This is the story of the Universe told as if the Universe were the subject of a biography. Like all biographies should, this story begins with a birth and ends with a death. Our Universe was born out of a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago (using the most widely agreed-upon recent estimate), an event that created all time and space. When and how the Universe will end is a matter of much speculation. What comes in between is, of course, everything. Narrative driven and information rich, IThe Portable Universe /Iis the perfect book for the literary reader who wants to understand what science is all about. Using an entertaining and novel device, this book shows everything our Universe contains across all of time and all of space. IThe Portable Universe /Iis for all tolerably well-educated adults who nevertheless know nothing about science; who do not know, for example, that space has a smallest measure, nor that the triumph of the nineteenth-century was the discovery of the wave-nature of light. Written in a non-condescending style, this is a book to enlarge our understanding of the Universe and deepen our sense of its essential mysteriousness.