I grew up in a religious, borderline conservative family. Every Sundays, we went to a little musalla and attended Sunday Morning Lecture (or, Kajian Ahad Pagi). As a kid, I didn’t pay much attention to the lecture or stayed still in that matter. I usually ran around, got into fights with bigger kids, and read the announcement wall on one side of the musalla. One of the posters that stuck to the wall was the stages of qiyamah or Judgement’s Day as the end of the universe according to Al-Quran. I remember the days clearly because that wall is my introduction to eschatology and infographic design in general.

A couple of decades later, the kid that saw the (quite) frightening little poster picked up a book that imagines the last three minutes of the universe. But instead of being frightened, the kid grew up with the everlasting fascination of how the universe work!

This book was the accidental continuation of 2024 of reading around quantum physics: just months away from my reading of New Scientist: Instant Expert‘s Why the Universe Exists (2017) and WIRED Guides’ Quantum Computing (2021). The headache I experienced when I initially read the topic has lessen, and I think I am ready to revisit high-school physics courses to understand the math more!

Paul Davies wrote the book with charged academic fascination with—unfortunately—limited expression. The book assumes you to have a basic understanding of astrophysics and quantum physics, which not many people have. It’s not written to be as witty as Tyson’s writing, nor it is as poetic as Rovelli’s. Davies offers several interconnected scenarios of how the universe would die, but not without context.

In the first three chapters, Davies argued that while many scientists speculate the first three minutes—or just, the beginning—of the universe, Davies wanted to show how the universe would die based on the current understanding of quantum physics. Davies explains the current discourse surrounding the theory of the universe’s origin and the state of the universe. Like all things, the universe is dying and, in some sense, ‘decaying’. Not because of the lack of space as assumed—since one of the prominent theory that the universe is inflating—, but because of the lack of time (page 20).

Davies argued that the end of the universe would be the lost of heat, where instead of the current state of thermal equilibrium—where things are in a state of true thermodynamics, the universe would slowly losing the heat. He postulates, that due to the ever-changing and ‘unruly’ (read: difficult to observe) physics in quantum level, the expanding universe (and vacuum) would be the field where a lot of calor will dissipates and eventually ‘reverse’ the expansion, ultimately creating a ‘destructive’ interaction between atoms on molecular level.

The rest of the book dwells on the logistic explanation on how it would happen and the discussion surrounding the theory. Davies explains how the stars would die, how the gravity would collapse on universal scale, how the universe would continue to inflate, how celestial bodies live without gravitational pull, et cetera. Davies, like any other scientist in the fields, can only speculate. There are only probabilities within quantum physics (page 108). The math is there, it’s just a lot more complicated.

Frankly, quantum physics is a still a bit fuzzy to me as I am learning further into it. It’s nice to be affirmed that the natural state of the universe is actually chaos. Not that it’s a bad thing. It’s just is. A state. Order is just our way to make sense of things. Too much enforced order though, only bore disasters.

There are several models that Davies showcased in this book, like cyclical and wormhole, as the life cycle of the universe. The models offer alternative explanation of how the universe would end up. I found the models fascinating, since it gives to a lot more imagination to envisage how the universe—or multiverse, in this case—works.

The book is pretty focused despite it’s presented as a popular science books. Yet, I find this book is not necessarily introductory in terms of how it’s written. It conveys a very fascinating explanation on how the universe works and theoretical scenario on how it would end. As I said, it’s written with limited expression. I personally liked it, but it feels more like a companion text to a course rather than light reading—which might suit some readers.

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Book Identification

Title	: Tiga Menit Terakhir; Renungan Sains Mengenai Akhir Alam Semesta
Writer	: Paul Davies
Publisher	: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia
Year	: 2020
Pages	: 188 + xii pages
ISBN	: 978-602-481-438-0