A Brief History of the Universe: Painting a Picture of Our Cosmos

There’s no shortage of books promising to make the cosmos comprehensible to the general reader, but Sarah Alam Malik brings something distinctive to the genre: she is not a science communicator looking in from the outside, but a particle physicist who has spent her career working on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and researching dark matter. This authority shows.

AI-generated (GPT-5 / DALL·E), 2026.

With a nod to Stephen Hawking in its title, the book sweeps from the ancient Babylonians, charting stars on clay tablets out of sheer curiosity, all the way to the unresolved frontiers of dark energy, quantum physics, and the search for extra-terrestrial life. Along the way, Malik traces the great conceptual upheavals: Copernicus displacing Earth from the centre of everything, Rutherford splitting the supposedly indivisible atom, Vera Rubin quietly confirming the existence of dark matter while the broader scientific establishment looked elsewhere. One of the book’s pleasures is its attention to figures like Rubin, whose contributions have often been undersold.

What distinguishes Malik’s telling is her recurring theme: that every age believed it had nearly figured things out, and every age was wrong. This isn’t presented as cause for despair but for wonder. With ninety-five percent of the universe still unknown to us, the story is very much ongoing. Early reviewers have praised her as “a warm, clear writer who covers an awful lot in a small space,” and the comparison to Carl Sagan, in terms of capturing a sense of wonder, feels earned rather than flattering.

If the book has a limitation, it’s one inherent to the format: a history this broad, covered this accessibly, will inevitably leave specialists wanting more depth on particular topics. But that’s a minor complaint. For readers looking for an entry point into the grand story of how humanity came to understand – and repeatedly misunderstand – the universe it inhabits, Malik has written an elegant and timely guide.

Written by Lily Pagano, March 5, 2026.