NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST, OBSERVER, NEW SCIENTIST, BBC FOCUS, INDEPENDENT AND WASHINGTON POST ‘A rollicking tour of the wildest physics. . . Like an animated discussion with your favourite quirky and brilliant professor’ Leah Crane, New Scientist’Weird science, explained beautifully’ – John ScalziWe know the universe had a beginning. But what happens at the end of the story?With lively wit and wry humour, astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us on a mind-bending tour through each of the cosmos’ possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, Vacuum Decay, the Big Rip and the Bounce. Guiding us through major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory and much more, she describes how small tweaks to our incomplete understanding of reality can result in starkly different futures. Our universe could collapse in upon itself, or rip itself apart, or even – in the next five minutes – succumb to an inescapable expanding bubble of d