Science Cosmology

In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics. These include Graham's number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite value could never be reached before the universe reset itself; and 10^{-120}, which measures the desperately unlikely balance of energy the universe needs to exist....

We know the universe had a beginning. But what happens at the end of the story? With lively wit and wry humour, astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us on a mind-bending tour through each of the cosmos' possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, Vacuum Decay, the Big Rip and the Bounce. Guiding us through major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory and much more, she describes how small tweaks to our incomplete understanding of reality can result in starkly different futures.

It takes a certain amount of courage to step beyond one's day-to-day experiments and look at the big picture - and the origin of the Moon is a big picture question par excellence. Perhaps it makes sense that William Hartmann, one of the two scientists who unraveled the Moon's biggest mystery, is not only a scientist but also a part-time artist and science fiction writer. It took someone with an artist's eye and a fiction writer's speculative temperament to see the big picture....

Trained as a musician, amateur scientist William Herschel found international fame after discovering the planet Uranus in 1781. Though he is still best known for this finding, his partnership with his sister Caroline yielded groundbreaking work, including techniques that remain in use today. The duo pioneered comprehensive surveys of the night sky, carefully categorizing every visible object in the void. Caroline wrote an influential catalogue of nebulae, and William discovered infrared radiation.

In October of 2016, our estimate of how many galaxies there are in the universe jumped from 200 billion to 2 trillion, which begs the question: is there life outside of our planet? And if so, what does that do to our theology? In Alien Theology, Pastor Bradley enters into a conversation that started before Christ and considers the possibility of alien life in light of Scripture, science, and logic.

Qui de mieux que Nathalie A. Cabrol pour faire le point dans un essai vivant et didactique sur l’une des questions les plus profondes de l’humanité : sommes-nous seuls dans l’Univers ? La directrice scientifique du centre SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, " Recherche d’intelligence extraterrestre ") aborde tour à tour l’exploration de notre système solaire, la recherche des exoplanètes, celle des signaux extraterrestres et les types de civilisations ou vies qu’on espère y trouver.

This Way to the Universe is a celebration of the astounding, ongoing scientific investigations that have revealed the nature of reality at its smallest, at its largest, and at the scale of our daily lives. The enigmas Professor Michael Dine discusses are like landmarks on a fantastic journey to the edge of the universe.

How big is the universe? In the early twentieth century, scientists took sides. One held that the entire universe was contained in the Milky Way galaxy. Their champion was the strong-willed astronomer Harlow Shapley. Another camp believed that the universe was so vast that the Milky Way was just one galaxy among billions—the view that would prevail, proven by the equally headstrong Edwin Hubble.

In this bundle, astrophysicist Andrew May take a deep dive into space exploration and our continued and evolving fascination with the cosmos. Astrobiology: May gives an expert overview of our current state of knowledge, looking at how life started on Earth, the tell-tale signatures it produces, and how such signatures might be detected elsewhere in the Solar System. Destination Mars: May traces the history of our fascination with the Red Planet. The Space Business: May provides an in-depth look at the triumphs and heroic failures of quixotic quests to commercialize the final frontier.

For Irwin Shapiro, science starts with questions. This book provides a broad and entertaining survey of major scientific discoveries that have changed our views of nature and, in turn, spawned further questions. Shapiro, an award-winning scientist and beloved teacher, separates his inquiry into three parts: looking up at the universe; looking down at the earth and its fossils; and looking in at the story of life. His framework encourages listeners to view science as a detective story—to observe and question nature and natural phenomena, and to base all conclusions on scientific evidence.

We have long fantasized about finding life on planets other than our own. Yet even as we become aware of the vast expanses beyond our solar system, it remains clear that Earth is exceptional. The question is: Why? In Lucky Planet, astrobiologist David Waltham argues that Earth’s climate stability is what makes it uniquely able to support life, and it is nothing short of luck that made such conditions possible. The four-billion-year stretch of good weather that our planet has experienced is statistically so unlikely that chances are slim that we will ever encounter intelligent extraterrestrial others.

En El universo en una caja, el profesor de cosmología Andrew Pontzen, explica de una manera clara y rigurosa qué son las simulaciones, esos códigos informáticos con los que los científicos han podido recrear el universo y profundizar en su historia, poniendo a prueba por primera vez ideas centenarias. Esta suerte de manual fundamental para amantes de la astronomía, que aún está desplegando sus capacidades, replantea lo que creemos saber sobre los agujeros negros o la materia cósmica para arrojar nuevas luces sobre nuestra realidad.

Brian Clegg's acclaimed popular science book Inflight Science explored the science experienced on a plane flight. Interstellar Tours takes that concept and goes large. It takes the listener on a tour of our galaxy on the starship Endurance.

At the heart of the Milky Way, there is a distortion in the fabric of the Universe. Caused by something 4 million times bigger than our Sun, it is where space and time are so warped that everything within 12 million kilometres is trapped, even light. This region of no return is called the event horizon, and inside it lies the end of time as we know it. We have named it Sagittarius A* and it is a supermassive black hole.

Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) was a genius who revolutionized the way the world looks at electricity. In February 1915, Tesla published a short 12-page work titled How Cosmic Forces Shape Our Destinies in the New York American magazine, recreated as an audiobook here. As Tesla explains in this work, "everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside. There is no gap between, no break of continuity, no special and distinguishing vital agent. The same law governs all matter, all the universe is alive."

The universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together. The expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. Maybe it was a result of a long-discarded version of Einstein's theory of gravity, one that contained what was called a "cosmological constant." Maybe there was some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space. Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein's theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. It turns out that ...

Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the 20th century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaître convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaître called "the day without yesterday".

Após o enorme sucesso de Uma breve história do tempo, a Intrínseca traz a luxuosa reedição de O universo numa casca de noz, na qual Stephen Hawking se vale de ilustrações, fotos e esquemas detalhados para mostrar grandes descobertas no campo da física teórica. Tudo isso, é claro, com sua conhecida clareza, elucidando temas complexos por meio de conceitos e ideias do dia a dia, como a inflação, as cartas de baralho e as linhas ferroviárias, e permeado com seu peculiar senso de humor.

Fra tutte le teorie scientifiche, la relatività è quella che più ci affascina e ci sconcerta. Andando contro la nostra rassicurante percezione del mondo, ci costringe a prendere atto che spazio e tempo non sono due dimensioni fisse e separate, ma si contraggono e si dilatano, sfumando l'una nell'altra, fino a perdere la loro individualità. La realtà è, dunque, molto più strana di quello che appare. Tutto ciò può sembrare misterioso o comprensibile solo agli addetti ai lavori. Ma non è così.

Is there such a thing as a fundamental reality, something which was around before our universe came into existence and which will still remain when all matter, time, and space itself ultimately disappear? Something fundamental which, in turn, can make space and time and matter arise from seemingly nothing? Under most cosmological and physical models, the last known remnants of reality are the disembodied laws of mathematics - beyond which it is extremely difficult to probe further.