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?
Newstrade