Roberto Trotta's new book,
The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is (Basic Books, 2014) uses only the thousand (or ten-hundred) most common words in the English language to describe our current understanding and the most compelling outstanding mysteries in astrophysics and particle physics. A senior lecturer in astrophysics at Imperial College London, and an accomplished science communicator and scientific consultant, Trotta finds creative, and often surprisingly effective, ways to introduce concepts like the Big Bang, dark matter, supersymmetry, and the multiverse. What began as a challenge to describe his job as an astrophysicist using the
Up-Goer Five text editor(inspired by the web comic,
xkcd) has become a delightful exploration of the universe (the All-There-Is) that is completely free from technical jargon. Anyone interested in cosmology--from beginners to experts--will find in this book a fresh and illuminating perspective on the present state of this dynamic field and the very human endeavor to understand it.