Many of Paul Davies’ books are about cosmology, while others use his skill and understanding of some of the most arcane concepts in science to pose specific questions (Is there a God? Can we travel through time? Are we alone in the universe?)

This book is a round-up of the current understanding about the physical universe.

Davies gives us insight into the mystery, magic and menace of multiverses, dark matter and dark energy, black holes and the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. And while you might have heard a lot of those terms before, Davies puts many of them in context, in light of recent discoveries thanks to research at places like the Large Hadron Collider. Davies writes in plain English making the science of such oddities as accessible as they can possibly be. A lot of the concepts he raises run so counter to our natural viewpoint of the world that you might have a hard time grasping at least some of it.

Perhaps the most profound message in this book is that we’re prisoners trapped on a stable planet where time and space feel constant. Trying to understand a notion where time runs at a different rate in fields of higher gravity or where space itself is compressed so that millions of tons of matter can be contained in a needlepoint is beyond our comprehension no matter how much sense it all makes mathematically.

You’ll learn whether the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, whether it has a centre, why matter is supposedly made of energy strings and why space is actually curved, and you’ll come away unsettled but much smarter than you went in.

Reviewed by Drew Turney