Review of reviews: Books

a “Big Rip” powerful enough to shred galaxies, planets, and subatomic particles. “The scariest prospect, however, is also the one closest to Mack’s heart,” said Lee Billings in The Wall Street Journal, because the moment she learned about “vacuum decay” was the moment that sparked her passion for cosmic eschatology: Over tea and cookies, a professor who was bouncing his 3-year-old daughter on his knee explained that at any moment a quantum bubble could form and expand at the speed of light, vaporizing everything it touches.

“The End of Everything is already out of date,” said Alexander Masters in The Spectator (U.K.). This isn’t Mack’s fault:

“In this blissful subject, new insights arrive daily,” many of them complex and hallucinatory enough to boggle the brightest minds. “There’s a lovely sense of playground scrabbling in Mack’s picture of scientific progress,” an amusing ongoing drama in which theorists are forever duking it out. Does Mack sort through the din and identify our eventual killer? Not exactly. Instead, she looks on, “almost dancing with excitement,” as the potential suspects change from day to day.