Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“A cracking read,  combining storytelling of the highest order with a trove of information.  . . . What’s remarkable is that it all fits together.”—Wall Street Journal “Successful  science writing tells a complete story of the ‘how’—the methodical  marvel building up to the ‘why’—and Randall does just that.”—New York Times Book Review “[Randall]  is a lucid explainer, street-wise and informal. Without jargon or  mathematics, she steers us through centuries of sometimes tortuous  astronomical history.”—The Guardian In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs,  Professor Lisa Randall, one of today’s most influential theoretical  physicists, takes readers on an intellectual adventure through the  history of the cosmos, showing how events in the farthest reaches of the  Universe created the conditions for life—and death—on our planet. Sixty-six  million years ago, an object the size of a city crashed into Earth,  killing off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the planet’s  species. Challenging the usual assumptions about the simple makeup of  the unseen material that constitutes 85% of the matter in the Universe,  Randall explains how a disk of dark matter in the Milky Way plane might  have triggered the cataclysm. But Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs does more than present a radical idea. With clarity and wit, it  explains the nature of the Universe, dark matter, the Milky Way galaxy,  comets, asteroids, and impacts. This breathtaking synthesis, illuminated  by pop culture references and social and political viewpoints, reveals  the deep relationships among the small and the large, the visible and  the hidden, as well as the astonishing beauty of the connections that  surround us. It’s impossible to read this book and look at either the  Earth or the sky again in the same way.