Showing titles in Cosmology

How would Saturn’s rings look from a spaceship sailing just above them? If you were falling into a black hole, what’s the last thing you’d see before your spaghettification? What would it be like to visit the faraway places we currently experience only through high-powered telescopes and robotic emissaries? Faster-than-light travel may never be invented, but we can still take the scenic route through the universe with renowned astronomer and science communicator Philip Plait.

Imagine you’re trying to build the biggest, most awesome LEGO castle ever. You gather all your colorful bricks—the reds, blues, yellows, and greens. You plan your design, start stacking the bricks, and build towers, walls, gates, and secret tunnels. Everything’s going great. But suddenly, something odd starts to happen. Parts of your castle stick together more tightly than they should. Some towers refuse to fall over, no matter how much you poke them. And even stranger, the whole play area you’re building on starts stretching.

In the final book of his astonishing career, Carl Sagan brilliantly examines the burning questions of our lives, our world, and the universe around us. These luminous, entertaining essays travel both the vastness of the cosmos and the intimacy of the human mind, posing such fascinating questions as how did the universe originate and how will it end, and how can we meld science and compassion to meet the challenges of the coming century?

What would it have been like to be an eyewitness to the Big Bang? In 2014, astronomers wielding BICEP2, the most powerful cosmology telescope ever made, revealed that they'd glimpsed the spark that ignited the Big Bang. Millions around the world tuned in to the announcement broadcast live from Harvard University, immediately igniting rumors of an imminent Nobel Prize. But had these cosmologists truly read the cosmic prologue or, swept up in Nobel dreams, had they been deceived by a galactic mirage?

With wonder, wit, and flair - and in record time and space - geophysicist David Bercovici explains how everything came to be everywhere, from the creation of stars and galaxies to the formation of Earth's atmosphere and oceans to the origin of life and human civilization. Bercovici marries humor and legitimate scientific intrigue, rocketing listeners across nearly 14 billion years and making connections between the essential theories that give us our current understanding of topics as varied as particle physics, plate tectonics, and photosynthesis.

My beginner's book is your ticket to one of the coolest and most mysterious subjects out there. This isn't your average physics book. It's a portal to understanding the stuff that makes up... well, everything! Subatomic particles. Do not let their size fool you; they have a massive impact on the world around you—the fundamental part of how everything works and not as complex as you might fear.

A hilarious guide to what's real (and what's not) in our vast, beautiful (and terrifying) universe.

The hunt for the Higgs particle has involved the biggest, most expensive experiment ever. So exactly what is this particle? Why does it matter so much? What does it tell us about the universe? Was finding it really worth all the effort? The short answer is yes. The Higgs field is proposed as the way in which particles gain mass - a fundamental property of matter. It's the strongest indicator yet that the Standard Model of physics really does reflect the basic building blocks of our universe. Little wonder the hunt and discovery of this new particle produced such intense media interest.

In this audiobook, astrophysicist Janna Levin blends memoir and visionary science to provide a groundbreaking personal account of her life and ideas.

The late great astronomer and astrophysicist describes his personal search to understand the nature of the sacred in the vastness of the cosmos. Exhibiting a breadth of intellect nothing short of astounding, Sagan presents his views on a wide range of topics, including the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, creationism and so-called intelligent design.

The marvelous complexity of the universe emerges from several deep laws and a handful of fundamental constants that fix its shape, scale, and destiny. Where did these laws and these constants come from? And why are the laws so fruitful when written in the language of mathematics? Author Peter Atkins considers the minimum effort needed to equip the universe with its laws and its constants. He explores the origin of the conservation of energy, of electromagnetism, of classical and quantum mechanics, and of thermodynamics, showing how all these laws spring from deep symmetries.

Carl Sagan, writer and scientist, returns from the frontier to tell us about how the world works. In his delightfully down-to-earth style, he explores and explains a mind-boggling future of intelligent robots, extraterrestrial life and its consequences, and other provocative, fascinating quandaries of the future that we want to see today.

There is no more profound, enduring, or fascinating question in all of science than that of how time, space, and matter began. Now John Barrow, who has been at the cutting edge of research in this area and has written extensively about it, guides us on a journey to the beginning of time, into a world of temperatures and densities so high that we cannot recreate them in a laboratory.

From Brian Greene, one of the world's leading physicists, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way. Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time...

Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: We still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history.

THE PLANETS is Dava Sobel's sweeping look at our heavenly galaxy. In the spirit of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Sobel once again brings science and history deftly to life as she explores the origins of the planets and reveals the exotic environments that exist in each of these fascinating...

A Crack in Everything is the story of how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic centre stage. As a journalist, Marcus Chown interviews many of the scientists who made the key discoveries, and, as a former physicist, he translates the most esoteric of science into everyday language. The result is a uniquely engaging audiobook that tells one of the great untold stories in modern science.

From the cutting edge of science and living spirituality: a guide to understanding our identity and purpose in the world Outlines the new understanding of matter and mind coming to light at the cutting edge of physics and consciousness research Explains how we can evolve consciously...

Black holes, demystified: follow along the quest to understand the history and influence of one of space science's most fascinating and confounding phenomena Led by physicist James Trefil and astrophysicist Shobita Satyapal, this book traverses the incredible history of black holes and...

In this special thematic anthology, we traverse the solar system, the galaxies and the multiverse, voyaging across space to explore 25 celestial objects and phenomena. Included are programmes on the universe, the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets - among them our near neighbours, Venus and Mars. Also featured are discussions on comets, asteroids and black holes, as well as eclipses, exoplanets and the mysterious, invisible substance known as 'dark matter'.