For the John Templeton Foundation, I got to talk to theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies.
You’ve now written more than two dozen books explaining cutting-edge science to the general public. What’s new in the latest one?
What I tried to do in this book is to pick a few perennial big questions that people ask, like ‘What happened before the Big Bang?’, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’, ‘Is time travel possible?’, and ‘How will the universe end?’ Interspersed with those, I wanted to find curious and quirky ways of teaching the background science that you need in order to understand these questions. And so some of the questions — ‘Why is it dark at night?’, ‘What is the speed of space?’ — are really there to sort of set out the conceptual framework that you need to lead you to the other big unanswered questions.