part 1. Genesis: From the armoire to the cave ; Seeing in the dark ; Through a glass, lightly ; There, and back again ; A stitch in time ; The shadows of reality ; A universe stranger than fiction ; A wrinkle in time ; Decay and rubble ; From here to eternity : shedding light on the sun -- part 2. Exodus ; Desperate times and desperate measure ; March of the titans ; Endless forms most beautiful : symmetry strikes back ; Cold, stark reality : breaking bad or beautiful? ; Living inside a superconductor ; The bearable heaviness of being : symmetry broken, physics fixed -- part 3. Revelation ; The wrong place at the right time ; The fog lifts ; Free at last ; Spanking the vacuum ; Gothic cathedrals of the twenty-first century ; More questions than answers ; From a beer party to the end of time ; Cosmic humility.