Logical, because if you want to know how something ends, it’s useful to explore how it started. It explores the edges of the known, and dangles its feet over the precipice of where physics is broken.
It is sufficiently cutting-edge that Mack occasionally delves into knowledge that was emerging as the book was being written. Many of the concepts covered in The End of Everything are familiar to me, but both cosmology and particle physics are moving so rapidly that I found it a satisfying overview, with enough detail to explain but not bamboozle. But Mack delves instead into the limits of quantum mechanics, general relativity, dark matter, dark energy and the research designed to produce a Grand Unifying Theory and a Theory of Everything (physicists can get a little grandiose). I work in an experimental world that is predominantly governed by Newtonian physics – and I quite like it there. I am a physicist but in a completely different field from cosmology or particle physics. The author also occasionally gets VERY EXCITED (yes, all in caps) – it’s quite infectious. Mack’s book is informative, occasionally wry, often entertaining and sometimes headache-inducing (in the best way).
Granted, it won’t help you set aside your more immediate concerns about things you can actually do something about, but sometimes it can be useful to take a step back and remember that, across the vast swathe of space and time, you are an entirely insignificant blip. Yes, it is.ĭr Katie Mack is a prominent voice on science Twitter and a theoretical cosmologist, whose book describes the various scenarios for the end of…well, Everything. But against this backdrop, while some of us feel continuously gaslit by the virus deniers, is it really the best time to read a book titled The End of Everything? Well, yes. Fortunately, this is a small population, although one that happens to have a loud voice. Irrationality is apparently on the rise, with anti-maskers claiming that the mesh size of homemade masks allows the free passage of virus particles while simultaneously preventing us from expelling carbon dioxide or inhaling sufficient oxygen. It’s a strange old world at the moment, isn’t it? With a global pandemic hanging over our heads, people are acting strangely.
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