Once upon a time, I briefly considered studying astronomy. It was brief because the big math that I needed to know to become a sky-scientist clobbered my gray cells so hard that I was forced to wave the white flag at anything beyond basic arithmetic. It was not my destiny to join the ranks of astrophysicists, but I’m still curious about what’s going on up there. I just need to approach cosmology in a different way. Because my brain is wired for words rather than numbers, I gravitate toward “nonfiction that reads like fiction” (a popular catchphrase among librarians and booksellers.) Keep those integers and complicated calculations away from me — just tell me a story. And that is exactly what this week’s book does.
“The Edge of the Sky,” located in the nonfiction section of the library, explains the origins of the universe by way of a magical tale. (A short aside: Remember the “wonderful world of Dewey” columns? If you’ll recall, the 500s are extremely “science-y.” Astronomy — the science of the heavens, so to speak — resides in the celestially-oriented 520s.)
In a mere 85 pages, I learned and understood more about the origins of the universe than from any other “standard” astronomy book. The author, an astrophysicist at Imperial College London, does a very clever thing: He writes about a complex topic using “only the most-used ten hundred words” in our language. Instead of “universe” he writes “All-There-Is”; a “telescope” becomes a “Far-Seer”; the “Milky Way galaxy” turns into the “White Road.”
As you read, you might want to imagine yourself sitting by a campfire, listening to a friend tell a story. A good storyteller doesn’t try to impress his audience by using such big words that listeners might feel lost, or even worse, stupid. “This book came out of a little idea: that it should be possible to talk about very hard things in a straight-forward way that all people can understand,” writes the author. And I believe he succeeds. His tale of Student-People (scientists) searching the heavens and discovering Star-Crowds (galaxies), the Dark Push (dark energy), and Crazy Stars (planets) offers every reader a chance to better understand what the All-There-Is is all about.
