For a long time, the skies must have seemed like an orderly place to humans: the sun rising and falling like clockwork, stars twinkling dutifully in their positions. The trouble began at least as far back as the Ancient Greeks, whose astronomers noticed some stars tracing out bizarre serpentine patterns in the night sky. They christened them asteres planetai, or wandering stars – now better known as the planets.
Since then, the view has only become more troubling. Earth was ousted from its position at the centre of the universe, and the universe itself was revealed to be a ballooning, billowing tapestry, embroidered with cosmological features that would have baffled the Ancient Greeks.
In this chapter, we visit some of the strangest places in the cosmos, where time flows backwards, white holes spew matter into existence, gravitational waves slosh around hidden dimensions and the universe itself leaks away through infinitesimal holes in the fabric of space–time. You’ll never see the night sky in the same way again.