Space Science

A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe.

A company of Army Rangers is sent on an interstellar colony ship to secure a foothold on a dangerous, alien planet through violence of action. Leaving behind a warring Earth flung headfirst into a conflict of mutual assured destruction, the Rangers and the accompanying crew of first colonists are guided on a 40-year journey by an unprecedented artificial intelligence. But when they emerge from the frigid embrace of cryosleep, they awake to a nightmare, finding themselves greeted by the same ruthless enemy that brought about the ruin of Earth.

Nine hundred thousand years ago, something annihilated the Amarantin civilization just as it was on the verge of discovering space flight. Now one scientist, Dan Sylveste, will stop at nothing to solve the Amarantin riddle before ancient history repeats itself. With no other resources at his disposal, Sylveste forges a dangerous alliance with the cyborg crew of the starship Nostalgia for Infinity. But as he closes in on the secret, a killer closes in on him because the Amarantin were destroyed for a reason.

Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein's project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe's structure and origin. The quest for gravitational waves involved years of risky research and many personal and professional struggles that threatened to derail one of the world's largest scientific endeavors.

Includes books one and two in the Sleeping Gods series: Endeavor and Erebus.

This new and long-awaited sequel to Carl Sagan's international best seller continues the electrifying journey through space and time, linking worlds within and worlds billions of miles away and envisioning a future of science tempered with wisdom. Based on National Geographic's internationally-renowned television series, this groundbreaking and visually stunning book explores how science and civilization grew up together.

The human race is at a crossroads. In the coming years, we will make decisions regarding our human spaceflight program that will lead to one of two familiar futures: the open universe of Star Trek, where we allow ourselves the opportunity to spread our wings and attempt to flourish as an interplanetary species - or the closed, dystopian, and ultimately self-destructive world of Soylent Green. If we ever hope to live in the future that is the former scenario, our first stepping stone must be a manned mission to Mars.

Something strange is going on in the cosmos. Scientists are uncovering a catalogue of weird phenomena that simply can’t be explained by our long-established theories of the universe. After decades of fruitless searching, could we finally be catching glimpses of a profound new view of our physical world? Or are we being fooled by cruel tricks of the data? In Space Oddities, Harry Cliff, a physicist who does cutting-edge work on the Large Hadron Collider, provides a riveting look at the universe’s most confounding puzzles.

There are deep connections between stars and atoms, between the cosmos and the microworld. Just six numbers, imprinted in the "Big Bang", determine the essential features of our entire physical world. Moreover, cosmic evolution is astonishingly sensitive to the values of these numbers. If any one of them were "untuned", there could be no stars and no life. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, our place in it, and the nature of physical laws.

The galaxy remembers Hadrian Marlowe as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives - even the emperor himself - against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier. Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world.

The seventh novel in James S. A. Corey's New York Times best-selling Expanse series - now a major television series.

In the 35th century, mankind has colonized vast reaches of space, yet war remains constant as galactic governments and interstellar corporations fight for control of resource-rich planets and lucrative interstellar trade routes. And if centuries of war has taught man one thing, it's that planets are valuable and lives are cheap.

Joe Colsco boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to attend a national chemistry meeting. He would never set foot on Earth again. On planet Anyar, Joe is found unconscious on a beach of a large island inhabited by humans where the level of technology is similar to Earth circa 1700. He awakes amid strangers speaking an unintelligible language and struggles to accept losing his previous life and finding a place in a society with different customs, needing a way to support himself and not knowing a single soul.

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone and perhaps 400 billion galaxies in the universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of these extraterrestrials?

The complete Baldwin's Legacy series.

Mars and the Moon have been colonized, piracy runs rampant in the asteroid belts, and a thriving society grows in the depths of space. Humanity prepares to embark upon its greatest journey - the colonization of Alpha Centauri. Then, everything changes. A deep space reconnaissance probe discovers a new Earth-like planet 12 light-years from Earth’s sun. The probe also finds something unusual, something unnerving. A new mission is created, a space fleet is formed, and humanity embarks on unravelling the greatest mystery of all - the origins of life itself.

Zero, Nyx, and the other Pathfinder colonists have adjusted to life on Kaguya. But Earth has built much faster starships-the Dreamcatcher arrives 10 years early, and the Stargazer arrives so early it actually got there before the Pathfinder did! Now the Stargazer is a lost shipwreck, and the race is on to find it, and who should show up looking for it but Nyx's dangerous family: Big Mama, Jim, and Kratt. Nyx and Zero will face kidnappers, pirates, shipwrecks, warlords, dragons, and maybe a new ally or two on their way to save the day once again.

Most of us have heard of black holes and supernovas, galaxies and the big bang. But few of us understand more than the bare facts about the universe we call home. What is really out there? How did it all begin? Jo Dunkley begins in Earth's neighborhood, explaining the nature of the solar system, the stars in our night sky, and the Milky Way. She then moves out past nearby galaxies - and back in time - to the horizon of the observable universe, which contains over a hundred billion galaxies, each with billions of stars, many orbited by planets, some of which may host life.

In war, there is no second place. To ensure victory, planetary governments employ private armies to help fight their battles. And the Berserkers are the best. As the galaxy's preeminent mercenary force, they are hired by governments and corporations to do jobs that are too tough, too messy, or too deadly for their own forces. Expertly trained and equipped with the most advanced weaponry, they are willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill a contract - if the price is right.

Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper. In the dead systems where gates lead to stranger things than alien planets, Elvi Okoye begins a desperate search to discover the nature of a genocide that happened before the first human beings existed and to find weapons to fight a war against forces at the edge of the imaginable. But the price of that knowledge may be higher than she can pay.