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Cosmology Revealed by Anthony Fairall, Springer-Verlag, £19.50, ISBN 1852333227

IMAGINE the Universe as a spherical, hollow chocolate Easter egg, with the chocolate representing the opaque, early stages of the big bang. Then think of all the cars racing along Earth’s roads. Eventually, of course, Earth’s oil resources will run out: those cars will grind to a halt. In the same way the stars will exhaust their nuclear fuel and stop shining. Or you could think of the Universe as a cosmological fruit cake with galaxies as raisins. Perhaps the voids between galaxies could be created by “anti-gravity” acting as a cosmic baking powder.

These and other striking images enliven Anthony Fairall’s Cosmology Revealed: Living inside the cosmic egg. Fairall is especially good at painting a picture of how the Universe of galaxies looks. He also has an excellent chapter on how looking out into the Universe corresponds to looking back in time, with well-known astronomical objects correlated with historical events on Earth.

The book is heavily slanted towards optical astronomy. The discoveries of radio, infrared and X-ray astronomy barely rate a mention by Fairall. The chapters on optical galaxy surveys that William and John Herschel began, and which continue to this day, are one of this book’s strengths.

But there are one or two theoretical errors. Fairall confuses “grand unified theories”, which unify the strong and weak nuclear forces, with “theories of everything” that aim to unify gravity as well. And, contrary to what Fairall says, the opaque phase of the Universe can be penetrated (by neutrinos and gravitational waves). It’s not true that what lies outside the horizon remains so for ever: new matter becomes visible as time goes on.

Despite these flaws, this is a fun book. I also enjoyed the series of three-dimensional images of the Universe on different scales-and, yes, 3D specs are provided.