Showing results for "LIKE" in Cosmology

For a hundred years the cosmological constant has been served up as physics' most embarrassing riddle. Empty space, we are told, has no structure at all —no grain, no direction, no preferred place to stand —and yet it presses outward on the universe, stretching the heavens apart with a quiet, relentless force. How can the same nothing be both featureless and full of push? How can emptiness shove? This book answers by refusing the trick question. The word “structureless,” it turns out, smuggles two very different ideas into one.

Twelve light-years from Earth, a star burns quietly in the constellation of the Whale. It is the nearest solitary star that resembles our Sun—a little older, a little cooler, a little poorer in the heavy elements from which planets are made. For sixty years, astronomers have trained the world’s finest instruments on Tau Ceti, searching for planets, for signals, for signs of life. What they have found is something more unexpected and more instructive: a masterclass in the limits of human knowledge.