The Infinite Monkey Cage, the legendary BBC Radio 4 programme, brings you this irreverent celebration of scientific marvels. Join us on a hectic leap through the grand and bizarre ideas conjured up by human imagination, from dark matter to consciousness via neutrinos and earthworms.
In the book, Professor Brian Cox and Robin Ince muse on multifaceted subjects involved in building a universe, with pearls of wisdom from leading scientists and comedians peppered throughout.
Covering billions of concepts and conundrums, they tackle everything from the Big Bang to parallel universes, fierce creatures to extraterrestrial life, brain science to artificial intelligence. How to Build a Universe is an illuminating and inspirational celebration of science sometimes silly, sometimes astounding and very occasionally facetious.
The publisher told The Bookseller: “The radio programme has won several awards and is BBC Radio 4’s most successful comedy and popular science series. From the grand and bizarre ideas conjured up by the human imagination to the nitty gritty of dark matter and consciousness via neutrinos and earthworms, the book promises to be as unique, witty and accessible as the series itself.”
Professor Brian Cox said: “The Infinite Monkey Cage is an audio representation of the absurdity of nature prevented from collapse by the scaffolding of reason. Whether it can survive in book form is theoretically uncertain, so we decided the only option is to conduct the experiment.” This book is the result.
Robin Ince added: “For ten years I have been interrupting Brian during his equations, it is exciting to think that finally I can jumble his equations in print. It will be a mixture of hard science (Brian’s speciality) and facetiousness, stupidity and childish curiosity (something I’ve been working on for 48 years).”
Interested in learning more about Newham Bookshop and some of the people connected with it? We have four lessons for classroom or family use developed from On the Record’s oral history project centered around Newham Bookshop, Writing and Reading Newham. Click here for full details.
We are proud that Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s Bookshop of the Month. The article features a Q&A with Vivian Archer, which you can read here.