The Digester

New 'A Brief History of the Universe' updates Hawking with modern discoveries

Mar 20th 2026

Particle physicist Sarah Alam Malik offers a short, people-centered tour of cosmology from Babylonian sky records to the Higgs boson, prioritizing accessibility over technical detail.

  • Malik traces astronomy from 7th century BC Babylonian sky records to contemporary cosmology.
  • The book moves through key figures from Aristotle and Galileo to Einstein and the teams behind the Higgs boson.
  • Malik foregrounds the people behind discoveries, including Islamic astronomers and women like Vera Rubin.
  • As a particle physicist who worked on the Large Hadron Collider, Malik includes post-1988 advances such as the LHC and the Higgs.
  • The book is concise and accessible, trading technical depth for a broader, more human-centered narrative while chapters on life and AI feel less developed.

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