Stuart Clark

All Possible Worlds

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

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Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 370pp £25 order from our bookshop

The Book of Universes

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The Bodley Head 354pp £20 order from our bookshop

For practitioners of a supposedly observational discipline, astronomers are good at inventing things. Mostly they imagine celestial objects that cannot be immediately seen but are suspected on the basis of theory to lurk in the dimmest recesses of the universe. Then they race to find them or to look so thoroughly that they are sure that they do not exist after all. If they return empty handed, it’s back to the drawing board.

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