Reality gets a bad rap. Too often it is cast as the sober canvas from which our imagination takes flight. Wild stories are called imaginative, while critics caution those who peddle them to ‘be more realistic’. Worse still, we might say a tale ‘lacks imagination’, as if that were the only source of material that could excite us. The implication is clear: reality is humdrum.
Thankfully, nothing could be further from the truth.
We might be besieged by fake news and post-truth discourse, but even the most duplicitous of liars could never hope to invent a reality as marvellous, baroque or dazzling as our own. Who could dream up the millimetre-high mountain ranges that snake across the surface of neutron stars? Or the strange earthquake-warning lights that illuminate the sky above aching fault lines? Or suspect that buried deep below those fault lines, microbes that once shared the planet with dinosaurs are still plodding through their very long lives? The astonishing stories behind all these facts and much more are in your hands.
Few visit these dizzying corners of reality as frequently as the staff at New Scientist. Day in and out, we grapple with mind-boggling matters, always asking questions. Can time flow backwards? How do microbes survive outer space? Where do humans come from? And why do some physicists think the universe is a hologram?
This childlike questioning of reality does not mean we are averse to using our imaginations – New Scientist’s last book, The Universe Next Door, took a grand tour of the multiverse, stopping in at what-if worlds, alternative timelines and thought experiments. But this book is dedicated to reality in all its unimaginable complexity. Collected here are the stories we’ve published that left us bowled over or bamboozled. If you find yourself shaking your head in disbelief as you read them, know that we were doing the same when we worked on them. And yet, everything here is real – even if conclusive evidence for some bits still hovers tantalisingly out of reach.
We start with a peek at the strangeness of the everyday: why lightning bolts shouldn’t exist, how the sun sometimes comes out at night, and the sea monsters that can appear from nowhere to break a ship in two. Then you’re in the hot seat, as we find out why being human is the most incredible thing you’ll ever experience (so long as we’re not all holograms). Chapter three takes you on a wild safari of nature’s strangest nooks, from the ecosystem above your head to the alien life beneath the seas.
And that is just the small stuff. Further chapters reveal a place on Earth where things fall up, hidden dimensions in space, the biggest number you can imagine and the small question of whether reality as we know it is, er, real.
This book will blow your mind and make you rethink what it even means to be you – but don’t let that stop you reading it. As you will discover, the human mind is capable of incredible feats, so putting your blown mind back together at the end of it should be child’s play. Really.