Table of Contents

Foreword by Marcia Bartusiak IX
Preface XIII
1 Lights Beyond the Horizon 1
2 Traveling Companions 5
3 The Laws of the Cosmos 9
4 Knowing that we Don't Know 17
5 Elephants in the Room 23
6 Fiat Lux? 29
7 Space 33
8 Ten Infernal Minutes 39
9 And There Was Not Light 49
10 The First Dawn of the Cosmos 53
11 A Special Star 57
12 The Dawn of the Solar System 61
13 The Earth and Its Climate 67
14 The Dawn of Life 71
15 Interstellar Migrations 77
16 Other Suns, Other Worlds 83
17 Where Are They? 89
18 The Dark Side of the Cosmos 93
19 The Organization of the Universe 99
20 Black Holes 103
21 Toward a New Astronomy 111
22 Toward the Infinitely Large 119
23 Toward the Infinitely Small 123
24 Big Science 129
25 The Universe as a Laboratory 135
26 A Special Particle 139
27 Antimatter 143
28 Hunting for Antimatter in Space 149
29 New Territories, New Dawns 155
30 The Dawn of Astronautics 167
31 The Dawn of the Next Star 171
32 Even More Satellites, Even Smaller 175
33 The Dawn of the Future 181
Acknowledgments 189
Index 191

About the Author

Roberto Battiston is a physicist who specializes in the field of experimental fundamental and elementary particles physics, both at particle accelerators and in space. He is the author of A Dialogue between an Artist and a Scientist, Quantum Mechanics for Dummies, Making Space, and The Mathematics of the Virus.

Reviews

"Battiston’s book presents a useful synthesis across multiple scientific disciplines to arrive at a definition and general outline of cosmology, which is both timely and of great interest."
– Library Journal


“[An] elegant book on the history of knowledge about the cosmos” 
– Nature