The Universe

Though the universe is an incredibly vast, unexplored, and complex place, it is the primary setting and subject of this book. The book opens nearly four billion years in the past, with all the contents of the cosmos compacted “in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence” (17). Throughout the course of the book, the expansion and development of the universe is analyzed and dissected to reveal the reasons why the universe behaves the way it does, which ultimately sums up the focus of Tyson’s field of study. The origin of the universe is at the same time simple and complex; complex in the sense that most of the universe is made up of matter and energy of which we know almost nothing, and simple because everything in the universe is born from the same stuff. “The four most...