My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the cosmologist Andrew Pontzen. His The Universe In A Box: A New Cosmic History describes how we have learned to simulate first the weather, and then the universe itself – and how we discovered that those simulations don't just mimic reality but allow us to learn new things about it. Dark matter, the Big Bang and the scientific importance of suboptimal pizza: it's all here.

Produced by Oscar Edmondson, Joe Bedell-Brill and Cindy Yu.