This is a curious book from Russell Stannard, former head of physics and astronomy at the Open University. Superficially, it’s an overview of cosmology, high-energy physics and quantum mechanics, emphasising the limits of knowledge in these areas.

Stannard distinguishes his book from John Horgan’s The End of Science (1996), which argued that no more big discoveries remained. Rather, his argument is that while many fundamental discoveries may still come, the extent of the knowledge accessible to science is inevitably limited. Some reasons for this are pragmatic, such as the apparent impossibility of building particle accelerators large enough to achieve the energies that nuclear physicists would like.