Product Description

Cosmologists yearn to behold the unseen elements of our universe. And as new technologies become more powerful and precise, scientists are getting their wish - though these tools are challenging the limits of our imagination as fast as they are answering many longstanding questions. Space is one of the last great frontiers for modern man. A never-ending source of investigation and inspiration, it beckons to scientists with an irresistible siren's call. And in this glorious age of cosmology, astronomical measurement has never been more precise. The power provided to us by extraordinary new observational mechanisms has shattered former suppositions and stimulated exciting new visions of the universe. Using modern instruments such as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), astronomers now have access to information about the age and composition of the universe. By providing greatly improved answers, high-resolution satellite data and novel telescopic techniques have transformed one of science's most speculative fields into a triumph of meticulous and rigorous detection. Yet as the technological tools grow increasingly robust and we are able to see farther and know more, we find that we have even more questions. Could there be realms beyond ordinary space? Might time, space, and matter simply be illusions? What unique blend of cosmological factors influences life on Earth? Featuring interviews with leaders in the field as well as thought-provoking descriptions of their work, "Brave New Universe" is a guided tour of current advances and controversies in cosmology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #558023 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Halpern and Wesson, both physics professors and authors, give us a history of 20th century cosmology, and how its development was influenced by the concepts of relativity, new technology and the mathematical explanations they engendered. In a brain-twisting tour of time and space, each chapter explores an aspect of contemporary physics and cosmology, including infinity, the accelerating universe, dark matter and the slippery notion of reality. They describe competing models for the geometry of space, including string theory, additional dimensions, and "branes," evaluating each model in terms of observational and experimental data. So far, all these models fail to reproduce the entirety of the known universe; certain aspects of the universe's structure cannot be reproduced by the complex mathematics of cosmologists, and the dense text makes it easy to see why-though not quite so easy to see how. The discussion of Einstein's cosmological constant and the subsequent discovery of universal cosmic background radiation is intriguing, as are chapters describing the mysterious nature of matter and its invisible counterpart, dark matter. General readers may find other passages difficult, like those describing newer efforts to reinvigorate the "steady-state" cosmology of Hoyle and his colleagues. Without a pre-existing knowledge of non-Euclidean geometry, many readers will be frustrated. But for readers with at least one college-level class in physics, this will prove an interesting, illuminating challenge.
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About the Author
Paul Halpern and Paul Wesson