Dr Roberto Trotta explains 'All you need to know about All-There-Is'

Could you explain the long and complicated story of our universe using only the most common thousand words in the English language?

Sounds like an almost impossible task, but in his first book ‘The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is’, Dr Roberto Trotta does exactly that.

With only these thousand words at his disposal, Dr Trotta tells the tale of the big bang and the birth of the universe all the way through to theories of its destiny.

Credit: Antoine Déprez

Following a young female scientist from sunset to sunrise, the story explains what she sees through her telescope, or what Dr Trotta refers to in his book as ‘Big-Seer’.

Writing a book about an expanding universe, planets, alien worlds, particle physics, galaxies and telescopes without being able to use any of these words, creates a unique science story that is entertaining, metaphorical and magical in places, but educational and enlightening at the same time.

Dr Trotta, a theoretical cosmologist in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, is a passionate communicator of science. As he explains, he wanted to write a book about cosmology that anybody, whether you are physicist, young school pupil or fan of space, could pick up, read with ease and enjoy.

“For more than a decade I’ve been looking for a language to communicate my excitement about my science - dark matter, dark energy, the universe, the big questions about ‘why are we here? - with the public. At the beginning it was very frustrating because I had all these words, which are the bread and butter of cosmology, that I wanted to use but couldn’t.

“But little by little I started coming up with a different vocabulary and different ways of expressing cosmology. So a planet became a ‘crazy star’, galaxies became ‘star crowds’, and our Milky Way galaxy became the ‘White Road’. And so little by little a new voice started to emerge from the format that I’d given myself. I started to think about it as some sort of poetic straight jacket that forced me into expressing cosmology concepts in a new, and hopefully refreshing, way, that gave me childlike new eyes on the universe”, he added.

In this audio interview Dr Trotta reads an extract from his new book and explains how difficult it was to write about cosmology without using typical scientific language, what inspired him to write about the universe using such a unique approach, and how he hopes his readers will react.

‘The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is’ is published by Basic Books and available from most high street book stores and online retailers.