An award-winning theoretical physicist and best-selling author of A Universe from Nothing traces the dramatic discovery of the counterintuitive world of reality, explaining how readers can shift their perspectives to gain greater understandings of our individual roles in the universe. --Publisher.

Includes index.

Part 1: Genesis. From the armoire to the cave ; Seeing in the dark ; Through a glass, lightly ; There, and back again ; A stitch in time ; The shadows of reality ; A universe stranger than fiction ; A wrinkle in time ; Decay and rubble ; From here to eternity : shedding light on the sun -- Part 2: Exodus. Desperate times and desperate measure ; March of the titans ; Endless forms most beautiful : symmetry strikes back ; Cold, stark reality : breaking bad or beautiful? ; Living inside a superconductor ; The bearable heaviness of being : symmetry broken, physics fixed -- Part 3: Revelation. The wrong place at the right time ; The fog lifts ; Free at last ; Spanking the vacuum ; Gothic cathedrals of the twenty-first century ; More questions than answers ; From a beer party to the end of time ; Cosmic humility.