Cosmic evolution -- The beginning -- When the Universe was one second old -- The creation of life -- The fate of the Universe -- Universes withouth end, or the cosmos is a big nothing -- The search for a theory of matter -- "Was it a God that wrote these signs?" -- Too many particles -- Einstein's unified field theory -- The hunting of the quark -- Superstrings and other entanglements -- The scientific imagination -- Intuitions of a deeper reality -- How to tell what is science from what isn't science -- When the world changed -- Platonists and Kantians