I am always attracted to “The End of XXX”. “The End of Faith”, “The End of Time”, “The End of Physics”, “The End of History”, and the list goes on.   Thus, ever since a colleague of mine named The End of Everything his favorite book about astrophysics, I knew I must read it.   I was not disappointed.

The book is a layman’s guide to cosmology, with a focus on the death of the universe. Katie Mack explains that our universe could end in five different ways and she expects humanity to survive in none of these scenarios.  Of the five endings, Heat Death seems the most humane to me.  In it, the universe will continue to expand until it reaches a thermodynamic equilibrium, at which nothing, including life in any form as we know it, can ever happen again.  The other four endings, if I understand them correctly, all involve a cataclysm that, according to Mack, you will never want to live long enough to witness.

A book entitled “The end of everything”, of course, is inherently about eschatology.  Contemplating the end of the universe was surprisingly hard and strangely personal. In fact, I found it even harder than thinking of my own death. We humans often come to terms with death using the legacies we might leave behind: passing our genes on to next generations; making the world a better place; or better yet, enshrining our ideas in eternal knowledge.  However, if humanity itself will not survive the destruction of the universe, these justifications sound unconvincing.  “At some point, in a cosmic sense, it will not have mattered that we ever lived.” Mack tells us.  This comment reminds me of the famous quote from the movie Coco, “When there is no one left in the living world who remembers you, you disappear from this world. we call it the Final Death”. The end of universe is the Final Death of Humanity.

Mack then asks the obvious question: “What does that mean for humanity and where does that leave us now?”  In the epilogue, she tried but struggled to offer a satisfactory answer.  I could not come up with an answer either.  In fact, just thinking about it makes me feel sad. Indeed, when a colleague of Mack posed that question at an academic seminar, some people in the audience cried.

Mack is a great writer and communicator.  Her infectious passion for science and sharp wit makes reading the book a joy that I look forward to everyday. For the first time, I feel that I actually understand what dark energy or cosmic background radiation is.  Of course, I still have no idea about the Higgs Field or Vacuum Decay, but that’s probably on me.