as it combines, in both style and substance, the different themes of his life's work. Blending genuine literary talents with impeccable scientific credentials, Gould crafts an elegant entreaty for scientists and scholars to spend less time complaining about each other and more time combining their considerable resources. We need both the fox and the hedgehog in any intellectual menagerie - the persistent pluralist

—— Alan C. Hutchinson , Globe and Mail

A fresh, strange, and wonderful new voice in nature writing

—— Michael Pollan

A lovely little book. After all we've done to them it's great to see the animals getting their own back

—— Tony Fitzjohn, author of Born Wild

I wolfed it down

—— Will Self on The Red Hourglass

First-rate, unsentimental writing about nature and about the ways that human beings try to cope with the most terrible cruelties that nature offers up

—— The New York Times

Elegant and wryly funny

—— Esquire

The most polymathic science writer of our time

—— Peter Forbes , Independent, Books of the Year

An engaging and lively account of an endlessly curious man

—— Independent

A fascinating window into the complex emergent urban future. This book is an extremely sophisticated, often devastatingly witty and ironic, interpretation of what is possible over the next two decades

—— Saskia Sassen (author of TERRITORY, AUTHORITY, RIGHTS)

Throw out your old atlas. The new version is here

—— Walter Kirn (author of UP IN THE AIR)

Kasarda ... and Lindsay convincingly put the airport at the centre of modern urban life

—— Economist

Highly recommended

—— Library Journal

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