by Govert SchillingThe Elephant in the Universe

FORTHCOMING TITLES

THE ELEPHANT IN THE UNIVERSE Thirty-three Glimpses of Dark Matter... and How They Might Unlock the Secrets of the Cosmos GOVERT SCHILLING

Praise for RIPPLES IN SPACETIME

Schilling’s deliciously nerdy grand tour takes us through compelling backstory, current research, and future expectations – Barbara Kiser, NATURE

Scientists are faced with a crisis that encompasses particle physics, astronomy and cosmology, and, as yet, there’s no solution – though hints may be in plain sight.

Some 80 per cent of all matter in the Universe consists of unknown particles, but despite decades of research by the most brilliant minds on Earth, no one knows what the stuff really is. It’s a thoughtprovoking and humbling conclusion: even the matter we are composed of is little more than the visible tip of a weird, non-luminous iceberg.

Current wisdom has it that dark matter consists of a so far undiscovered type of elementary particle that hardly interacts with normal matter, making it almost impossible to detect. A whole industry of detectors is looking for the enigmatic particle – usually installed in deep underground laboratories to shield the sensitive equipment from spurious cosmic rays. Meanwhile, other physicists are searching for evidence of decaying dark matter in the wider Universe, or trying to create dark-matter particles in collider experiments. But so far none of these approaches has yielded any results.

Little surprise, then, that some scientists have started to doubt that dark-matter particles really exist. Who knows, the mysterious stuff may be a new state of matter, more akin to an all-pervasive field. Dark matter’s properties may be somehow connected to the equally puzzling discovery that empty space must also contain loads of mysterious ‘dark energy’ to account for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Or our current understanding of gravity may be all wrong, leading us to believe in the existence of huge amounts of dark matter while there may be none at all.

In THE ELEPHANT IN THE UNIVERSE, Govert Schilling take readers on a comprehensive tour through space and time and across the globe to explore the story of the dark-matter mystery and the researchers working to crack it. The book takes the form of 33 brief chapters, each giving a separate insight into just what this strange missing stuff might be. Taken together they provide a unique, state-of-the-art overview of the latest ideas and findings. With so many new particle experiments coming online, telescopes dedicated to finding a solution and bright researchers exploring the limits of theoretical physics, there is real hope, he says, that this combined effort will soon shed light on dark matter and open up a deeper understanding of the nature of reality itself.

GOVERT SCHILLING is a prize-winning freelance astronomy writer based in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines as well as in New Scientist, Science, BBC Sky at Night and Sky & Telescope. He has written more than 50 books, appears frequently on Dutch radio and TV and gives talks for a wide variety of audiences. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union named asteroid (10986) Govert after him. His most recent English-language book is RIPPLES IN SPACETIME (Harvard University Press, 2017 – ‘fascinating trifecta of historical and scientific accuracy, a grand sense of wonder and curiosity, and brilliantly accessible storytelling’, Forbes).

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Harvard University Press Delivery: Spring 2021 Publication: Autumn 2021 Status: Proposal Length: 75,000 words

All rights available excluding World English Language (Harvard University Press), China (CITIC), Netherlands (Fontaine)

FORTHCOMING TITLES

THE INVENTION OF TOMORROW How Foresight Conquered the World THOMAS SUDDENDORF, JON REDSHAW & ADAM BULLEY

Praise for Thomas Suddendorf’s THE GAP

Beautifully written, well researched and thought provoking – Jane Goodall

The first trade book dedicated to the emergence of foresight, how this prodigious capacity drove human evolution and how we’ll continue to rely and improve on it in the future.

Chimpanzees tend to grunt excitedly to say hello. But, curiously, our closest animal cousins never say goodbye. In fact humans may well be the only animals who bid one another farewell in mutual recognition that we are going our separate ways, and often in the hope our paths may cross again.

Your mind is a virtual time machine. You can relive past events and imagine future possibilities – even ones that you have never experienced or which may never materialize. Because you are a mental time traveller, you can prepare for threats and opportunities well in advance and deliberately shape the future to your own design. Humans run the zoos not because we are stronger than other animals, but because we can foresee what these animals need and what they can do. Foresight is essential to our dominance on the planet.

In THE INVENTION OF TOMORROW, three pioneering researchers in the field of mental time travel provide a ground-breaking exploration of one of humanity’s greatest powers, showing that humans are fundamentally a species of farsighted vision, not one of myopia and impulsivity. Far from being unequipped to deal with the challenges it now faces, our species has evolved to deal with future dangers more than any other creature that has ever existed.

An avalanche of discoveries in the past decade has dramatically transformed our understanding of our mental time machines and how we use them to envisage, predict and control the future. Drawing on cutting-edge research from many disciplines – cognitive neuroscience, archaeology, psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and more – THE INVENTION OF TOMORROW tells a revolutionary story of discovery that is providing a new perspective on the story of humanity.

THOMAS SUDDENDORF is a full professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research on how memory and foresight are part of the same mental time machine is some of the most widely cited research in psychology and neuroscience. His first trade book was THE GAP: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals (Basic Books, 2013).

JON REDSHAW is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland who has published extensively on the development and evolution of mental time travel. One of his 2016 collaborations with Suddendorf in Current Biology was covered by over 50 news outlets, and his findings have been disseminated to over 700,000 Twitter users.

ADAM BULLEY is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where he researches the cognitive neuroscience of foresight. A passionate science communicator, he has given numerous radio interviews and talks and won acclaim for his university teaching.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Basic Books Delivery: Autumn 2021 Publication: Autumn 2022 Status: Proposal Length: 90,000 words

All rights available excluding World English Language (Basic Books), China (Ginkgo)