Katie Mack: 'I didn't anticipate being in a pop song when I went off to study physics'

The cosmologist, author and Twitter sensation on ‘heat death’, getting heckled by Stephen Hawking – and being name-checked on a No 1 albumKatie Mack achieves two improbable feats with her new book,The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). First, she writes about the end of the universe with a jauntiness that makes it not actually that depressing. And second, she takes concepts in cosmology, string theory and quantum mechanics and makes them accessible. This gift for straight talking will be familiar to the 360,000 followers of Mack ’s Twitter feed –@AstroKatie– through which the 39-year-old cosmologist and assistant professor at North Carolina State University has become one of the most popular voices on science.Why did you want to write about the end of the universe?There are a lot of books about the beginning. I ’ve read some of those books, and I’m fascinated by that question of where we come from. But there are very few books about the end. So I wanted to explore that other side. And I love the idea of studying the ultimate destruction of reality; I just think that’s a cool thing to be able to study .Continue reading...

Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - August 9, 2020 Category: Science Authors: Tim Lewis Tags: Physics Astronomy Space Science Science and nature books Source Type: news