What will the end of everything be like? How will everything end? Will it be the Big Crunch as the Universe collapses back to a reverse Big Bang? Will it be the heat death, or what is better called the high-entropy death? Will it be the Big Rip as the Universe is ripped apart, or vacuum decay? Maybe it will be the Quantum Bubble of Death? Wouldn’t the Quantum Bubble of Death be a cool way to die?
The goal of this blog is to create a list of what I call super facts. Important facts that we know to be true and yet they are surprising, shocking or disputed among non-experts. Super facts are important facts that people get wrong. However, I sometimes create posts that are not super facts but other interesting information, such as this book review and book recommendation.
The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack is a relatively easy book on cosmology. It features scientifically guided speculation on how the Universe will end. As in the previous book I reviewed the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) is a major source for the information. It is amazing what it can tell you. I bought the hardback version of it. I can add that this book and my Amazon review was written in 2020, a good year for talking about the end of the world.
- Hardcover – Publisher : Scribner; Illustrated edition (August 4, 2020), ISBN-10 : 198210354X, ISBN-13 : 978-1982103545, 240 pages, item weight : 2.31 pounds, dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.38 inches, it costs $19.14 on US Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
- Paperback – Publisher : Scribner (May 4, 2021), ISBN-10 : 1982103558, ISBN-13 : 978-1982103552, 256 pages, item weight : 2.31 pounds, dimensions : : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.38 inches, it costs $10.99 on Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
- Kindle – Published : August 04, 2020, ASIN : B07Z41TTNK, 237 pages, it costs $14.89 on US Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
- Audiobook – Publisher : Scribner (August 4, 2020), ASIN : B07Z8B5NZ8, it costs $13.12 on US Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
Amazon’s description of The End of Everything By Katie Mack
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY * THE WASHINGTON POST * THE ECONOMIST * NEW SCIENTIST * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * THE GUARDIAN
From one of the most dynamic rising stars in astrophysics, an “engrossing, elegant” (The New York Times) look at five ways the universe could end, and the mind-blowing lessons each scenario reveals about the most important concepts in cosmology.
We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it expanded from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life as we know it. But what happens to the universe at the end of the story? And what does it mean for us now?
Dr. Katie Mack has been contemplating these questions since she was a young student, when her astronomy professor informed her the universe could end at any moment, in an instant. This revelation set her on the path toward theoretical astrophysics.
Now, with lively wit and humor, she takes us on a mind-bending tour through five of the cosmos’s possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, the Big Rip, Vacuum Decay (the one that could happen at any moment!), and the Bounce. Guiding us through cutting-edge science and major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory, and much more, The End of Everything is a wildly fun, surprisingly upbeat ride to the farthest reaches of all that we know.
This is my five-star review for The End of Everything
The End of the Universe can be a lot of fun
Katie Mack’s timely (it’s 2020 after all) survey of the various ways the Universe might end, based on current physics, was a delightful read. It is an interesting and fun book. We learn about the Big Crunch (the Universe shrinking back), the Heat Death, or rather the high-entropy death, the Big Rip, Vacuum decay, or the “quantum bubble of death” if you want to call it that, and the “bounce”.
To understand where the various ideas regarding the end of the Universe come from, you need to understand some of the physics and the cosmology. We learn something about CMB, or the Cosmic Microwave Background, Big Bang, cosmic inflation, Planck Time, GUTs, Nucleosynthesis, the standard model, de Sitter Space, black holes, electroweak symmetry breaking, the Higgs Boson and the Higgs field, multiverses, and much more.
Perhaps most importantly, we learn about dark matter and dark energy, which are important concepts that have greatly changed cosmology over the last few years. Chapter 2 on the Big Bang reminded me a lot about an old book by Stephen Weinberg, the first 3 minutes. However, Katie Mack puts a modern spin on it and goes much further beyond our Universe. I was intrigued to hear that it might be possible to communicate between different Universes in a multiverse using gravity, or gravity waves.
The book is written for laymen, and I found it to be between Neil De Grasse Tyson / Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking in difficulty level. The book covers a lot of concepts and theories but does so concisely, simply and not in a mathematical way. Not so simply though that it is misleading.
I am an Engineer with an undergrad degree in physics so I may not be the best person to judge whether this is an easy read for laymen, but I believe it is. I am very interested in these kinds of topics, and I read all popularized books on cosmology, modern physics, the standard model, that I can find. This was one of the most fun books that I’ve ever read.
Would you like to travel in time into the future to see the end of the Universe?
To see the Super Facts click here
Newstrade
This sounds like an interesting read, Thomas. I just figured that the universe would continue forever. But if it began, I suppose it can end too. That makes our existence even more miraculous. Thanks for sharing the book and your review!
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Thank you so much Diane. I can add that one of the deaths of the Universe, the heat death, is that it continues to expand forever, but all the stars burn out, or get swallowed up by black holes, which eventually evaporate via Hawking radiation and after a quadrillion times quadrallion times quadrallion etc., years the entire universe will have turned into nothing but photons (light particles) and then time will no longer exist. Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose says that at this point it is the beginning of a new Universe and another Big Bang. The big rip, another death from expansion, is that the universe will expand so quickly in the future that space and time will be ripped into shreds. She discusses all kinds of deaths. It’s speculation but it is guided by physics and the structure of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation so it is better than blind guessing.
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So very fascinating!! “… Penrose says that at this point it is the beginning of a new Universe and another Big Bang.” Whoa! I love that!
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I have a book on Roger Penrose’s theory conformal cyclic cosmology called Cycles of Time. However, it is admittedly a bit tough to read it. After the universe has expanded to an extreme size and all that is left is photons time loses its meaning. That’s because for photons time and space do not exist, so infinity is a point, a point in a new universe. It solves the problem with entropy growing between universes. So despite being the opposite of a big crunch, it is still a continuous rebirth of universes through subsequent big bangs that he claim we can detect in the cosmic background microwave radiation. Something like that. But I have to finish the book.
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That would be a tough one for me, Thomas. The End of Everything sounds more manageable. It’s all mind-boggling and fascinating.
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Yes the same here, but Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology brings to mind the opening line of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Wall of Darkness”. It is : “Many and strange are the universes that drift like bubbles in the foam upon the River of Time.”
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Aaah. Time, that’s another interesting topic!
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Yes I agree
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“Not with a bang but a whimper”–who knows! Amazing almost 3,000 reviews of a scientific book! Well chosen, Thomas.
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Thank you Jacqui. That is a good way of describing a few of the possible deaths. I can add that my review (66 helpful) is one of the top reviews.
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This sounds like a fascinating book. It’s been a while since I’ve caught up on theories of how the universe might end and I know there are a lot of new thoughts since my graduate school days.
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It is certainly a fascinating topic and a good book. Katie Mack is a good popularizer just like Neil de Grasse Tyson and Michio Kaku.
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Lulu: “Our Dada says the hard rock minstrels Evanescence have a song where they talk about the end of everything, but I feel like it’s not science-based like this is …”
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I think I’ve heard that song. There are a few end of things songs, so I am not sure. You are right Lulu, the song is probably not based on the latest physics. You are certainly a smart dog.
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I would absolutely travel into the future to see the end of the universe. In fact I would probably accept an invitation to time travel anywhere if it seemed likely to be interesting, especially if the invitation came from somebody in a blue police box.
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Ha ha, yes I agree with you. Same here.
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Fascinating, Thomas. Thank you for sharing your review and spotlighting Mack’s book. I’m intrigued and will check it out.
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Thank you so much Gwen. It was a fun read.
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Dear Thomas
Thanks for your review. I’ll ask my publisher to send me this book.
We are amazed by all the reviews of this book on the net.
All the best
The Fab Four of Cley
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
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Thank you so much Klaus. If I am not mistaken you have a publishing business. I should say that this book is not self published. It has already been published the traditional way.
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No, dear Thomas, I have been an author and editor and invested my royalties in high-street bookshops. I got a linguistics and Nordic literature degree and taught at McGill University/Montreal. I was always active in the book business for the last 50 years.
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Oh I see. That is interesting. Thank you Klaus.
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A very interesting subject and review. Interesting you say, wildly funny for such a depressing thought end of the universe, lol. I’m pretty sure we’re all on our way to the end of everything in our current world, so timely. 🙂
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I think you are right. Not to be pessimistic, but considering that human times scales of hundreds or thousands of years is extremely short compared to the billions of years we are talking about for cosmic scales, I think we are a bigger threat to ourselves than the end of the universe. Between climate change, nuclear war, bio-warfare, out of control AI, etc., I think we might have a good chance to kill ourselves in the next one thousand years, and a billion years is a million times longer than a thousand years.
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I agree with every word you said. 🙂 Only I think it could be well before 1000 years.
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A bit pessimistic but that’s what Stephen Hawking said.
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Another good reason to enjoy and appreciate life while we have it!
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Yes you are right. That is a very good point. Thank you Dawn.
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