The Universe: A Biography
By Paul Murdin
Thames & Hudson, 2022

Paul Murdin, Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, takes on the biggest subject imaginable in his new book The Universe: A Biography, attempting to give a walking tour of 13.8 billion years in well under 300 pages. “We are a part of the history of the Universe and our origins lie in its birth,” he writes. “We are in fact alive and we can trace the general steps by which the Big Bang created the environment in which we live.”

For most of the lifespan of the discipline of astronomy, all of the researchers involved in furthering the story of the universe would have been thinking etiologically, of a story in which humanity is the climax. Murdin naturally parts ways with such thinking, since it’s obviously untrue; he points out not only the multitude of variables that hand to land just right in order to produce intelligent life on the skin of one planet in one solar system in an outer arm of one galaxy but also the multitude of variables that will inevitably change the current picture long before the universe has lived its full life span.

It’s amazing how much fact, speculation, and sheer pedagogical spirit he manages to pack into pages that are necessarily extremely busy. All the giants of physics and astronomy are given their time on the stage, and all the larger meanings of their discoveries are teased out patiently and enticingly for the non-specialist reader in a wonderfully donnish register. “Our general conclusion that can be inferred from this particular instance,” goes one such passage, “is that galaxies are still being drawn towards concentrations of other galaxies. In other words, the voids of the cosmic web are growing: space is getting emptier.”

It’s unsurprising that the author of an earlier book called Are We Being Watched? The Search for Life in the Cosmos would be unable to resist a bit of speculation on one salient question about the universe: is life in all that unimaginable expanse confined to this one planet? Our author is considerably aided in such speculation by the huge advances made in finding exoplanets and revealing the fine details of their secrets:

The Alpha Centauri system also contains three planets (a, b, and c) that orbit Proxima in its planetary system. Proxima b is much like the Earth in size and mass, although considerably closer to its parent star than Earth. Proxima is rather a dim star but because Proxima b is relatively close to it, it also has about the same temperature as the Earth. The surface environment of the planet is thus quite Earth-like, making it an interesting target for investigations of astrobiology, the science of life in the Universe. Can life exist there – even alien intelligence? Given the planet’s closeness to us, could we communicate with extraterrestrials? One’s imagination can readily spiral off into optimistic predictions!

The Universe: A Biography furnishes the material for a thousand such flights of the imagination. Readers looking to learn more about the cosmos could hardly find a better starting place.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.