Science

The weird, wonderful, and surprisingly comforting science of how everything ends—from the smallest cells to the universe itself.

Demise is inevitab

The weird, wonderful, and surprisingly comforting science of how everything ends—from the smallest cells to the universe itself.

Demise is inevitable. Cells commit suicide. Bodies decompose after death. Stars exhaust their fuel and swell into spectacular blazes, taking entire planets with them. From the microscopic to the cosmic, everything falls apart according to the inexorable rules of time and entropy—and maybe, suggests award-winning science writer Stephen Ornes, that’s OK. In A Brief History of the End of the Universe and Everything in It, he leads a kaleidoscopic, counterintuitively hopeful journey to uncover the hidden order—and, at times, startling beauty—behind why and how everything eventually comes undone, demonstrating how death is, in a real scientific sense, not merely an end but a transformation, even a source of creation.

Accompanied by a colorful cast of biologists, forensic scientists, ecologists, death doulas, cosmologists, and more, we follow breakdown wherever it leads—from a roadside attraction where a man decays in real time, to a greenhouse where mice decompose on beds of moss, to Knoxville’s infamous Body Farm, into the depths of the Pacific Ocean, where whale carcasses host a raucous assortment of organic life while scientists track the intricate choreography of their decay. We listen in as astrophysicists and cosmologists debate the possible fates of our planet and the universe itself. The cosmos, we see, is in constant motion, endlessly breaking down and remaking itself. Viewed from the right perspective, processes that look random and destructive up close reveal an unexpected grace at larger scales.

Divulging all the gory details alongside the strange, surprising consolations of decomposition, A Brief History of the End of the Universe and Everything in It deepens our appreciation of life, death, and everything in between.