A brief review of the history of space (and our place in it): A new journey through space paints a broad picture

A Brief History of the Universe
Sarah Alam Malik, Simon & Schuster (UK, February 12) William Morrow (US, May 5)

IN 1988 Stephen Hawking published A brief history of timean exploration and explanation of cosmology by a renowned physicist who has become an unlikely and huge bestseller. Shameful Confession: I set about reading the updated edition as a curious teenager studying literature, and I tried. I never finished it.

38 years later, particle physicist Sarah Alam Malik is here to help with her own exploration of cosmology, with a nod to Hawking in her title: A brief history of the universe (and our place in it).

Hawking began with Aristotle’s argument for a geocentric model of the universe in 340 BC. Malik opens his brief history earlier, around the 7th century BC, when the Babylonians track the movements of the sun, moon and stars in “astronomical diaries” written in cuneiform. But soon we come to Aristotle and Ptolemy, and then to the flowering of astronomical knowledge in the Islamic world in the 6th century AD.

Since this is a brief history, on page 47 we went from Galileo Galilei and his discovery of Jupiter’s four moons and Isaac Newton watching his apple fall to Albert Einstein and the general theory of relativity. From there we sing through galaxies and black holes to the eventual heat death of the universe. From macro to micro: “The building blocks of the universe turned out to be no less amazing than the cosmic structures they created,” Malik writes, taking his readers through the discoveries that led to quantum mechanics and the discovery of the subatomic world.

He goes less deeply into the depths of physics than Hawking, paints with a broader brush, and focuses a little more on bringing to life the people he writes about. This ranges from Dmitri Mendeleev, the youngest of a family of more than a dozen children in a small Siberian town, who came up with the periodic table while visiting a cheese factory, to Fritz Zwicky, who hypothesized dark matter in the 1930s but was so uncomfortable that the idea didn’t catch on for four decades.

Writing decades later than Hawking, Malik portrays a more diverse cast of characters. These range from Islamic astronomers of the Middle Ages to women like Vera Rubin who overcame widespread misogyny to do pioneering work on galactic rotation curves.

Not only is it a different tone, but it takes us into developments that Hawking couldn’t include in 1988 – such as the Large Hadron Collider (which Malik worked on) and the Higgs boson. Some in the audience cried during the announcement of her discovery, she writes in one of the book’s many delightful anecdotes.

This is indeed a “brief history of the universe,” but what is hidden in parentheses, “and our place in it,” is just as important. It’s a book about our exploration of space, how we’ve stood on the shoulders of giants to get this far, and what might come next. He is full of wonder—”It remains the wonder of human existence that we can understand worlds far removed from our own”—and humility—”Mankind has written and rewritten the story of the universe many times, and each age has largely believed the story of its time.”

The book was the best way into deep space and quantum – unsurprising, given Malik’s field (dark matter). The chapters on the origin of life, its future and machine intelligence seemed smaller to me.

Much of what Malik tells will be familiar The new scientist readers, but she is a warm, clear writer who covers an awful lot in a small space (my edition is only 223 pages). I think 18-year-old me could have made it through this one – and then I was ready for Hawking.

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