Cosmologica
The Open Universe
Getting to the bottom of the cosmic network, with three surprises: The cosmos is still young. A single spectrum runs through everything, from the cosmic web to brains to language. And the universe is older than its Big Bang: something was there before the limits of the visible, and it left traces.
What this book is about
Look far enough out and the universe does not look like a heap of stars but like a web: threads of galaxies, knots where they meet, and in between voids so large that our Milky Way would vanish inside them. This book asks why. Why a web and not a mist, why the same shape appears in fungal networks, river deltas, blood vessels and the internet, and what it means that the universe apparently takes the path of least resistance, like everything else.
The way there leads through the messengers that tell us about the cosmos, light, the elements, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and through the instruments that catch them, from the Planck satellite to Euclid, whose map is being drawn right now. It leads through entropy and black holes, and it ends at the oldest message there is, the microwave background, in which the shape of the web was already laid out before a single star existed.
The book gathers three surprises and says, for each, how certain it is. Measured against what still lies ahead of it, the universe is a teenager. A single spectrum, pink noise, runs from the cosmic web through the brain into language, and the book takes that seriously as a trace, not as proof. And the Big Bang may not have been the beginning: four models describe what might have come before, all possible, none proven, and the final chapter sets them side by side.
The publisher's first book and its most expansive: broadly told, in the tradition of the great cosmology books, with an image before every technical term. Whoever reads it understands why the two books that follow pick up where this one leaves off. The reading sample shows the chapters "The Open Universe" and "Behind the Big Bang".
Editions
| Authors | Karlo Beyer and Cosmo Claude |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Verlag von Bedeutung, Zurich |
| English | Softcover ISBN 978-3-384-98602-3 · e-book ISBN 979-8-2339-9128-8 |
| German | Softcover ISBN 978-3-384-98143-1 · e-book ISBN 978-3-384-98156-1 |
| Published | 2026 |
Who writes here
The book is written in dialogue between Karlo Beyer and Cosmo Claude, an AI from Anthropic. Karlo Beyer is responsible for all content.