By an award-winning astrophysicist and coauthor of Where Did the Universe Come From?, a brisk, lucid tour of the human quest to uncover reality’s fundamentals, from the atomic to the cosmological

Making sense of our reality has burdened humanity since the very beginning. In their search for answers, scientists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists have revealed incredible insight into our perception of the world around us—but they have also cracked open a Pandora’s box of discoveries that challenge our understanding of what’s really out there.

In The Shortest History of Reality, the idea of “what’s real” is traced from its everyday, commonsense beginnings to the mind-bending discoveries of modern physics. Along the way, we encounter the great shifts in thought that reshaped our view of existence—from ancient philosophy to the rise of science, from Newton’s universe to the strange probabilities of the quantum world and beyond.

Blending science, history, and philosophy, Lewis leads a brisk and lucid tour through humanity’s changing grasp of reality, writing the compelling story of how we have tried to make sense of it all. This is no encyclopedia of everything that exists, but it’s an accessible, witty romp through space, time, and some of life’s most complex questions.