On the Inside of a Marble

Keeping in mind that we can only see the universe from the comfort of our home galaxy, Bascom begins his text by meticulously laying the necessary groundwork to understand the Big Bang's mathematics without using any equations. He then paints a freeze-frame picture of our universe as if we had taken a three-dimensional picture with a giant camera. Within this picture, he traces forces beginning with the smallest (a single atom) to the biggest (the cosmos), keeping in mind that in this frozen moment everything further away from the observer spatially is also further away from the observer in time; that is, older. Soon a very real and very vivid image of the Big Bang appears (especially in things that are loud or hot), echoing down through time and into our everyday lives, reflected in every atom during every measurement. Then, slowly but deliberately, Bascom unfreezes this picture, ratcheting each moment from one to the next, showing us how and why quantum particles are constantly in contact with the Big Bang and why that allows the particles to pop in and out of existence from moment to moment, what a photon is, and what exactly we mean when we say that free space has energy.