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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith,

literary editor of The Spectator. And this this week my guest is Andrew Ponson,

whose new book is The Universe in a Box, a New Cosmic History. Now, it contains an awful

lot about cosmic history, but it's a history actually of something more precise and interesting

than that, which is how we simulate and how we create models of the universe.

Andrew, can you start by telling our listeners sort of a little bit about how we simulate and how we create models of the universe.

Andrew, can you start by telling our listeners sort of a little bit about what exactly it is you do and how you got into it? There's a lovely little CPR origin story you include.

Yeah, I come into it in a really roundabout way, I suppose.

What we're trying to do at its heart is understand the universe. So it's

really asking the question, where did we come from? And, you know, when you look out into the

night sky, you see a handful of stars, but if you go somewhere really dark, you maybe see a few

hundred or a few thousand. That's still the tip of the iceberg. I think we know

the universe is absolutely enormous. And so understanding what's out there, how it gave rise to us

here on a rocky planet, and putting all of that together into a sort of coherent picture,

that's at the heart of what we do.

And the way I ended up doing that is almost by accident, really. I was doing a physics degree,

and I was just terrible at doing lab experiments. So I was looking for a way to avoid doing

...