Showing titles in Physics

After the Apollo program put 12 men on the moon and safely brought them home, anything seemed possible. In this spirit, the team at NASA set about developing the space shuttle, arguably the most complex piece of machinery ever created.

New York Times best-selling author Deepak Chopra joins forces with leading physicist Menas Kafatos to explore some of the most important and baffling questions about our place in the world.

Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all - from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel.

Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world's physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called "the Pope" by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics.

In Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White takes listeners across the globe to discover the science and spirit of ocean tides. In the Arctic, White shimmies under the ice with an Inuit elder to hunt for mussels in the dark cavities left behind at low tide; in China, he races the Silver Dragon, a 25-foot tidal bore that crashes 80 miles up the Qiantang River; in France, he interviews the monks that live in the tide-wrapped monastery of Mont Saint-Michel; in Chile and Scotland, he investigates the growth of tidal power generation.

Is Stonehenge a stone hinge? As early as 10,000 years ago, early man knew of parallel universes. Not from quantum theoretical models but from face-to-face interaction with their denizens. Over the last 30 years, television series and movies focused on the public's thirst for inexplicable phenomena. The growing number of books devoted to works explaining everything from UFOs to Stonehenge are testaments of continuing and increasing interest.

For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary - a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, has been astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe.

Clear answers are given to important questions in both theoretical and applied logic. The writing is cogent and straightforward.

In this grand poetic vision of the universe, Lawrence Krauss tells the dramatic story of the discovery of the hidden world that underlies reality - and our place within it. Reality is not what you think or sense - it’s weird, wild, and counterintuitive, and its inner workings seem at least as implausible as the idea that something can come from nothing. With his trademark wit and accessible style, Krauss leads us to realms so small that they are invisible to microscopes, to the birth and rebirth of light, and into the natural forces that govern our existence.

How big is the universe? How many numbers are there? And is infinity + 1 is the same as 1 + infinity? Such questions occur to young children and our greatest minds. And they are all the same question: What is infinity? In Beyond Infinity, Eugenia Cheng takes us on a staggering journey from elemental math to its loftiest abstractions. Along the way, she considers how to use a chessboard to plan a worldwide dinner party, how to make a chicken-sandwich sandwich, and how to create infinite cookies from a finite ball of dough.

On July 23, 1999, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the most powerful X-ray telescope ever built, was launched aboard the space shuttle Columbia. Since then, Chandra has given us a view of the universe that is largely hidden from telescopes sensitive only to visible light. In Chandra's Cosmos, Wallace H. Tucker uses a series of short, connected stories to describe the telescope's exploration of the hot, high-energy face of the universe.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA - was established on July 29, 1958. Ever since that day, NASA has been at the forefront of efforts to explore outer space, resulting in the Apollo missions to the moon, the Skylab space-station, and today's space shuttle. But behind the open face of NASA, there is a much more mysterious world. NASA has been linked to a wealth of high-level cover-ups.

Earth and its neighboring planets Venus and Mars all began with similar temperatures, mineral compositions, and atmospheric gases that could have led to the formation of life. Earth was the only planet to pull off that trick, while climate change took Venus and Mars in less hospitable directions. It was much like the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"; Mars was too cold, Venus was too hot, but Earth was just right.

Gamma rays are the most intense form of radiation. As the Cold War focused on the spread of nuclear war, a U.S. spy satellite searching for clandestine nuclear weapons tests detected frequent, but brief, bursts of powerful gamma-rays, a possible signal of a hydrogen bomb explosion. Interviewing some of the original researchers of this phenomenon, Producer David Barrett Wilson takes us from that starting point through the beginning of scientific research into these bizarre surges of energy.

Much of the U.S. and international space program in the early years looked at the biomedical consequences of space travel on the human body. Bone loss, muscular atrophy and the impact on the cardiovascular system were of special concern as astronauts came and went from outer space. Then researchers began to make connections between the impact of extreme conditions and natural aging here on Earth.

Losing your balance and feeling dizzy? It happens as we grow older, and astronauts are trying to help us figure out why. Producer Judith Kampfner takes a look at how health researchers use the experience of weightlessness to better understand the bodies' equilibrium. The effects of motion sickness —disorientation, maladjustment to environment, and human flexibility to adapt — are the same effects experienced by astronauts in outer space.

Anyone sending a space shuttle into orbit, building a skyscraper, or even studying bone density owes a debt of gratitude to Isaac Newton and his theory of gravitation and laws of motion. Yet, the role of gravity in life’s processes, from cell structure to the human cardiovascular system remains unclear.

Anyone sending a space shuttle into orbit, building a skyscraper, or even studying bone density owes a debt of gratitude to Isaac Newton and his theory of gravitation and laws of motion. Yet, the role of gravity in life’s processes, from cell structure to the human cardiovascular system remains unclear. Judith Kampfner explores the enigma force by starting in an eight grade science class, following a high school physics class as they perform some experiments on NASA’s vomit comet.

In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell and perceive time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel" - simulations of future and past events.

Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world, yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognised and described, yet it is the least understood. It is a 'force' that keeps your feet on the ground, yet no such force actually exists. Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'. And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: what is space? What is time? What is the universe? And where did it all come from?