There’s something deeply satisfying about the title of Marcus Chown’s book – it really catches the attention. This isn’t one of those collections of little scientific snippets – you know the sort of thing, the type of book that asks if penguins’ feet freeze – though it could be mistaken for one thanks to the look of the cover. Although it is a collection of different scientific theories, it is both a much deeper and more mind-boggling book than the “questions answered” type. It is subtitled “dispatches from the frontline of science”, and that frontline is the interface between scientific ideas and the deepest questions of the universe. For Douglas Adams fans, this is real Deep Thought territory. Chown takes off with the relatively familiar but still mind boggling concept that our universe could be but a single bubble amid a myriad variant universes, so many in fact that there’s one out there where Elvis lives, and another identical to this, except you aren’t reading this review ...