The Egg and the Rock is the name of the book I am currently writing. It is also the name of the Substack where I am writing it. (Substack, for those of you who don’t know – hi mum! – is a sort of like a blog combined with an email newsletter: designed by writers for writers, it is a far more pleasant place to write than my own website, which is why I’m spending so much time over there right now.)

The Egg and the Rock is a non-fiction book about the universe. It explores the idea that our universe evolved (that it is descended from a long line of earlier, less complex universes) – and the remarkable new evidence supporting that idea, which is coming from the James Webb Space Telescope...

OK, I could write a much longer description of what The Egg and the Rock is all about here, but that seems pointless when the actual thing itself is just a click away.

So here is a link to the introduction to the book. Substack will probably ask you if you want to subscribe: do! It just means typing in your email address, after which I will automatically email you my new posts as I finish them, for free.

The Substack isn’t the book itself: it’s the public performance of writing the book. So, although I will put up chapters as I finish them, I will also put up interviews with people, I will discuss interesting new scientific papers, I will riff on subjects related to the book but not actually in it. And so on. If you have any interest in how a book is written, you might enjoy this.