Download or read book Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space written by Janna Levin and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe. Black holes are dark. That is their essence. When black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated. Yet the black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. The profusion of energy will emanate as waves in the shape of spacetime: gravitational waves. No telescope will ever record the event; instead, the only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing. In 1916, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, his top priority after he proposed his theory of curved spacetime. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, the soundtrack to accompany astronomy’s silent movie. In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. An experimental ambition that began as an amusing thought experiment, a mad idea, became the object of fixation for the original architects—Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever. Striving to make the ambition a reality, the original three gradually accumulated an international team of hundreds. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. Janna Levin’s absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Download or read book Black Hole Survival Guide written by Janna Levin and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would happen if you fell into a Black Hole? Black holes are found throughout the universe. They can be microscopic. They can be billions of times larger than our Sun. They are dark on the outside but not on the inside. Anything that enters them can never escape, and yet they contain nothing at all. In Black Hole Survival Guide physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey into a black hole, explaining what would happen to you and why. In the process you'll come to see how their mysteries contain answers to some of the most profound questions ever asked about the nature of our universe. 'Astrophysics at its sexiest...hugely enjoyable' Sunday Times

Download or read book The Little Book of Black Holes written by Steven S. Gubser and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dive into a mind-bending exploration of the physics of black holes Black holes, predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity more than a century ago, have long intrigued scientists and the public with their bizarre and fantastical properties. Although Einstein understood that black holes were mathematical solutions to his equations, he never accepted their physical reality—a viewpoint many shared. This all changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when a deeper conceptual understanding of black holes developed just as new observations revealed the existence of quasars and X-ray binary star systems, whose mysterious properties could be explained by the presence of black holes. Black holes have since been the subject of intense research—and the physics governing how they behave and affect their surroundings is stranger and more mind-bending than any fiction. After introducing the basics of the special and general theories of relativity, this book describes black holes both as astrophysical objects and theoretical “laboratories” in which physicists can test their understanding of gravitational, quantum, and thermal physics. From Schwarzschild black holes to rotating and colliding black holes, and from gravitational radiation to Hawking radiation and information loss, Steven Gubser and Frans Pretorius use creative thought experiments and analogies to explain their subject accessibly. They also describe the decades-long quest to observe the universe in gravitational waves, which recently resulted in the LIGO observatories’ detection of the distinctive gravitational wave “chirp” of two colliding black holes—the first direct observation of black holes’ existence. The Little Book of Black Holes takes readers deep into the mysterious heart of the subject, offering rare clarity of insight into the physics that makes black holes simple yet destructive manifestations of geometric destiny.

Download or read book Ripples in Spacetime Einstein Gravitational Waves and the Future of Astronomy written by Violet R. Nunez and published by Gavin Jay Maureemootoo. This book was released on 2024-10-24 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dive into the fascinating world of gravitational wave astronomy with this comprehensive book that covers everything from the theoretical framework of gravitational waves to the significant discoveries and applications in the field. Explore the challenges, implications, and future directions in gravitational wave research, as well as the debates and controversies surrounding this cutting-edge science. Discover how gravitational waves are shaping the future of astronomy and the potential societal impact of this groundbreaking research. Perfect for anyone interested in astrophysics, physics, or the wonders of the universe.

Download or read book Black Holes and Time Warps Einstein s Outrageous Legacy written by Robert S. Obrien and published by Gavin Jay Maureemootoo. This book was released on 2024-10-24 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Delve into the mysterious world of black holes with this comprehensive guide that explores everything from their formation and characteristics to their impact on cosmology and popular culture. Discover the latest research on black hole astrophysics and theoretical frameworks, and learn about the future of astronomy with insights into next-generation telescopes and black hole research initiatives. With a focus on both scientific facts and cultural perceptions, this book will captivate readers interested in the intersection of physics, cosmology, and the mysteries of the universe. Explore the mind-bending concepts of black holes and beyond, and uncover the secrets that lie within these enigmatic cosmic phenomena.

Download or read book The Joy of X written by Steven Henry Strogatz and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delightful tour of the greatest ideas of math, showing how math intersects with philosophy, science, art, business, current events, and everyday life, by an acclaimed science communicator and regular contributor to the "New York Times."

Download or read book The Detection of Gravitational Waves written by David G. Blair and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-13 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces the concepts of gravitational waves within the context of general relativity. The sources of gravitational radiation for which there is direct observational evidence and those of a more speculative nature are described. He then gives a general introduction to the methods of detection. In the subsequent chapters he has drawn together the leading scientists in the field to give a comprehensive practical and theoretical account of the physics and technology of gravitational wave detection.

Download or read book General Relativity and its Applications written by Valeria Ferrari and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2020-12-21 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Provides a self-contained and consistent treatment of the subject that does not require advanced previous knowledge of the field. • Explores the subject with a new focus on gravitational waves and astrophysical relativity, unlike current introductory textbooks. • Fully up-to-date, containing the latest developments and discoveries in the field.

Download or read book A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines written by Janna Levin and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems sent shivers through Vienna’s intellectual circles and directly challenged Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dominant philosophy. Alan Turing’s mathematical genius helped him break the Nazi Enigma Code during WWII. Though they never met, their lives strangely mirrored one another—both were brilliant, and both met with tragic ends. Here, a mysterious narrator intertwines these parallel lives into a double helix of genius and anguish, wonderfully capturing not only two radiant, fragile minds but also the zeitgeist of the era.

Download or read book Mapping the Heavens written by Priyamvada Natarajan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A theoretical astrophysicist explores the ideas that transformed our knowledge of the universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. She not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance. The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe. “Part history, part science, all illuminating. If you want to understand the greatest ideas that shaped our current cosmic cartography, read this book.”—Adam G. Riess, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011 “A highly readable, insider’s view of recent discoveries in astronomy with unusual attention to the instruments used and the human drama of the scientists.”—Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe and Einstein's Dream

Download or read book Modern General Relativity written by Mike Guidry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Einstein's general theory of relativity is widely considered to be one of the most elegant and successful scientific theories ever developed, and it is increasingly being taught in a simplified form at advanced undergraduate level within both physics and mathematics departments. Due to the increasing interest in gravitational physics, in both the academic and the public sphere, driven largely by widely-publicised developments such as the recent observations of gravitational waves, general relativity is also one of the most popular scientific topics pursued through self-study. Modern General Relativity introduces the reader to the general theory of relativity using an example-based approach, before describing some of its most important applications in cosmology and astrophysics, such as gamma-ray bursts, neutron stars, black holes, and gravitational waves. With hundreds of worked examples, explanatory boxes, and end-of-chapter problems, this textbook provides a solid foundation for understanding one of the towering achievements of twentieth-century physics.

Download or read book Collected Papers of L D Landau written by D. Ter Haar and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 859 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected Papers of L. D. Landau brings together the collected papers of L. D. Landau in the field of physics. The discussion is divided into the following sections: low-temperature physics (including superconductivity); solid-state physics; plasma physics; hydrodynamics; astrophysics; nuclear physics and cosmic rays; quantum mechanics; quantum field theory; and miscellaneous works. Topics covered include the intermediate state of supraconductors; the absorption of sound in solids; the properties of metals at very low temperatures; and production of showers by heavy particles. This volume is comprised of 100 chapters and begins with Landau's paper on the theory of the spectra of diatomic molecules, followed by his studies on the damping problem in wave mechanics; quantum electrodynamics in configuration space; electron motion in crystal lattices; and the internal temperature of stars. Some of Landau's theories, such as those of stars, energy transfer on collisions, phase transitions, and specific heat anomalies are discussed. Subsequent chapters focus on the structure of the undisplaced scattering line; the transport equation in the case of Coulomb interactions; scattering of light by light; and the origin of stellar energy. This book will be a valuable resource for physicists as well as physics students and researchers.

Download or read book A Relativist s Toolkit written by Eric Poisson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2004 textbook fills a gap in the literature on general relativity by providing the advanced student with practical tools for the computation of many physically interesting quantities. The context is provided by the mathematical theory of black holes, one of the most elegant, successful, and relevant applications of general relativity. Among the topics discussed are congruencies of timelike and null geodesics, the embedding of spacelike, timelike and null hypersurfaces in spacetime, and the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of general relativity. Although the book is self-contained, it is not meant to serve as an introduction to general relativity. Instead, it is meant to help the reader acquire advanced skills and become a competent researcher in relativity and gravitational physics. The primary readership consists of graduate students in gravitational physics. It will also be a useful reference for more seasoned researchers working in this field.

Download or read book What s Happening in the Mathematical Sciences written by Barry Cipra and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematicians like to point out that mathematics is universal. In spite of this, most people continue to view it as either mundane (balancing a checkbook) or mysterious (cryptography). This fifth volume of the What's Happening series contradicts that view by showing that mathematics is indeed found everywhere-in science, art, history, and our everyday lives. Here is some of what you'll find in this volume: Mathematics and Science Mathematical biology: Mathematics was key tocracking the genetic code. Now, new mathematics is needed to understand the three-dimensional structure of the proteins produced from that code. Celestial mechanics and cosmology: New methods have revealed a multitude of solutions to the three-body problem. And other new work may answer one of cosmology'smost fundamental questions: What is the size and shape of the universe? Mathematics and Everyday Life Traffic jams: New models are helping researchers understand where traffic jams come from-and maybe what to do about them! Small worlds: Researchers have found a short distance from theory to applications in the study of small world networks. Elegance in Mathematics Beyond Fermat's Last Theorem: Number theorists are reaching higher ground after Wiles' astounding 1994 proof: new developments inthe elegant world of elliptic curves and modular functions. The Millennium Prize Problems: The Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a million dollars for solutions to seven important and difficult unsolved problems. These are just some of the topics of current interest that are covered in thislatest volume of What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences. The book has broad appeal for a wide spectrum of mathematicians and scientists, from high school students through advanced-level graduates and researchers.

Download or read book The Day We Found the Universe written by Marcia Bartusiak and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-03-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting and mesmerizing story behind a watershed period in human history, the discovery of the startling size and true nature of our universe. On New Years Day in 1925, a young Edwin Hubble released his finding that our Universe was far bigger, eventually measured as a thousand trillion times larger than previously believed. Hubble’s proclamation sent shock waves through the scientific community. Six years later, in a series of meetings at Mount Wilson Observatory, Hubble and others convinced Albert Einstein that the Universe was not static but in fact expanding. Here Marcia Bartusiak reveals the key players, battles of will, clever insights, incredible technology, ground-breaking research, and wrong turns made by the early investigators of the heavens as they raced to uncover what many consider one of most significant discoveries in scientific history.

Download or read book Sonic Skills written by Karin Bijsterveld and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is common for us today to associate the practice of science primarily with the act of seeing—with staring at computer screens, analyzing graphs, and presenting images. We may notice that physicians use stethoscopes to listen for disease, that biologists tune into sound recordings to understand birds, or that engineers have created Geiger tellers warning us for radiation through sound. But in the sciences overall, we think, seeing is believing. This open access book explains why, indeed, listening for knowledge plays an ambiguous, if fascinating, role in the sciences. For what purposes have scientists, engineers and physicians listened to the objects of their interest? How did they listen exactly? And why has listening often been contested as a legitimate form of access to scientific knowledge? This concise monograph combines historical and ethnographic evidence about the practices of listening on shop floors, in laboratories, field stations, hospitals, and conference halls, between the 1920s and today. It shows how scientists have used sonic skills—skills required for making, recording, storing, retrieving, and listening to sound—in ensembles: sets of instruments and techniques for particular situations of knowledge making. Yet rather than pleading for the emancipation of hearing at the expense of seeing, this essay investigates when, how, and under which conditions the ear has contributed to science dynamics, either in tandem with or without the eye.

Download or read book Ripples On A Cosmic Sea written by David Blair and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1999-04-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people live and work entirely oblivious to the fact that a myriad of ghostly ripples are passing through them all the time. Generated in the depths of space by colliding stars and black holes, exploding supernovas and quasars, these so-called gravitational waves are literally ripples in the fabric of space itself. Sweeping across the cosmos at the speed of light, they encode vital clues about the exotic systems that produced them. Predicted by Einstein over eighty years ago, but never detected in the laboratory, gravitational waves have proven elusive to scientists. In the first book for a general reader on these amazing waves, Blair and McNamara weave a thrilling tale about the race to build the first gravitational wave antenna—a challenge that has prompted physicists and astronomers to devise some of the most breathtaking technology the world has ever seen. What these scientists find will allow us to listen to the explosion of stars, the creation of black holes, even the sound of the Big Bang itself, and will undoubtedly chart a new course for astronomy in the coming millennium.