The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is

By Robert Trotta

'A poetic primer on the universe… one part children’s book for grownups, one part imaginative exercise in economical yet lyrical language, and wholly wonderful'

– Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

'Inventive, enjoyable and thought-provoking'

– Nature

Imagine a short book presenting the latest discoveries and outstanding mysteries in modern cosmology — but written using only the most common 1,000 words in English, as derived from 10 million works of contemporary fiction...

The Edge of the Sky does just that (the only exceptions being names of people). From the Big Bang to planets in other solar systems, from dark matter to dark energy, from the destiny of the Universe to its fundamental reality, from the work of Hubble to Einstein, it explores the most important cosmological ideas through the eyes of a fictional female scientist hunting for dark matter with one of the biggest telescopes on Earth.

Written by an acclaimed astrophysicist, The Edge of the Sky shows that it is possible to explain complex, abstract ideas using only common words that everybody can understand. At the same time, with its necessarily metaphorical, almost poetic style, the book can be enjoyed by novices and experts alike, with readers stimulated to interpret the symbolic language, which ranges from the whimsical to the profound. Thus ‘the Universe’ becomes ‘the All-there-is’, a ‘telescope’ becomes ‘Big-Seer’, ‘particle collisions’ become ‘matter drops hugging', and so on.

Scientific detail and technical jargon take a back seat, while the evocative imagery is brought to the fore to illuminate the science in the simplest yet most accurate way possible. The result is a surprising, entertaining and entrancing little book for all – a unique blend of literary experimentation and science popularization that brings science back to the human scale and offers a startling new perspective on the Universe and our place in it.