In your own work, you have been focused on getting people excited about astrophysics and cosmology. How exactly did you come across these five books, and what made you choose them? 

Most of these are somewhat older books that contributed to my own education. A Brief History of Time, for example, is a book that I read when I was in high school, or maybe even before that, and it was one of the books that got me really excited about cosmology. It has held up pretty well – we have discovered a lot about how the universe works since then, but it still gives you a very good overview of what we know. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken with – my generation, or even a little younger – who basically got into astrophysics and cosmology because of that book. So that is a very central one.

Another one that has to be on any list like this is The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winner. It’s a relatively slim volume, in which he describes what happened in the first three minutes of the Big Bang, as it was known and understood back then [1977]. We’ve learned a fair amount since then and some of the details in his original version are a little off, but the basic picture is still incredibly accurate. It’s just a really great description of the beginning of the universe, and almost every book on cosmology will include some variants of Weinberg’s description because he walks through it in such a clear way. 

The other three are books I read much later in my life, mostly because they were written much later, but I think they are really interesting resources. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy – they always call it a trilogy even though there were four and then five books – obviously they’re classics, especially the first four, everyone loves them. The casual way in which Adams treats the universe as a whole – as something you can just sort of run around in – conveys a sense of excitement about the universe that really appeals to a lot of people.

I’ve seen the movie of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and it offers a comical, not a serious, view of the universe, so I was wondering why you chose it? 

Unfortunately, I think they did quite a bad job with the movie. But it’s not a serious view, that’s the whole point. They’re novels, not textbooks. Good books on cosmology, astrophysics, or outside of my field for that matter, get people excited about the topic. There’s a lot in this trilogy that’s subtle and buried. For example, there’s a lot of talk about the bigness of space that really gives you a sense of the actual size of space in a way that a textbook typically doesn’t. The books play a lot with things like the Big Bang or the end of time in a fun way. I would obviously not even remotely suggest this as a textbook, but it goes part and parcel with the more serious side of physics. If you look at my own book, A User’s Guide to the Universe, the title is very self-consciously similar – you could call it a homage

I noticed that both Stephen Hawking and Bill Bryson wrote a ‘history’, and I was wondering, judging by these titles, do cosmologists see themselves as historians, in a way, of space and time? 

Stephen Hawking’s book came first, and I’m sure that Bill Bryson very intentionally named his book to resemble it, but they’re very different books. Bill Bryson is not a physicist, and he makes a very big point of that: most of his books are travel writing, but he’s also written on the history of the English language, the British Isles, things like that. 

What I really liked about A Short History of Nearly Everything is that it gives an excellent account of a lot of the personalities, and the interconnectedness of important discoveries, in cosmology and elsewhere. He does such a great job of bringing together our understanding of cosmology, evolution, palaeontology, and geology in a very, very fluid way. He talks a lot about our understanding of how old the Earth is, and the relationship of that to how old the sun or the universe as a whole is, and those are cosmological questions. The Earth’s age is important if you want to know if there has been enough time for human beings to evolve or if you want to understand when and how the dinosaurs went extinct - everything interrelates. He tells a really nice story, intertwining seemingly disparate areas, putting our cosmological understanding into context. 

I can’t help but think of the ‘theory of everything’ – meant to connect all the laws of physics, a theory that so many physicists are searching for – when I look at the way he seems to be uniting all these different fields, and also at the title: A Short History of Nearly Everything. 

I think you have a point, because it’s definitely a major goal in many areas of human thought to try to fuse seemingly disparate ideas.