Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

I would imagine that most physicists can remember where they were when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on at Cern. I certainly do: sitting on a research assessment exercise panel in a hotel in a very wet Lake District. The excitement around the table was palpable as we all followed what was going on via the BBC website on our laptops. I don't suppose any of us were sitting there on the edge of our seats waiting to see if a black hole was going to swallow up Geneva, followed swiftly by the rest of the world, but no doubt there were people elsewhere fearing the worst. This book by the eminent US theoretical particle physicist Lisa Randall discusses, among other things, why physicists were so certain that a black hole was not going to consume us when the beam was first switched on (or at any point subsequently). It is a book written by a leading proponent of that highly technical branch of physics known as string theory, but one in which she attempts to make these tricky subjects accessible to everyone, without an equation in sight (barring the occasional E=mc2).