Sky & Telescope - October 2021 - 67

BOOK REVIEW by M. Nicole Nazzaro
Goodbye to All That
THE END OF EVERYTHING (ASTROPHYSICALLY SPEAKING)
Katie Mack
Scribner, 2020
240 pages, ISBN 9781982103545
$26, hardcover
IF THE UNIVERSE IS GOING TO END,
you may as well have fun before it all
goes down the tubes. Or gets sucked
into a vacuum, burned up by a Heat
Death, or pulled back from expansion
to contraction like a macrocosm-size
rubber band. The good news, according
to Katie Mack, is that we probably have
billions of years before any one of those
doomsday scenarios comes to pass.
Well, maybe. It's astrophysics, so it's
complicated.
The End of Everything (Astrophysically
Speaking), Mack's sparkling popular-science-book
debut, delivers on its promise
to explain the tremendously difficult
subject of cosmology to an audience
that probably would rather not do all
the math. Mack, an assistant professor
of physics at North Carolina State University,
deftly employs clever humor and
first-rate explanatory science journalism
to bring some of the most abstract
astrophysics concepts to life.
It's cheery Bill Bryson hanging
with your scowling, pessimistic
great-aunt who's convinced it's
all going downhill.
It's all here: What differentiates
special from general relativity. What
the term " spacetime " really means.
Why quantum mechanics breaks the
Standard Model of particle physics. The
implications of dark matter and dark
energy for the eventual destruction of
the universe, and the five leading theories
of how that destruction is likely to
happen. You may have
to put the book down
while your head stops
spinning. As Mack puts
it, " This is not easy to
picture. Infinities are
complicated that way. "
One reason Mack
and her fellow theoreticians
can delve into the
lifetime of the cosmos
is that the Big Bang
left fingerprints. The
discovery of the cosmic
microwave background
suggested that the universe
emerged from a moment of almost
unimaginable heat and density before
the traditional rules of physics could
apply (S&T: July 2015, p. 28). Only in
recent decades have we begun to build
the instruments and the knowledge to
fathom what will happen to the universe
to which the Big Bang gave birth.
The bigger our telescopes get, the
further back we can look, perhaps even
to sense clues to our universe's eventual
fate. And with theoretical physicists
involved, it all gets a little nuts, because
physics at an unimaginably large scale
doesn't exactly obey a set of rules that
we fully comprehend yet.
Mack is equal parts irreverent and
informed, sly and yet sure of one thing:
All that we are and all that we have
ever been will someday be no more. It's
cheery Bill Bryson hanging with your
scowling, pessimistic great-aunt who's
convinced it's all going downhill - with
a gaggle of Nobel Prize winners making
the occasional cameo.
This is a book for everyone fascinated
by the questions that arise when we
look at the sky and consider our place in
the universe. If it's all going to end - if
all life and other matter will someday
be sucked into a true
vacuum or vanish as
the universe expands
so much as to become a
cold, dark cave of nothingness
- what does
that mean for the few
decades most of us will
have on this tiny rock
orbiting an average star
in a nondescript part of
the Milky Way? Mack
makes space for the
most eschatological of
conversations. She gives
her readers room to consider
what a life well lived truly means,
how we make sense of what we can see,
and what we do not yet grasp when we
contemplate the vastness before us.
Mack's book has an even broader
mandate. Our most recent history
as a species teaches us the extreme
importance of ordinary people understanding
the foundations of scientific
research. It bears noting that this book
was partially funded with a grant from
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Public
Understanding of Science program.
Altogether, The End of Everything
presents astrophysics with an attitude,
but the crackup one-liners and popculture
references Mack employs to get
her point across are really just window
dressing. Fundamentally, this is a deeply
researched gem of a book, a joy to read
even when you know the end is nigh (or
might be, anyway). And the fact that
there's only a slim chance the universe
could terminate without warning at any
moment gives us a bit of comfort that
we'll at least make it to the book's end.
¢ Journalist NICOLE NAZZARO wrote a
review of The Last Stargazers in the April
2021 issue.
sk yand tele scope .o r g * OCTOBER 2021 67
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Sky & Telescope - October 2021

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