'Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?' remains the most curious and
most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Moving away from the narrower paths
of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, the celebrated essa
yist Jim Holt now enters this fascinating debate with his broad, lively and deep
ly informed narrative that traces all our efforts to grasp the origins of the un
iverse. With sly humour and a highly original personal approach Holt takes on th
e role of cosmological detective.
Suggesting that we might have been too narr
ow in limiting our suspects to God and the Big Bang, he tracks down, among other
s, an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Nobel Laureate physicist, a French Buddhis
t monk, and John Updike just before he died, to pursue this cosmic puzzle from e
very angle. As he pieces together a solution - while offering useful insights in
to time, consciousness, and eternity - he sheds fascinating new light on the mea
ning of existence. A New York Times bestseller on first publication, this new pa
perback edition provides a much-needed new take on history's greatest conundrum,
in the vein of previous bestsellers like Michael Brooks' 13 Things that Don't M
ake Sense.
