How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space

"I put this book on the list because there’s not another book out there like it. It is truly unique. I read it when I was a postdoc. I read a lot of popular science, but I read this book and thought, ‘this is an entirely different genre of science writing!’ It’s very personal. She interweaves stories about her science and her science research from a first-person perspective with stuff going on in her personal life—her troubles with her relationship or when she feels depressed or lonely. That’s all in the book. You understand more what it is like to be a human being doing science from this book than anything I’ve ever read. I still think it’s profound. I occasionally go back and reread a chapter of it, also just to be inspired as a writer. “I don’t think the universe provides meaning, but human beings create their own meaning, when they value things.” She’s also a brilliant scientist. The title of the book, How the Universe Got Its Spots, is of course a play on How the Leopard Got His Spots, and it refers to the light that was produced a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. When you look at maps of it, it’s full of patches of hot and cold spots. She explains how the universe got those spots and explores the possibility that there might be an interesting topology to our universe. It might not be just a simple space that goes out in all directions, it might wrap around on itself in interesting ways. That’s what she was doing research on at the time and she wrote this book about looking at data and trying to learn those things about our universe. It’s a fantastic book. That was what she was exploring. Scientists very rarely say what they ‘believe.’ It’s not a phrase we use very comfortably. She was certainly hypothesizing that we might live in a finite universe and was trying to devise tests to find out. I’d have to ask her whether she would use the word believe, but we all think it’s possible. It’s also possible it’s not finite. We don’t know. It’s a totally open question."