By David A. Weintraub
ISBN-10: 0691147310
ISBN-13: 9780691147314
Astronomers have decided that our universe is 13.7 billion years previous. How precisely did they arrive to this designated end? How previous Is the Universe? tells the marvelous tale of ways astronomers solved probably the most compelling mysteries in technological know-how and, alongside the best way, introduces readers to basic options and state-of-the-art advances in smooth astronomy.
The age of our universe poses a deceptively uncomplicated query, and its resolution incorporates profound implications for technological know-how, faith, and philosophy. David Weintraub strains the centuries-old quest through astronomers to fathom the secrets and techniques of the night sky. Describing the achievements of the visionaries whose discoveries jointly unveiled a primary secret, he exhibits what number self reliant traces of inquiry and masses painstakingly accumulated facts, while equipped jointly like items in a cosmic puzzle, resulted in the long-sought solution. Astronomers don't think the universe is 13.7 billion years old--they comprehend it. you are going to too after examining this publication. through concentrating on some of the most the most important questions on the universe and demanding readers to appreciate the reply, Weintraub familiarizes readers with the guidelines and phenomena on the middle of contemporary astronomy, together with pink giants and white dwarfs, cepheid variable stars and supernovae, clusters of galaxies, gravitational lensing, darkish topic, darkish power and the accelerating universe--and even more. delivering a different historic method of astronomy, How outdated Is the Universe? sheds mild at the internal workings of clinical inquiry and divulges how astronomers grapple with deep questions about the actual nature of our universe.
Read or Download How Old Is the Universe? PDF
Best cosmology books
Get About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution PDF
A sublime, witty, and fascinating exploration of the riddle of time, which examines the results of Einstein's thought of relativity and gives startling feedback approximately what fresh study could reveal.
The everlasting questions of technological know-how and faith have been profoundly recast through Einstein's concept of relativity and its implications that point may be warped through movement and gravitation, and that it can't be meaningfully divided into prior, current, and future.
In approximately Time, Paul Davies discusses the large bang thought, chaos concept, and the new discovery that the universe seems to be more youthful than many of the gadgets in it, concluding that Einstein's idea offers purely an incomplete knowing of the character of time. Davies explores unanswered questions such as:
* Does the universe have a starting and an end?
* Is the passage of time in simple terms an illusion?
* Is it attainable to trip backward -- or ahead -- in time?
About Time weaves physics and metaphysics in a provocative contemplation of time and the universe.
Roger PENROSE's The road to reality: a complete guide to the laws of the PDF
From one among our best dwelling scientists, an impressive ebook that gives, for the intense lay reader, the main complete and complex account we have now but had of the actual universe and the necessities of its underlying mathematical conception. because the earliest efforts of the traditional Greeks to discover order amid the chaos round us, there was continuous speeded up growth towards realizing the legislation that govern our universe.
What's the final future of our universe? that's the remarkable query addressed through James Gardner within the clever Universe. typically, scientists (and Robert Frost) have provided bleak solutions to this profound factor: hearth or ice. The cosmos could result in fire—a cataclysmic enormous Crunch during which galaxies, planets, and existence kinds are ate up in a raging inferno because the universe contracts in one of those monstrous Bang in opposite.
Get Beyond the God Particle PDF
Prime physicists speak about the significance of the Higgs Boson, the way forward for particle physics, and the mysteries of the universe but to be unraveled. On July four, 2012, the long-sought Higgs Boson--aka "the God Particle"--was chanced on on the world's greatest particle accelerator, the LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland.
- The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter (Science Essentials)
- Supersymmetry. Theory, Experiment and Cosmology
- Tragedy in the Gulf: A Call for a New Engineering Ethic
- The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality
Additional info for How Old Is the Universe?
Sample text
They reasoned that if the core temperature of the Sun were much hotter than 10 million K, the intense pressure from the super hot gas deep inside the Sun would cause the outer layers of the Sun to expand, increasing its size much above its present diameter. Clearly, if stars generate energy through nuclear fusion but do so at temperatures of millions of degrees rather than billions of degrees, then our simple picture of the fusion process is so far inadequate. We need to furnish two additional and crucial links.
In general, interstellar clouds are in a precarious balance between expansion and collapse. Their internal heat generates expansive pressure while gravity from the particles of matter in the cloud works to pull the particles closer together. When an interstellar cloud cools off, its thermal pressure weakens and the cloud loses the ability to resist the compressive force of gravity. The balance tips in favor of gravity and the cloud collapses in on itself. The rotational motion of the collapsing cloud, however, prevents all of the material in the cloud from falling all the way to the center; instead, while the cloud shrinks it also flattens, forming a disk of gas and dust that revolves around the newborn star at its center.
Over time, they collided with other small objects. Through these sticky collisions, the CAIs were incorporated into bigger objects that grew from dust-grains into pebbles, rocks, and boulders. These larger objects continued to orbit the Sun. Those that remain we call asteroids. Every year, some asteroids collide or exert enough gravitational at- chapter 3 • 26 traction on each other to change each others’ orbits so that a few of them, or fragments of a few of them, end up in orbits that intersect the orbit of the Earth.
How Old Is the Universe? by David A. Weintraub
by Ronald
4.0