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Featured Categories : Scientific, Technical & Medical : Astronomy & Cosmology

• Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos

  Michio Kak

  
  
   

• The Holographic Universe

  Michael Talbot

  
  
   

• Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth

  Andrew Smith

  
  
   

• Turn Left at Orion: A Hundred Night Sky Objects to See in a Small Telescope - and How to Find Them

  Guy Consolmagno, Dan M. Davis

  
  
   

• The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life?: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?

  Paul Davies

  
  
   

• The Never-ending Days of Being Dead

  Marcus Chown

  
  
   

• A Brief History of Time

  Stephen Hawking

  
  Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history, wrote the modern classic A Brief History of Time to help non-scientists understand fundamental questions of physics and our existence: where did the universe come from? How and why did it begin? Will it come to an end, and if so, how? Hawking attempts to deal with these questions (and where we might look for answers) using a minimum of technical jargon. Among the topics gracefully covered are gravity, black holes, the Big Bang, the nature of time and physicists' search for a grand unifying theory. This is deep science; the concepts are so vast (or so tiny) that they cause mental vertigo while reading, and one can't help but marvel at Hawking's ability to synthesize this difficult subject for people not used to thinking about things like alternate dimensions. The journey is certainly worth taking for as Hawking says, the reward of understanding the universe may be a glimpse of "the mind of God". --Therese Littleton, Amazon.com
  
   

• Universe: The Definitive Visual Guide (Astronomy)

  
  
   

• The Universe in a Nutshell

  Stephen William Hawking

  
  The Universe in a Nutshell attempts to address the relative difficulty of Hawking's first foray into popular science, A Brief History of Time. While this sold in its millions, few readers got past the first few chapters. Helpfully, this new work is full of beautifully prepared colour illustrations and decorations, and has a "tree-like" structure, so that readers can skip from chapter to chapter without losing the thread.

  In 200 highly illustrated pages, Hawking is pushing the frontiers of popular physics beyond relativity and quantum theory, past superstring theory and imaginary time, into a dizzying new world of M-theory and branes. It's a colossal venture--one Hawking is uniquely qualified to undertake--but it is crammed into far too small a space. When you consider the other rather good tomes being written on the nature of consciousness these days, the decision to limit The Universe in a Nutshell to the dictates of publishing rather than to the natural parameters of the material is an unfortunate one.

  Worse, Hawking tries to paper over the complexity of his field. He rushes over the very concepts he should be helping us understand, only to belabour simple ideas, often by means of flip Star Trek metaphors. Also unfortunately, the illustrations--by turns trivial and opaque--mirror the faults of the text. The author's name alone will guarantee sales, but the book we long for--the long, ruminative, poetic celebration of Hawking's world--seems as far away as ever. --Simon Ings

  
   

• Heaven and Earth: Unseen by the Naked Eye (Photography)

  
  
   

• Yearbook of Astronomy 2009

  Sir Patrick Moore

  
  
   

• Astronomy for Dummies (For Dummies)

  Stephen P. Maran

  
  
   

• A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

  Andrew Chaikin

  
  
   

• Astronomy for GCSE

  Sir Patrick Moore, Chris Lintott

  
  
   

• The Science of Discworld

  Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack S. Cohen

  
  Terry Pratchett needs no introduction. Ian Stewart has written fine nonfiction books on mathematics, and he and Jack Cohen collaborated on the quirkily inventive pop-science titles The Collapse of Chaos and Figments of Reality. What on earth, or on Discworld, are they all doing in the same book? Pratchett provides a very funny 30,000-word novella about Discworld science, beginning in the High Energy Magic faculty of Unseen University and leading his eccentric wizards to investigate an alien cosmos where there's no magic to keep things going. This is the Roundworld universe--ours. The key point: much that's true only on Discworld (eg: that suns orbit planets and not vice-versa) was once believed on Earth and the wizards' comic misunderstandings echo the history of real science ... Unusually, Pratchett's story is split into chapters and in between his chapters Stewart and Cohen wittily discuss the concepts underlying the fiction, from the Big Bang through stellar formation to life and evolution. Much of the science we know, they cheerfully insist, is "lies-to-children": good stories that are mostly untrue, like thinking of atoms as tiny solar systems. Discworld operates by narrative plausibility and so does human thought even when our Roundworld universe disagrees. Between the laughs, The Science of Discworld is a provocative, informative book that'll make you think about what you think you know. --David Langford
  
   

• Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It

  Simon Singh

  
  
   

• An Introduction to Modern Cosmology, 2nd Edition

  Andrew Liddle

  
  
   

• Bang! The Complete History of the Universe

  Brian May, Sir Patrick Moore, Chris Lintott

  
  
   

• Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing Hoax (Bad Science)

  Philip C. Plait

  
  
   

• The Magic Furnace

  Marcus Chown

  
  If only because of its grand scale, cosmology can bring out the worst in science writers. But The Magic Furnace is as unputdownable as any thriller as it unifies the very big and the very small in a single coherent vision of creation.

  In a cosmos dominated by hydrogen and helium all the other elements make up a mere two per cent of the universe's mass. It was not always so. There was a time when those other elements did not even exist. The stuff which we're made from was not fully formed by the Big Bang. So where did it--where did we--come from?

  Chown dovetails two histories: the story of how we came to know how stars are born, grow old and die, and the story of how we investigated the atom and came to appreciate how different elements are related. This is no contrived juxtaposition. The elements from which we are made were assembled by stars and distributed by supernovae. We are--literally--stardust.

  All scientific histories are simplifications after the event but Chown, in something of the spirit of Local Heroes's Adam Hart-Davis, brings a biographer's eye to those--from Greek philosopher Democritus onwards--who brought us to our present understanding.

  By Chown's account, the universe seems uncannily friendly to the formation of organics and ultimately, life. Chown's take on this "anthropomorphic" (and quasi-religious) version of the world is a model of balanced and responsible speculation and provides the fitting conclusion to this fascinating account. --Simon Ings