
David Christian: Origin Story: A Big History of Everything (Hardcover, Little, Brown and Company)
"Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But …
We don’t know what Goldilocks conditions allowed a universe to emerge, and we still can’t explain it any better than novelist Terry Pratchett did when he wrote, “The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”
— Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian