The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

A tour of the exotic and remote outposts where scientists seek answers to the great mysteries: “A thrilling ride around the globe and around the cosmos.” —Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here

In The Edge of Physics, a science writer journeys to the ends of the Earth—visiting remote and sometimes dangerous places—in search of the telescopes and detectors that promise to answer the biggest questions in modern cosmology.

Anil Ananthaswamy treks to the Atacama Desert in the Chilean Andes, one of the coldest, driest places on the planet, where not even a blade of grass can survive, and the spectacularly clear skies and dry atmosphere allow astronomers to gather brilliant images of galaxies billions of light-years away. He takes us inside the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere’s Very Large Telescope on Mount Paranal, where four massive domes open to the sky each night “like a dragon waking up.”

Ananthaswamy also heads deep inside an abandoned iron mine in Minnesota—where half-mile-thick rock shields physicists as they hunt for elusive dark matter particles. And to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, where engineers are drilling 1.5 miles into the clearest ice on the planet. They are building the world’s largest neutrino detector, which could finally help reconcile quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The stories of the people who work at these and other research sites make for a compelling new portrait of the universe—and our quest to understand it.