The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack *****

The End of Everything

The stuff of planet Earth constitutes 5% of the universe. The rest is dark energy and dark matter. If physics has left you behind, Katie (despite what the records might say, the fire was not my fault) Mack will catch you up with her readable and enjoyable book, The End of Everything. For example, “The 2D surface is a saddle shape (or, if you don’t have a saddle handy, you can use a Pringles chip),” or “If we need weirdness in physics, we can always rely on the quantum realm to serve us up something good.” Her physics is more fun than you remember.

Some memorable quotes:

“It means I have to learn a lot about everything, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun.”

“The fundamental incompatibility of our theories of the very massive and the very small is one of the things that hints at the direction we should go in creating new, more complete theories. But it is also rather inconvenient when we’re trying to explain the very early universe.”

“If you zoom in to a small enough scale, do space and time act like discrete particles, or perhaps waves that interfere with each other? Are there wormholes? Are there dragons??? We have no idea.”

“And, to be clear, it’s not that we necessarily can explain everything from the Planck Time on, but that we currently definitely cannot explain anything before it.”

“I have a moral objection to the word quadrillion.”

As a bonus, Dr. Katie Mack (BS Caltech, PhD Princeton) mentions several notable female and POC physicists and astronomers, including: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Freya Blekman, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Ruth Gregory, Anna Ijjas, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Hiranya Peiris, and Vera Rubin. Surprisingly, she omits Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.

The book ends with a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “But that means the whole point is that you understand it, and then you enjoy it, and then… ‘so long and thanks for all the fish.’ Cool.”

Check out https://amazon.com/shop/influencer-20171115075 for Omega Cats Press books and book recommendations.