If you want to gift a primer on everything “Space” for your kid or any young one in your life, and want to sneak in reading a few pages of it yourself to en-light-en your dark matter, “Unlocking the Universe“, a curated selection of non-fiction essays by late Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy Hawking is your ideal pick.
“Unlocking the Universe” is correctly described as “Everything you need to travel through space and time”. The contents of the books are diverse: they range from the formation of the Universe to Artificial Intelligence to the future of the modern world and how time travel is not really feasible in the coming years and how wormholes are probably sustainable only in rotten apples (sorry, kids).
Like Rick and Morty’s portal gun, you can jump into a parallel universe of knowledge by selecting the topic of your interest from the Index. And I bet that you wouldn’t not find a topic of your interest in it.
Coming to the contents of the book, the pages and illustrations are black and white with a few colour images in the middle section of the book. A stunning image of Karman, the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space is one of these images. The illustrations are brilliant to look at and serve to be an educational aid to the content-rich chapters. Graphs, timelines, pictorial depictions of various concepts, it’s all in this 432 page book.
The chapters are written by various contributors like astrophysicists, professors from the fields of neurosciences, earth sciences, psychology, theoretical physics, and are interspersed with biographies of various eminent personalities in the field of science, physics, astronomy and much more. The language within the book is also lucid and intelligible. Technical jargon is minimally used, and there’s a glossary at the end of the book as well as quick search index for various concepts.
All in all, I am totally starstruck by the awesomeness of this book. One thing is for sure, if I had read this book when I was 10-11 years old, I surely would have aimed to convert my fantasy of space travel to reality!
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