List of plates xi Acknowledgements xii 1 Project Shangri-La 1 The icon 5 The book 7 Big Questions 9 Where do we go from here? 10 2 Tunguska 13 Elementary, my dear Aristotle 15 It's all Greek to me 17 This most beautiful system 19 Force fields and the art of science 22 Light and momentary troubles 25 A space-, time- and mind-bending solution 28 Hawking, relativity and those Big Questions 30 3 Canoe man 33 A case for the defence 34 The beginning of the end 35 Hooke versus Newton revisited 36 But together they do 38 Young strikes again 39 Weirdness, weirdness, everywhere 41 A matter of interpretation 42 Contents Heisenberg, histories and Hawking 45 Closing argument 47 4 Gingerich's quest 50 All that nonsense 51 The book nobody read 53 Holding the universe still 54 The 1920s' Copernicus #1 55 The 1920s' Copernicus #2 57 Redshifting opinions 58 The discarded image 59 A cooling-off period 60 The small matter of nucleosynthesis 61 Digging the cosmological heels in 63 Brainwaves and microwaves 64 Cosmology and salvation 66 5 Batman Forever? 80 The clash of the titans 81 Why can't you two just get along?! 82 Separation anxiety 84 The dark star 86 Where QM and GR meet 88 Hawking destroys the universe 91 QM versus GR - the infinite battleground 94 Hawking the hero 98 6 Part 1 101 Akira Yoshida 101 Unification 102 The grand unified theory 103 Contents Putting the heat on 105 Just how far can we take this? 107 A new hope 111 Black holes ain't so black 112 Hawking radiation 114 Securing a legacy 116 Trouble in Paradise 117 6 Part 2 121 Mathematical dogfights 121 Imagine that 122 Waves, particles, probabilities, histories 124 Hawking goes big 126 A disclaimer 129 Extraordinary measures 130 Extraordinary times 131 A theory of (almost) everything 133 Multiverses, metaphysics and myths 136 7 Tyres and anchors 139 Counter-punches 141 Crossing the divide 141 Is philosophy dead? 144 You Kant be serious!? 147 Being critical about realism 150 A rose by any other name 151 One foot in each camp 152 Introducing the multiverse 154 Creating history 157 Hawking and God 159 Switching the spotlight 161 Contents 8 The Test of Solomon 163 What about singularities? 163 What about Hawking radiation? 165 What about the no-boundary proposal? 167 No rescue 168 What about model-dependent realism? 172 What about the multiverse? 174 Infinite death 178 What about God? 180 Different universes 182 Big Answers 185 Appendix 1: A note on M-theory 188 Appendix 2: A universe from nothing 191 Notes 195 Acknowledgements 206 Index 207.