Hugin & Munin Journal

My first real encounter with cosmology—outside science fiction—came surprisingly early. I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I picked up Isaac Asimov’s The Collapsing Universe . In Swedish it was called Svarta hål och kosmiska ägg —“Black Holes and Cosmic Eggs”—which, in hindsight, might be one of the most wonderfully strange titles imaginable for a schoolchild browsing a library shelf. I found it while preparing a five-minute classroom presentation and ended up reading the entire book twice. The books that followed trace more than an expanding interest in cosmology and theoretical physics. They record a change in what I expected science to give me. I began with the sense that the universe was full of astonishing answers waiting to be explained. Later, I became more interested in how we distinguish an explanation from an elegant possibility. The movement was not from wonder to disillusionment. It was from wonder to uncertainty—and eventually to the recognition that unce...