A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty
Dave Goldberg, Jeff Blomquist
Language: English
Pages: 305
ISBN: B00DNKYGOK
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Answers to science's most enduring questions from "Can I break the light-speed barrier like on Star Trek?" and "Is there life on other planets?" to "What is empty space made of?"
This is an indispensable guide to physics that offers readers an overview of the most popular physics topics written in an accessible, irreverent, and engaging manner while still maintaining a tone of wry skepticism. Even the novice will be able to follow along, as the topics are addressed using plain English and (almost) no equations. Veterans of popular physics will also find their nagging questions addressed, like whether the universe can expand faster than light, and for that matter, what the universe is expanding into anyway.
- Gives a one-stop tour of all the big questions that capture the public imagination including string theory, quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and the beginning of time
- Explains serious science in an entertaining, conversational, and easy-to-understand way
- Includes dozens of delightfully groan-worthy cartoons that explain everything from special relativity to Dark Matter
Filled with fascinating information and insights, this book will both deepen and transform your understanding of the universe.
Fundamentals of Space Medicine (2nd Edition) (Space Technology Library, Volume 23)
The Handy Astronomy Answer Book
Stardust: The Cosmic Seeds of Life (Astronomers' Universe)
Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos
Turbulence And Self Organization: Modeling Astrophysical Objects
completely without warning, a 1 is rolled. That 1 represents a critical failure in stability, and poof! we get a decay. If the cosmic randomizer does this for every atom for 4.5 billion years, half of them will still be uranium and half will have decayed, though there’s no predicting which will be which. We can exploit this idea to learn all sorts of things. For instance, carbon-14 is created by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere, which slowly circulate into our air. All living creatures that
strings of chronoengineering. So if we’re going to really build a practical time machine, we need to get our hands dirty by jumping into one of these time warpers feet first. By way of example, we’d like you to consider what would happen if Dr. Dave and Robo-Jeff decided to mount an expedition into Oblivion, a ten-solar-mass black hole, and claim it for the Evil Research Academy on Jupiter. Dr. Dave, being the more cautious (and perhaps smarter) of the two, decides to stay back and take
to the point of no return, he never actually crosses it. During the entire fall, Robo-Jeff appears to be outside the black hole. However, the lights on his suit eventually just get redshifted out of Dr. Dave’s detector range and he seems to disappear. From Robo-Jeff ’s perspective, on the other hand, everything seems to happen in fast forward, and the signals from the Evil Research Academy appear high-pitched. And what happens at the instant he crosses the event horizon? Time Travel Except for
other, far away. In fact, you could design it so you could easily travel faster than light. We’ll forget about the difficulty in building such a thing for the moment and point out the obvious. While wormholes sound like great teleportation devices, it’s not obvious how you’d use them as time machines. This is fine, though, because Kip Thorne of Caltech has done the heavy lifting for you. In his book Black Holes and Time Warps, he describes a wormhole time machine design that he and two of his
It’s like trying to measure an eel. It gets all wiggly while you hold a ruler, and by the time you measure where its head is, you realize that the end of the ruler isn’t where you left it. No matter; we still know what Dr. Snuggles will see when he looks through his telescope. He will observe exactly the same thing we do here on Earth: nearly all of the galaxies in the sky seem to be flying away from Tentaculus VII, and the farther away the galaxies are, the faster they seem to be receding. The
