By Katie Mack

In general, I don’t write about science books here. I read them, but because I work as a scientist, my reactions to them tend to be analytical and not emotional: am I persuaded by this argument? Do I find the statistics sound? Does the evidence agree with my understanding of the field? I evaluate them informationally, not experientially, and because this isn’t a science blog, I tend to avoid writing about them.

However, the further afield I go from my own field (biology), the more of a tourist I become. By the time I get to physics, I am completely without expertise of any kind – I am reading purely for enjoyment, to learn something new, to goggle stupidly at the complexity of the world.

Which means that my reactions to ‘The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)’ are entirely emotional. I have absolutely no ability to assess this information scientifically – it could be a pack of lies, for all I know. I’m just here for the ride.

Writing about science is really tricky. In science, accuracy is often a matter of considerable complexity, but complexity is antithetical to narrative. Therefore, works of popular science often reduce that complexity, simplifying for the sake of clarity. While this is frustrating for people who work in those fields, for whom the complexities are the point, it is required to make yourself understood to laypeople.

In the case of physics, this simplification usually means avoiding math. Most of the sort of far-out theoretical work involved in cosmology is all math; translations into common language are necessarily approximations at best. The more far-out the research, the more that this is true. And end-of-universe scenarios, advanced mathematical modeling of the Big Bang and other quantum phenomena, these things are as far-out and mathy as it gets.

Which makes what Katie Mack has done here all the more impressive. Mack is a cosmologist, and ‘The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)’ is her survey of current theories about…the end of the universe. Will the expansion of the universe slow and reverse itself, bringing all matter collapsing back into itself, obliterating existence itself in a backwards Big Bang? Or does the expansion continue, pulling galaxies and solar systems and planets and finally matter itself apart? Or does the universe just dissolve into entropic chaos?

I loved this book. First of all, it’s a fucking great science book. Mack is an excellent science writer: she balances science, hard science, with clarity, and she balances it well. I can’t think of tougher material to translate for a lay-audience than extreme math-based astrophysics, and she nails it. I didn’t understand everything, but I understand a hell of a lot more than I would have if anyone else had tried to explain it to me.

“We already have astronomical all-sky surveys that are capable of measuring the positions and motions of billions of stars within our own galaxy. As the Big Rip approaches, we start to notice that the stars on the edges of the galaxy are not coming around in their expected orbits, but instead drifting away like guests at a party at the end of an evening. Soon after, our night sky begins to darken, as the great Milky Way swath across the sky fades. The galaxy is evaporating.

From this point, the destruction picks up its pace. We begin to find that the orbits of the planets are not what they should be, but are instead slowly spiraling outward. Just months before the end, after we’ve lost the outer planets to the great and growing blackness, the Earth drifts away from the Sun, and the Moon from the Earth. We too enter the darkness, alone.” (p. 113)

I want to highlight in particular Mack’s instinct for when to give context. Most science writers start from first principles, usually in the form of an intro chapter on the basic vocab, processes, or concepts which inform all the subsequent work. This can be really useful, but it’s often counter-productive. If you don’t understand why you’re learning the vocab, it can be hard to remember or understand it. Later, when you encounter the concepts for which you needed that intro, you have to keep going back through pages and reminding yourself of those intro concepts. It’s clunky.

Mack doesn’t do that. She opts to give you context as you go, snagging you with a scary sentence or idea, then pulling back to give you the physics you need to parse it. Her rhythm is pretty perfect: she never front-loads the science too far in advance, and she never lets you go too far into a topic without the science you need to understand it. It’s really well done.

Excellent science writing aside, though, I also loved this book emotionally. It’s strangely refreshing, at this moment in time, to think about the end of the universe. Which is not to say that it is entirely unstressful, contemplating the obliteration not only of the entire world, but also of the physical laws which govern existence itself. It’s a little sobering, if I’m honest, a little bleak.

But it puts everything (and I do mean everything) into perspective: my plans for dinner, my irritating coworker, my next vacation, my relationship, my net worth, my own inevitable death, the inevitable deaths of everyone I love, of my very planet. In the end, I found it relaxing, zooming out that far. It’s hard to sustain local stress when you discover that, ultimately, the universe ends in perfect entropy.

It’s lovely, in a way. It throws your own life into sharp relief: there is no “forever”, not on a cosmic scale. No matter what you create, what you change in this world, what happens to you, what monuments you build, given a long enough timeline, every trace of your existence will vanish into nothing. When time itself has ceased to exist, legacy is a meaningless concept.

I will admit: I read this book on a beach, which probably informed my reaction, but, truthfully, this book left me feeling pleasantly, nihilistically zen: if we’re all just hurtling towards the heat death of the universe (which, thanks to Mack’s lucidity, I am 100% convinced we are), why worry? I see no reason why I should not have a little more fun with my own personal eye-blink of an existence.

There is relief in being able to credibly tell yourself that absolutely nothing matters. And it’s a lot easier to tell yourself that nothing matters when you have some science to back it up. So, my gift to you: nothing matters. I’ve read the book, it’s science, it’s official. Cheer up.