Showing results for "Stories" in Cosmology

In this grand poetic vision of the universe, Lawrence Krauss tells the dramatic story of the discovery of the hidden world that underlies reality - and our place within it. Reality is not what you think or sense - it’s weird, wild, and counterintuitive, and its inner workings seem at least as implausible as the idea that something can come from nothing. With his trademark wit and accessible style, Krauss leads us to realms so small that they are invisible to microscopes, to the birth and rebirth of light, and into the natural forces that govern our existence.

Brought to you by Penguin. The BBC presenter of 'Sky at Night', and Gresham Professor of Astronomy, Chris Lintott, takes us on an astonishing tour of bizarre accidents, big characters, and human error to tell the story of some of the most important astronomical events of the past hundred years...

What is the nature of the material world? How does it work? What is the universe and how was it formed? What is life? Where do we come from and how did we evolve? How and why do we think? What does it mean to be human? How do we know? There are many different versions of our creation story. This book tells the version according to modern science. It is a unique account, starting at the Big Bang and travelling right up to the emergence of humans as conscious intelligent beings, 13.8 billion years later.

David Christian, historian and best-selling author of Origin Story, is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past. But with Future Stories, he casts his sharp analytical eye forward, offering an introduction to the strange world of the future, and a guide to what we think we know about it at all scales, from the predictive mechanisms of single-celled organisms and tomato plants to the merging of colossal galaxies billions of years from now. 

2023 Nautilus Gold Award Examines our emergence as self-aware members of a Universe that is itself a unified and innately sentient entity that exists TO evolve Shares leading-edge scientific breakthroughs and shows how they support traditional visions of Earth as a living being--Gaia...

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?

Quasars are the brightest sustained phenomena in the known universe—engines of light powered by supermassive black holes devouring matter at the centers of distant galaxies. But they are more than cosmic spectacles. Every beam of quasar light that crosses the universe accumulates an extraordinarily detailed record of the gas, matter, and structure it passes through. The intergalactic medium writes its autobiography in the spectra of quasars, using absorption lines as words and sightlines as sentences.

Over the past two centuries scientific advances have made it clear that the universe is a story still unfolding. In this thought-provoking book, John F. Haught considers the deeper implications of this discovery. He contends that many others who have written books on life and the universe - including Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins - have overlooked a crucial aspect of cosmic history: the drama of life's awakening to interiority and religious awareness.

‘Sarah Cruddas is a gifted writer and Look Up is an inspired book. I am hopeful that we will never stop looking up.’ Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins Most of us have never been to space. To date, of the more than 100 billion humans that have ever existed, fewer than 600 humans have ever...

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.

A breakout bestseller in Italy, now available for American listeners for the first time, Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began is a short, humanistic tour of the origins of the universe, earth, and life—drawing on the latest discoveries in physics to explain the seven most significant...

The Short Story of the Universe is a new introduction to the subject of the universe. Covering 130 key components that make it up - from dwarf galaxies and spiral arms to red giants and the planets of the solar system - and linking these to the universe's structure and the theories that help us understand it, this book simplifies this riveting yet mind-boggling subject, telling the story of how it came into being and how it will eventually be no more.

In 2000, Martin Bojowald, then a twenty-seven-year-old post-doc at Pennsylvania State University, used a relatively new theory called loop quantum gravity—a cunning combination of Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics—to create a simple model of the universe. Loop quantum...