MISSING SPACES

Paul Davies. What's Eating the Universe, and Other Cosmic Questions. Penguin, 2022.

What's Eating the Universe? is a scientific detective story explaining how age-old cosmic puzzles have recently been solved. It is a thought-provoking book by Paul Davies that explores some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. Davies, a renowned physicist and writer, takes readers on a journey through the history of cosmology, from the ancient Greeks to the present day. 

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HEAVEN'S TOUCH

James B Kaler. Heaven's Touch. From Killer Stars to the Seeds of Life, How We Are Connected to the Universe. Princeton Press. 2022 [Paperback]

This is a fascinating and informative book that explores the many ways in which the universe affects our planet and our lives. Kaler, an astronomer and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, writes in a clear and engaging style, and he does an excellent job of explaining complex scientific concepts in a way that is accessible to the lay reader.

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SOMETHING AND NOTHING

Richard Grossinger. Bottoming Out The Universe; Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. Park Street Press, 2020.

The sub-title of this book is a helpful guide to its intention - why there is something rather than nothing? A question you may never have asked yourself before. But, one that, it turns out, is rather important. This is posed here in reference to the universe, and, most particularly, to the nature of consciousness interacting with it. 

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WATCH THE SKIES

Jonathan Powell. Rare Astronomical Sights and Sounds. Springer Nature, 2018

“Our ancestors lived and died by observations and rituals created around annual events in the sky.” “To acknowledge the sky and its perceived power, many sacrifices were made, all of which were observed with great timing and accuracy.” Thus begins our journey from the past to the present and on into the future. 

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PYRAMID SCHEME

Chandra Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., and Robert Bauval. Cosmic Womb; The Seeding of the Planet Earth. Bear & Company, 2017.

This book is comprised of some quite different sections. The first part, ‘Origins of Life in the Cosmos’, by Wickramasinghe, is a renewed statement of the thesis that he put forwards many years ago along with the late Fred Hoyle, that life did not originate on earth, but somewhere in outer space, being perhaps brought here by comets crashing. He presents some subsequent discoveries that tend to support this hypothesis.

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... ME NEITHER

Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe. John Murray. 2017.

You might think, judging by some of the rhetoric, that scientists have everything sewn up and are perhaps near the magical formulae that will provide the theory of everything. 
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COSMIC QUESTIONS

Sean Carroll. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself. One World, 2016.

You can’t say that cosmologist Sean Carroll isn’t ambitious, at least in the subtitle. However this book really does not go into the origin of the universe, still less the multiverse, but does discuss the core principles of modern physics, the possible origins of life and the hard problem of consciousness.
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SPACE: THERE'S A LOT OF IT ABOUT

Richard Gott. The Cosmic Web - Mysterious Architecture of the Universe. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Space: there's a lot of it about. It's all around us, and even inside us. It seems to go on forever, absolutely infinite. But what exactly is it? We naturally tend to think of Space as nothing, emptiness, void or vacuum. 

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ON THE LOOKOUT

John Asher Johnson. How Do You Find an Exoplanet? Princeton University Press, 2016.

The author was asked to write this book because of the large number of students who want to study exoplanetary science for the same reasons that exoplanets are so popular among the general public, because their interest has been aroused by science fiction and by the possibility of "answering some of humankind's most ancient questions about our place in the universe".
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TO INFINITY AND BEYOND?

Giovanni F. Bignami. The Mystery of the Seven Spheres: How Homo Sapiens Will Conquer Space. Springer, 2015.

Astronomer Giovanni Bignami has obviously written this book with the intention of providing information for young people who might be interested in pursuing a scientific career. He introduces his account of the progress of astronomy and space exploration, manned and unmanned, by telling his readers, in considerable detail, how he was influenced by the works of Jules Verne.
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TIME OUT

Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin. The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

If there are a number of propositions that the majority of physicists would hold, these would include: there are immutable scientific laws, true for all space and time.

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GOD'S PLANET

Owen Gingerich. God's Planet. Harvard University Press, 2014

This book, consisting of three lectures delivered to the American Scientific Affiliation, "a fellowship of Christians in the sciences founded in 1941", is devoted to discussing the tensions between science and religion.
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THE KNOWN UNKNOWNS

Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Simon Mitton, Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe, Princeton University Press, 2013.

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Katherine Freese, The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter, Princeton University Press, 2014

It’s ironic that one of the achievements of which modern science is most proud is discovering that it doesn’t know what the vast majority of the universe is made of.

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QUANTUM QUESTS

Max Tegmark. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Utimate Nature of Reality. Allen Lane, 2014.

Back in his native Sweden, the then high school student Max Tegmark came within a whisker of being smashed to bits by a 40 ton lorry at a crossroads. This experience, quoted at the beginning of this book, is perhaps the nucleus around which this book is constructed, the inspiration for his visions of grand multiverses and their implications for matters of life and death. He presents these ideas interwoven with aspects of autobiography in the current work.
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ABOUT TIME

Lee Smolin. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Allen Lane, 2013.

Two ideas have had wide currency within physics; one is that at that most basic physical processes are time invariant, that is to say that we could not tell whether they were going backwards and forwards in time. 

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OVER THE EDGE

Dorion Sagan. Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches From the Edge of Science. University of Minnesota, 2013.

In this collection of essays, Dorion Sagan, the son of the astronomer Carl Sagan and the biologist Lynn Margulis, covers a range of topics around the boundaries of science and philosophy. Here he vigorously defends the Gaia hypothesis, and presents the argument that life not only modulates the atmosphere but has also affected the structure of the planet itself, including the development of plate tectonics.
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BIG QUESTIONS ABOUT NOTHING

John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn (editors). The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All? Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

The editors of this book have selected extracts from the works of philosophers, physicists and theologians who have tried to consider the question posed in the title. These extracts are presented and discussed under five main headings, so I think it might be helpful to prospective readers of this book to give brief summaries of some of them.

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RELATIVELY ROMANTIC

Katy Price. Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe. University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Despite its American publisher this is a very British study of the impact of Einstein on popular culture, in which Katy Price looks at the impact of “relativity” in various media from newspapers to high art. Einstein and relativity were brought to Britain largely thanks to the work of Arthur Eddington, the Quaker astronomer whose observations on the island of Principe were held to have confirmed the General Theory of Relativity.

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SCIENCE AND BELIEF

Rupert Sheldrake. The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry. Coronet, 2013.

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Lawrence M Krauss. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. With an afterword by Richard Dawkins. Simon and Schuster, 2012.

These books are excellent examples of how science can become caught up in culture wars. Even though he was trained as a naturalist, Rupert Sheldrake does not really like modern science at all. This is because he sees it as materialistic and atheistic. Lawrence Krauss represents just that sort of atheistic science that Sheldrake deplores.
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SEEING STARDUST

Jacob Berkowitz. The Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars, Prometheus Books, 2012.

Until recently astronomy and biology were two entirely separate subjects, but there is now an increasing tendency to connect the study of the evolution of stars and planets to the study of the evolution of living organisms. To attempt to trace the processes which eventually led to the origin of life, it was first necessary to devise a sound theory to account for the origin of the elements.
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