Society, history reveals, tenaciously wards off ideological change.

Many astrophysicists have, or almost have, been ousted from society for their radical theories.

The Inquisition suppressed Galileo’s heliocentric theory because it outrightly denied Earth was the center of the solar system. He spent the remaining years of his life under house arrest, doomed into silence about that which he knew was true.

Just a few decades ago, Dale Russell, visiting professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, risked his career when, to his peers’ dismay, he asserted it was an asteroid that triggered the dinosaur extinction.

Each of these theories is, today, generally accepted by both society and the scientific community.

And Alex Vilenkin will have to fight the same battle.

In Many Worlds in One, Vilenkin proposes — and backs up each bit of his theory with physical and mathematical laws and equations — that there’s no one universe. Instead, there are infinite, working-model replicas of the same universe. Nothing is left out. In the other universes, Earth still takes 365.2425 days to complete its orbit. In the other universes, you’re still reading this article (though some of you might have stopped reading long before, and some might have just trashed the whole paper upon completing the sudoku on page 2.)

It might not be as far-fetched as you think.

Nietzsche would have flipped. If there’s no valid excuse for life in one universe, what excuse can there be for dozens of that same life in other universes?

Vilenkin tackles the subject of multiple universes the way one would logically work his way through a tough mathematical equation: he elucidates each step, each term, each piece of the (rather large and complicated) puzzle. And, comfortingly, he doesn’t write for a fifth-grade audience.

Instead, he reminds readers — most of whom don’t have the background or patience to recall every definition of physics terminology at each mention, let alone readily utilize them in order to understand a more complex term or theory — why, for example, Einstein’s general theory of relativity comes into play. Once he’s done explaining Einstein’s steps toward developing and revising the theory, he tears apart each facet of it, making sure his readers fully understand terms such as the “cosmological constant” — the spacial, negative pressure vacuum resulting in antigravity.

It’s almost as if you’ve been invited to participate in an intellectual conversation you know is far beyond any realm of comprehension, yet instead of looking around, agape, you discover you know exactly what’s going on.

Vilenkin makes you believe your capacity for understanding is extraordinarily impressive. And while this may be true, his clear prose and concise knack for pinpointing what you won’t fully understand creates an elegantly drawn world in which the numbered jumble that is mathematics and physics is laid out, flat and concrete.

Many Worlds in One is genuinely riveting. Vilenkin’s admirable understanding of the subject, imbued with his willingness to clarify for those who have researched Hawthorne rather than Hubble, will leave you pondering “what banged, how it banged, and what caused it to bang.”

Granted, I’m slightly biased — every star, every galaxy, every black hole enthralls me. And note that the science in this book is slightly, if not exceedingly, complicated. The average reader will pause after many sentences so he can consider what he’s just read.

Walk through Vilenkin’s theory with him. Whether you believe his theory, you’ll not have wasted any time reading this book.