This is the book for those that are sufficiently familiar with the general ideas of physics and cosmology, at the popular level, and don't want to wade through the obligatory two hundred or so pages of history, and cut straight to a concise presentation of the latest ideas and developments. If you know your Big Bang and Inflation, and why it's needed, then you are ready for this book. The information is delivered so rapidly and efficiently that it took a fraction of the time to read as Lisa Randell's
Warped Passages: Unravelling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (Penguin Press Science) but left me with far fewer questions at the end. Other reviews go into the content but the broad track is inflation of the false vacuum as something that is continuously ongoing, forming endless bubbles of true vacuum, constituting the multiverse conjectured in anthropic thinking, and how theory is converging on such a vision.
I was particularly gratified to come across the notion, in the closing chapters, of the idea that the laws of physics alone could generate a universe from nothing, and the notion that any universe/multiverse that mathematics says can exist, must and does exist. This is a notion I've had from philosophical considerations, replacing the ethical requirement for something out of nothing of neoplatonism with the more convincing logical requiremenent out of the laws of mathematics and my resulting notion of Maths as God, or the MathGod as I call it.
