About this item
From the big bang to black holes, from dark matter to dark energy, from the origins of the universe to its ultimate destiny, The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the most important discoveries and mysteries in modern cosmology - with a twist. The book's lexicon is limited to the thousand most common words in the English language, excluding physics, energy, galaxy, or even universe. Through the eyes of a fictional scientist (Student-People) hunting for dark matter with one of the biggest telescopes (Big-Seers) on Earth (Home-World) , cosmologist Roberto Trotta explores the most important ideas about our universe (All-there-is) in language simple enough for anyone to understand.A unique blend of literary experimentation and science popularization, this delightful book is a perfect gift for any aspiring astronomer.
About the Author
Roberto was born and grew up in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. After obtaining an MSc(hons) in Physics from ETH Zurich and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Geneva, he moved to Oxford where he was the Lockyer Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society at Oxford University, and a Junior Fellow of St Anne's, before being appointed as a Lecturer at Imperial in 2008, where is is now Professor of Astrostatistics in the Physics Department. Roberto is a science communicator and a Visiting Professor of Cosmology at Gresham College, London. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research, outreach and teaching, including the Lord Kelvin Award of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (2007) , the Michelson Prize of Case Western Reserve University (2008) , a President's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016) and a President's Leadership Award for Excellence in Societal Engagement (2018) at Imperial College London. In 2019, he was awarded the Georges Lemaitre Chair of the University of Louvaine. His award-winning first book for the public, "The Edge of the Sky: All you need to know about the All-There-Is", endeavours to explain the Universe using only the most common 1,000 words in English. Roberto was named as one of the 100 Global Thinkers 2014 by Foreign Policy magazine (Nov 2014) , for "junking astronomy jargon". He is a co-founder and director at Data Fusion Consultants, offering statistical consultancy and custom-made data analysis solutions. He works as a scientific consultant with museums, writers, film makers and artists, providing the help and support they need to make their artistic creations scientifically sound.
