Does modern cosmology bear any residual of the ancient cosmogonies it replaced? ‘Functionally’, Zakariya notes, ‘the stories that science has told accounting for beginnings and endings, for the nature of everywhere and everywhen, can be seen as scientific myths’ (p. 8). In a dense introduction Zakariya discusses at length the main theoretical questions behind his historical inquiry into modern cosmological syntheses since the mid-eighteenth century. Since its emergence, by means of rational arguments and publicly producible experiences, modern science of cosmology has provided answers to the eternal human quest for meaning. Because it focuses on the origins of everything, cosmology has always been at the crossroad of religious beliefs and rational inquiry. It is significant, for instance, that for scientists such as Isaac Newton, a scientific study of the origins of the universe could not take place. Science, Newton claimed, can only grasp the nature of the physical world as it is now; by no means can it undertake the inquiry of its origins. But Kant and Laplace largely employed Newtonian principles to break the boundaries that Newton posed to natural science. Building on the cosmological ideas of Kant and Laplace, leading intellectual figures such as John Herschel and William Whewell envisaged the possibility of a synthesis of all scientific knowledge that could also answer the question of the origins of everything. Zakariya's book focuses almost exclusively on Anglo-American debates. With the exception of Helmholtz and Einstein, the cosmological works of non-English-speaking scientists are considered only inasmuch as they contribute to Anglo-American debates. Thus, in Zakariya's narrative, it was only after the emergence of Helmholtz's principle of conservation of energy that scientists like William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) could turn the origins of everything into a widely accepted scientific topic.

The nineteenth-century divide between geology and biology on the one hand and physics on the other did not favour the emergence of a consistent synthesis. A dominant scientific universal history was not achieved until the Belgian priest and physicist George Lemaître could overcome Einstein's doubts on the notion itself of the age of the universe. Once Lemaître's dynamic universe finally led to the Big Bang theory, a new synthetic perspective opened. Focusing on the work of George Gamow, Zakariya highlights the relevance of the design and use of atomic bombs during the Second World War for the public acknowledgement of the synthetic historical perspective of the Big Bang beyond the scientific community. If scientists could produce such wonders, the deepest secrets of the universe could soon be revealed: this, in Zakariya's words, is what many laymen might have thought in the 1950s. The advent of the new ‘atomic science of cosmology’ (p. 214) is reconstructed through the analysis of the scientific and political debates on the role of science in post-Second World War Western societies. The contribution of biology towards this new scientific and popular topic proved fundamental, as the ideas of Dobzhansky on cosmic evolution show. Thus in the 1960s English-speaking readers were offered popular versions of these scientific syntheses in different forms: popular-science books, science fiction, radio and television series. The significance of these new media is reflected by the increasing space that broadcasting programmes have in the second and third sections of Zakariya's book.

The last chapter focuses exclusively on three relevant television series: Evolution (2001), Nova (2004), and Cosmos (2014). Long before these, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (1973) and Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980) set a model of what Zakariya describes as mythology of science based on a synthetic account of universal history. In Sagan's view, science is the universal language of creation. Like old myths, science provides answers to the quest for the origins that humans seem unable to discharge, albeit in a new language and on different grounds. The aspiration to achieving a complete final story, however, has not gone unchallenged. Even within the scientific community, the quest for a final theory of everything has revived Newtonian's scepticism towards a closing gap between physics and history, astronomy and cosmology. According to Zakariya, Steven Weinberg has been the most vocal supporter of the attempt by energy physicists to challenge the cosmologists’ preponderance in gaining research funds via NASA. The failure of the superconductor supercollider project in 1993 marked the successful ‘intrusion of historical accidents’ into the study of the universal laws by the hard science of physics. Like biology and geology, this latter is to some extent a historical discipline. By dealing with the origins, it provides answers that end up taking the place – and sometimes also the shape – of myths in popular culture.