Cosmologist Katie Mack is ready to get back in the lab
"People think about physics as this very solitary thing, and for Isaac Newton I'm sure it was, but for most of us these days it's really not.
When I was a kid and I thought about what it was going to be like to do cosmology I envisioned myself in a room with a blackboard contemplating the cosmos, and since the pandemic that's been more my situation -- and it's not that effective!"
As we draw Season 4 of Kobo in Conversation to a close, we bring you a conversation with theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack on a wholly different kind of ending. Listeners may recall host Michael Tamblyn's praise for The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) in our year-end Staff Picks episode, where he found that during 2020, it helped to have a sense of time and space and the forces acting on every particle throughout the universe. Michael spoke with Katie about the 5 theoretical ways the universe will end, and we learned why for her the study of astrophysics is preferably a "social" science.
Katie Mack talked about the books she reads for fun, and why she's not a fan of popular science books on astrophyics: "It's hard for me to read a popular science book that's anywhere near my area of expertise[...] I spend a lot of time back-translating to the technical version." But one well-known book stands out and helped shape her vision for The End of Everything: "I thought a lot about Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. It's got this reputation as being one of the most-bought and least-read books in history [...] I really wanted my book to be something people could buy and read."
More of Katie's favourite books:
- "I re-read the Jane Austen novels a lot."
- Martha Wells, Becky Chambers, Ann Leckie, N. K. Jemisin, and
"I just read a lovely debut novel called Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell." - Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future: "a lot closer to non-fiction than I usually go."
- John Scalzi: "His stuff is always a lot of fun."
- "Chuck Wendig's Wanderers is an amazing novel."
The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)
We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it expanded from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life as we know it. But what happens to the universe at the end of the story? And what does it mean for us now?
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