The Universe: A Biography, by John Gribbin

John Gribbin turns biographer in this account of the history of the universe, arguing that the struggle of physicists (such as himself) to understand how the laws of physics guide the development of the universe is analogous "to the way in which a biographer or historian might try to understand the motives which lay behind the decisions made by a key figure such as Julius Caesar".

He follows the universe from its birth 14 billion years ago, through the emergence of life on Earth (10 billion years ago), and on into the far future, when our Sun will become a red giant and our oceans begin to boil, 5.7 billion years from now. Beyond that awaits the end of time itself, in a mere 12 to 14 billion years.

Gribbin begins with an introduction to the "standard model", describing the forces and particles that make up all matter. It is "one of the great triumphs of 20th-century science", which explains "everything on Earth, and how the stars work". Having mastered these quantum essentials, he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the "particle zoo", pointing out antineutrinos, fermions, gluons, up and down quarks, and the massive Higgs boson: an elusive particle, predicted by the standard model.

The physicist Richard Feynman once remarked that "no one understands quantum mechanics". But it's a measure of Gribbin's skill as a science writer that he can convince us that we have grasped the paradoxes of the quantum wonderland. Indeed, his biography is the very model of lucidity and succinctness.

In his discussion of the causes of the Big Bang, Gribbin journeys to the final frontier of physics and cosmology. Apparently, the entire universe may have exploded out of a "quantum fluctuation of the vacuum" - nothingness to you and me. In a deeply evocative idea, Gribbin suggests that the cosmic process of creation and destruction is cyclical, with universes born, phoenix-like, from the remains of the previous one.

At the end of our universe there will be a "Big Crunch" (or "Big Rip", depending on your view of the physics), rather like a Big Bang in reverse, as everything collapses into a singularity. Then, says Gribbin, there will be a moment "when the laws of physics that we know break down and something wonderful happens". You can almost hear the wistful disappointment, for that is one physics experiment that no human being will ever live to see.

P D SMITH