#219 - Philippe Blondel and John W. Mason - Solar System Update

Author or Editor: Philippe Blondel and John W. Mason
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2006
ISBN: 3-540-26056-0
Pages: 329
Size: 8.69MB

This first volume of Solar System Update comprises a collection of twelve topical reviews, each presented as a separate chapter, covering important areas of Solar System science. The contributions have been written by scientists at the forefront of research in the selected areas, in a style which, we hope, will be accessible not only to advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduate students, but also to professional astronomers, planetary scientists and physicists, helping them to keep abreast of the latest developments in related fields.

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#215 - Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

Author or Editor: Steven Weinberg
Publisher: Fontana Paperbacks
Published: 2006
ISBN: 1 904048 62 5
Pages: 174
Size: 1,81MB

It is a remarkable thing to be able to say just what the universe was like at the end of the first second or the first minute or the first year. To a physicist, the exhilarating thing is to be able to work things out numerically, to be able to say that at such and such a time the temperature and density and chemical composition of the universe had such 10 The First Three Minutes and such values. True, we are not absolutely certain about all this, but it is exciting that we are now able to speak of such things with any confidence at all. It was this excitement that I wanted to convey to the reader.

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#212 - M. Heifetz and W. Tirion - A Walk through the Southern Sky

Author or Editor: M. Heifetz and W. Tirion
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007
ISBN: 9780521689458
Pages:
Size:

From the time of early humans, people have looked at the stars to help them navigate across seas and deserts, know when to plant and to harvest, establish their legends, mark the change of seasons and even align their temples of worship.

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#208 - Chris Impey - The Living Cosmos

Author or Editor: Chris Impey
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007
ISBN: 1400065062
Pages: 393
Size: 4,97MB

It’s quite peculiar to be human. Our lives are filled with event and episode, with work and recreation, with the ebb and flow of friends and family. Seen from above, our actions would seem as purposeful as the activity of bees in a hive or squirrels in a forest. Yet we each house the awareness that we’re living, conscious entities. We reflect on our existence. We know that we will die. Perhaps we share self-awareness with a few other species on Earth, but no other creature has gained knowledge of its place in the largest landscapes of time and space.

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#206 - Eric Chaisson - Epic of Evolution : Seven Ages of the Cosmos

Author or Editor: Eric Chaisson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005
Pages: 478
Size: 6,51MB

Now, at the beginning of a new millennium, modern science is helping us construct a truly big picture. We are coming to appreciate how all objects—from quark to quasar, from microbe to mind—are interrelated. We are attempting to decipher the scenario of cosmic evolution: a grand synthesis of many varied changes in the assembly and composition of radiation, matter, and life throughout the history of the Universe. These are the changes, operating across almost incomprehensible domains of space and nearly inconceivable durations of time, that have given rise to our galaxy, our star, our planet, and ourselves.

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#202 - Joseph A. Angelo, Jr. - Encyclopedia of Space and Astronomy

Author or Editor: Joseph A. Angelo, Jr.
Publisher: Facts On File, Inc.
Published: 2006
Pages: 740
Size: 10,6MB

The Encyclopedia of Space and Astronomy introduces the exciting relationship between modern astronomy and space technology. The book also examines the technical, social, and philosophical influences this important combination of science and technology exerts on our global civilization. With the start of the space age in 1957, scientists gained the ability to place sophisticated observatories in outer space. Since such orbiting astronomical facilities operate above the masking limitations imposed by our planet’s atmosphere, they can collect scientific data in regions of the electromagnetic spectrum previously unavailable to astronomers who could only look at the heavens from the surface of Earth.

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#198 - National Research Council - Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium

Author or Editor: National Research Council
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2001
Pages: 246
Size: 5,28MB

The National Research Council established the survey under the auspices of the BPA, which oversaw the study in close consultation with the Space Studies Board. After consultations with members of the National Academy of Sciences Astronomy Section, members of astronomy departments in U.S. universities, and other leading astronomers, the BPA presented a slate of nominees for membership on the survey committee to the chair of the National Research Council. The NRC chair subsequently appointed the 15-member Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee (AASC), with Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., and Christopher F. McKee as co-chairs, to carry out the study.

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#195 - Sir Patrick Moore - Atlas of the Universe

Author or Editor: Sir Patrick Moore
Publisher: Philip's™
Published: 2006
Pages: 288
Size: 50MB

Astronomy is certainly the oldest of all the sciences. Our remote cave-dwelling ancestors must have looked up into the sky and marvelled at what they saw there, but they can have had no idea what the universe is really like, or how vast it is. It was natural for them to believe that the Earth is flat, with the sky revolving round it once a day carrying the Sun, the Moon and the stars.

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#191 - Lisa Yount - MODERN ASTRONOMY: Expanding the Universe

Author or Editor: Lisa Yount
Publisher: Chelsea House
Published: 2006
Pages: 204
Size: 4.2MB

More than a million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans began to shape stones into tools that helped them compete with the specialized predators around them. Starting about 35,000 years ago, the modern type of human, Homo sapiens, also created elaborate cave paintings and finely crafted art objects, showing that technology had been joined with imagination and language to compose a new and vibrant world of culture. Humans were not only shaping their world but also representing it in art and thinking about its nature and meaning.

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#186 - Norman k. Glendenning - Our Place in the Universe

Author or Editor: Norman k. Glendenning
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Published: 2007
Pages: 223
Size: 7.04MB

Our small place in space | this planet Earth | together with Sun and other planets of our solar system and their many moons is located about two-thirds from the center of the disk-shaped galaxy that we know as the Milky Way. When we look toward its center on a clear night what we see is the faint luminosity of billions of stars that make up this galaxy.
There are other galaxies too, far away, that look to our naked eyes just like any other star. But they too contain billions of stars. From our vantage point on Earth, orbiting a rather insignicant star that we call Sun, located in the Milky Way Galaxy in one of its many solar systems | we gaze in wonder.

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#178 - Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Louis N. Irwin - Life in the Universe

Author or Editor: Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Louis N. Irwin
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2004
Pages: 172
Size: 3.77MB

Astrobiology studies the origin, evolution, distribution, and fate of life throughout the universe, with no direct evidence that life exists anywhere in the universe other than on Earth. But there are compelling reasons to assume that life exists pervasively throughout the cosmos. That assumption is derived from empirical observations on the nature of the universe and the natural laws that govern it, from analysis of the history and properties of the one case of life that we do know, and on a logical integration of fact and theory.

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#176 - Stephen Hawking - Universe in a Nutshell

Author or Editor: Stephen Hawking
Publisher: Transworld Publishers
Published: 2001
Pages: 210
Size: 26.5MB

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, scientists believed they were close to a complete description of the universe. They imagined that space was filled by a continuous medium called the "ether." Light rays and radio signals were waves in this ether, just as sound is pressure waves in air. All that was needed for a complete theory were careful measurements of the elastic properties of the ether.

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#166 - Stacy Palen - Theory and Problems of Astronomy

Author or Editor: Stacy Palen
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2002
Pages: 234
Size: 4.19MB

The purpose of this Outline is to serve as a supplement to a basic astronomy text. Much of the material here is abbreviated, and students should use this book as a guide to the key concepts in modern astronomy, but not as an all-inclusive resource.

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#164 - Michael White and John Gribbin - Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science

Author or Editor: Michael White and John Gribbin
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press
Published: 2002
Pages: 348
Size: 1.11MB

When Stephen Hawking was involved in a minor road accident in Cambridge city center early in 1991, within twelve hours American TV networks were on the phone to his publisher, Bantam, for a low- down on the story. The fact that he suffered only minor injuries and was back at his desk within days was irrelevant. But then anything about Stephen Hawking is newsworthy. This would never have happened to any other scientist in the world. Apart from the fact that physicists are seen as somehow different from other human beings, existing outside the normal patterns of human life, there is no other scientist alive as famous as Stephen Hawking.

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#143 - Stephen W.Hawking - The Theory of Everything

Author or Editor: Stephen W.Hawking
Publisher: Phoenix Books
Published: 2005
Pages: 136
Size: 1.2MB

The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed for a long time. According to a number of early cosmologies in the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite and not very distant time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have a first cause to explain the existence of the universe.

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#82 - Jelle Kaastra - Clusters of Galaxies

Author or Editor: Jelle Kaastra
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2008
Pages: 418

Clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound structures in the Universe. Their baryonic composition is dominated by hot gas that is in quasi-hydrostatic equilibrium within the dark matter dominated gravitational potential well of the cluster. The hot gas is visible through spatially extended thermal X-ray emission, and it has been studied extensively both for assessing its physical properties and also as a tracer of the large-scale structure of the Universe.

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#59 - Roger Penrose - Road to Reality

Author or Editor: Roger Penrose
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 2004
Pages: 1094

Amphos the craftsman had lived all his life in the same small town as his father and his father before him, and his father’s father before that. He made his living constructing beautifully decorated gold bracelets, earrings, ceremonial cups, and other Wne products of his artistic skills. Such work had been the family trade for some forty generations—a line unbroken since Am-tep had settled there eleven hundred years before.

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#54 - Leonard Susskind and Janet Lindesay - An Introduction to Black Holes, Information and the String Theory Revolution

Author or Editor: Leonard Susskind and Janet Lindesay
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Published: 2005
Pages: 183

It is now almost a century since the year 1905, in which the principle of relativity and the hypothesis of the quantum of radiation were introduced. It has taken most of that time to synthesize the two into the modern quantum theory of fields and the standard model of particle phenomena. Although there is undoubtably more to be learned both theoretically and experimentally, it seems likely that we know most of the basic principles which follow from combining the special theory of relativity with quantum mechanics.It is unlikely that a major revolution will spring from this soil.

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#43 - Heinz R. Pagels - The Search for the Beginning of Time

Author or Editor: Heinz R. Pagels
Publisher: A Bantam Book
Published: 1985
Pages: 414

The attempt to understand the origin of the universe is the greatest challenge confronting the physical sciences. Armed with new concepts, scientists are rising to meet that challenge, although they know that success may be far away. Yet when the origin of the universe is understood, it will open a new vision of reality at the threshold of our imagination, a comprehensive vision that is beautiful, wonderful, and filled with the mystery of existence. It will be our intellectual gift to our progeny and our tribute to the scientific heroes who began this great adventure of the human mind, never to see it completed.

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#26 - Don Lincoln - Understanding the Universe from Quarks to the Cosmos

Author or Editor: Don Lincoln
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Published: 2005
Pages: 567

The study of science is one of the most interesting endeavors ever undertaken by mankind and, in my opinion, physics is the most interesting science. The other sciences each have their fascinating questions, but none are so deeply fundamental. Even the question of the origins of life, one of the great unanswered mysteries, is likely to be answered by research in the field of organic chemistry, using knowledge which is already largely understood. And chemistry, an immense and profitable field of study, is ultimately concerned with endless and complicated combinations of atoms.

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