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Title: Our Cosmic Habitat by Martin J. Rees ISBN: 0691089264 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33
Rating: 5
Summary: Our Cosmic Habitat
Comment: Our Cosmic Habitat written by Martin J. Rees is a book that looks at the fundamentals and conjectures of our galaxy and for that matter, of what we know, the universe.
To link the cosmos and the microworld requires a breakthrough. Twentieth-century physics rests on two great foundations: the quantum principle(that which governs the "inner space" of atoms) and Einstein's relativity theory, which describes time, outer space, and gravity but doesn't incorporate quantum effects.
Yet looking at the two great foundations you'd think that physics could link the two, well, surprise... they haven't. The structures erected on the foundations are still as far apart as the day they were proposed. Until there is a unified theory of the forces governing both cosmos and microworld, we won't be able to understand the fundamental features of our universe... the superstring theory shows the most promiss.
Superstring or M-theory in which each point in our ordinary space is actually a tightly folded in six dimensions, wrapped up on scales perhaps a billion billion times smaller than an atomic nucleus, and particles are represented as vibrating loops of "string."
As you can see this can get pretty deep, but the author has written this book so it can be easily understood and comprehended by the layreader. The author has a very effective prose and the narrative moves quickly and the reader gets a tour-de-force in the study of cosmology.
The book has three parts and each part has chapters. The chapters break the information down into easily understood groupings. A view of a multiverse or may universesis not just found in science-fiction anymore. It seems that the multiverse is getting play from those who are willing to venture out.
All in all, this was a very readable and engrossing read. It moved quickly and there are illustrating within the book that help in explaining different aspects of what the author is relaying to the reader. The book requires that the reader has some science background to get the most out of the book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Cosmic Life explained
Comment: Einstein once asked whether God could have made the world any differently; here, Rees, England's Astronomer Royal, offers an answer. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Princeton, Rees's meditations on the origins of the universe and the laws of physics begin with the planets and stars that make up the visible universe. While Giordiano Bruno and other philosophers speculated that distant worlds might be as hospitable to life as ours is, only in the last decade has science begun to detect planets beyond the solar system. Scientists who argue that life is the inevitable product of commonplace physical conditions have little better evidence on their side than those who believe it to be a rare cosmic fluke. What they do agree on is the general uniformity of physical laws throughout the observable universe. Gravity pulls at the same strength, and the relative masses and charges of the elementary particles remain constant. All this can be accounted for by a single creation event, popularly known as the Big Bang. Radio astronomy has given theorists a good idea of what conditions were like only a fraction of a second after the Bang. But theory cannot account for certain apparently arbitrary parameters, such as the relative abundances of matter and antimatter, or the comparative strengths of the different forces that act on all matter. What would happen if these parameters were different? Could there exist universes in which they are in fact different? Rees (Before the Beginning, 1997) suggests that other "bubbles" of reality might exist in unreachable dimensions, each with its own physical laws. Nor are these alternate universes necessarily beyond the reach of science; interesting theories prompt scientists to find ways to test them, and the future promises to be every bit as interesting as the past. A provocative survey of modern cosmology for readers who want the big picture.
Rating: 4
Summary: Far Out, Man
Comment: Our Cosmic Habitat
By Martin Rees
Astronomer Royal
of Great Britain
Princeton University Press, ...
I am here to explain the universe to you, courtesy of Martin Rees, research professor at Cambridge (the one in England) and the UK's Astronomer Royal (the head telescope dude).
First of all, remember that the universe is a big place. No, I mean really, really big. For example, our little solar system resides in a rather small galaxy that has more than 100 billion suns (no, we don't know who counted them). Our nearest neighbor galaxy is Andromeda and if you could get your Piper Cub up to 186,000 miles per second it would take you two million years to get there (also known as two light years), even downhill.
Want more? Our galaxy (we call it the Milky Way), Andromeda and about 35 smaller satellite galaxies in our neighborhood are all part of a larger group of galaxies centered on the Virgo Cluster, about 50 million light years away. Still further away but still part of our group is the Great Wall, what Rees calls a "sheetlike array of galaxies" about 200 million light years away, give or take a few hundred miles.
But that's not all; nope, as close as anyone can tell, there may be billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars and thousands of billions of planets. They're everywhere, man, everywhere.
Rees and his buddies up at the observatory know this because thanks to the Hubble space telescope and some computer magic, they can see further out into space than ever before. In fact, they now figure than can see as far as 10 billion light years away.
Of course, since they are seeing light (and various rays) coming at us, that means they are actually looking back in time 10 billion years.
Imagine.
And they're not done yet. Rees thinks that when bigger, new space telescopes are erected, they'll be able to see all the way back 14 billion light years to the "big bang," or the creation of the universe when everything that there is - every dog, plane, building, molecule, proton, ocean, planet, galaxy - everything! - was compressed into an object the size of a golf ball.
You can imagine how heavy that would be.
For some reason, unbeknownst still to us astrophysicists, on a Thursday afternoon 14 billion years ago (give or take ...) it all went BLAM! (with about 800 zeroes after it) and created our known universe. Now it was pretty hot; in fact, the entire universe was hotter than the sun for a while so there aren't many records laying about.
But after a few hundred thousand years, things began to cool down (at least, to the surfaces temperature of the sun) and form into stars, clusters of stars and eventually galaxies, all whirling about in a seemingly random pattern but, still, expanding away from the center at a measurable speed. There are still some curiosities about all this - for example, why are some expanding faster than others?
And us physicists believe it's all being held together by some force we can't quite detect but which we've all agreed to call "dark matter." This force (some call it "anti-matter") has to exist for it all to work.
Rees also admits that not everyone in the PhD community agrees on everything. For example, we're all still searching for "the theory of everything" which, basically, explains how all this works, because some evidence that's provable contradicts other evidence that's also provable. Confusing, wot?
Not quite there yet, and, Rees says, we may never be.
BLACK HOLES
A term coined in 1968 to refer to mysterious places in space where gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape it and into which everything in its neighborhood is being sucked and compressed. Avoid them.
Problem is, some of these Black Holes are pretty big, as big as our whole solar system. Maybe bigger.
Well, you can see that the universe is a pretty strange place and we haven't even touched on time travel, microworlds or the possibility of multiple universes co-existing with ours. All the more reason to pick up your copy of Our Cosmic Habitat.
If you think you know the answer to some of these puzzles, drop a note to Rees at Cambridge. We're sure he'd appreciate it.
- Wayman Dunlap
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Title: The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking ISBN: 055380202X Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd) Pub. Date: 06 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Future of Spacetime by S. W. Hawking, Kip S. Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris, Stephen Hawking, Richard Price, Alan Lightman ISBN: 0393020223 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Hyperspace: The Universe and Its Mysteries by John R. Gribbin, John Gribbin ISBN: 0789478382 Publisher: DK Publishing Pub. Date: 15 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe by Martin J. Rees ISBN: 0465036732 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 08 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe by John D. Barrow ISBN: 0375420991 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 17 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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