Although Livio works with a telescope that's produced a lot of spectacular imagery, the beauty he is concerned with here is more abstract, stemming partly from the simplicity and symmetry of physical laws. (The laws are "symmetrical" in that they do not change with an object's position in space and time.)

Livio also associates such beauty with the "Copernican principle" that humans do not occupy a privileged place in the universe (much as Copernicus discerned that Earth is not at the center of the solar system). In other words, a beautiful cosmological theory would not depend on wild coincidences or contrivances.

Here, Livio enters controversial territory. There has been growing debate in recent years, even beyond the physics community, about whether some aspects of the cosmos, such as the strength of gravity, are "fine-tuned" for life, and if so what this signifies. (It's sometimes held to have religious meaning, but could also mean, among other things, that there are multiple universes, or that we define life too narrowly.)

However, Livio's emphasis on aesthetics does little to further this debate. As he himself acknowledges toward book's end, the "eye of the beholder" plays some role in determining what's beautiful, even in cosmology. Moreover, there's no guarantee the universe will match anyone's criterion of attractiveness.

And at times, Livio's preoccupation with aesthetics seems overwrought. One unwanted finding in cosmology affects him badly: "I had a feeling in my stomach similar to the one I had in 1975, when I heard that somebody had carried a knife into the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and managed to gouge twelve deep slashes into Rembrandt's masterpiece The Night Watch."

This book has an interesting goal, to combine cosmology and matters more closely associated with art. Unfortunately, The Accelerating Universe is less compelling than this dual focus might suggest.