Includes bibliographical references and index.

What banged, how it banged, and what caused it to bang? -- The rise and fall of repulsive gravity -- Creation and its discontents -- The modern story of genesis -- The inflationary universe -- Too good to be wrong -- Eternal inflation -- The antigravity stone -- Runaway inflation -- The sky has spoken -- Infinite islands -- The king lives! -- Principle of mediocrity -- The cosmological constant problem -- Anthropic feuds -- Mediocrity raised to a principle -- A theory of everything -- Before the beginning -- Did the universe have a beginning? -- Creation of universes from nothing -- The end of the world -- Fire in the equations.