Author: Dorling Kindersley, Robert Dinwiddie
By Dorling Kindersley

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Universe, 2010-08-16
Fantastic book. Covers every aspect of space. The early sections on the history of astronomy and about telescopes and satellites are lacking detail, but the book is mostly about the planets, and the stars, and in this respect it is full of detail and wonderful images. DK books are always good, and this one is no exception. You can pick it up a hundred times and still find new things to read. Nice to read on nights when the sky is cloudy.

Author: John Gribbin
By Penguin

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A Solid Overview .. And More Questions Raised, 2009-12-27
What an interesting book.

Let's first dispose, perhaps, of 2 small complaints, which apply to all of John Gribbin's books: John's irrepressible habit to include largely irrelevant biographical data in his texts - as in, in this book, Quote his draft thesis, typed up by his gilrlfriend Nancy Gore, whom he married the following year unquote or "he was born in Washington DC, on 11 November 1930". Frankly - who cares? Another slightly grating habit is the belaboring of extremely elementary points - such as the author's constant reminders of what "10 the power N" means - anyone who would have difficulty grasping this, even if they extraordinarily enough did not know it yet, but nevertheless read popular science books - would surely have got it the first time!

Now for the gist of the book. The book is an overview and analysis of the current state of play in our search for understanding our Universe, either as a unique Universe or as one within a Multiverse of Universes - where our Universe is one of many (a more technical, and in some ways narrower, overview of learned opinions on the subject ranging from strong acceptance to strong rejection of the concept(s) of the Multiverse is to be found in the book 'Universe or Multiverse, edited by Bernard Carr)

John Gribbin's book shines in many ways, but leaves some questions hanging and IMHO does not go far enough in certain areas. Commendably, he cites Edward Tryon's work - a work that had been rejected out of hand by many eminent Physicists, because Tryon was way ahead of his time when he first described in the late sixties our Universe as the possible result of a rogue quantum fluctuation in a pre-existing environment. The reason for the rejection was that the inflationary scenario (as put forward by Alan Guth) was not yet understood - yet, when I discussed Tryon's model with a couple of world-renowned Physicists as recently as 2005, several years after Alan Guth became famous, they still rejected Tryon's ideas out of hand.

A couple of points that are mentioned almost in passing by John Gribbin would require book-length treatment, and some meta-results seem assumed rather than proven. For instance, he commendably indicates, almost in passing, that time is quantized (an idea astonishingly still controversial in some quarters) and without further ado sets the value of the time quantum at the Planck value. There is absolutely no evidence that the time quantum indeed has that value - the Planck time solely sets an upper boundary to a range of possible time quantum values - there is most likely one time quantum value per Universe within the Metaverse.

Finally- Max Tegmark is a well-known proponent of mathematics as being the ultimate reality - and although John Gribbing cites Max Tegmark's work several times, and in addition rightly says in the course of the text that 'the truth lies in the equations', he does not explore enough the explanatory and predictive power that pure mathematics lends our attempts to explain the Universe.

As for the conclusion - no spoiler here - I am a whit worried that the conclusion does not address properly an issue it raises, that of backwards recurrence. Overall, a five-star effort, possibly better read in conjunction with Bernard Carr's compilatory volume, but an excellent book in its own right.

Author: Michio Kaku
By Penguin

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Science Fact blows away Science Fiction, 2010-04-23
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed" - Albert Einstein.

Michio Kaku quotes this in a later chapter, it's clear he believes it because wonder and mystery pervade every page of his book. He's also a fan of science fiction and often uses examples from literature and film (like The Matrix) as a jumping board for new subjects and ideas.

I read 'A Brief History of Time' about six months ago which left so many un-answered questions in my head i've been reading everything and anything i can find on quantum physics, from John Gribbin to James Gleick. Whilst all have proved excellent bed time reading, Michio Kaku's 'Parallel Worlds' is easily the most fantastical. It took me weeks to read because i could barely read a page before my mind would embark on a fabulous day dream fuelled by Michio's fervent passion for his subject. Amongst the myriad ideas presented here, the chapter on string theory was perhaps my favourite as it explains a phenomenally complex idea in a clear and lucid manner, but there is so much content throughout, it will keep your mind racing for a very long time. In any world, this gets 5 stars.

Author: Marcus Chown
By Faber and Faber

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The slippery slope of reality, 2010-01-03
Barack Obama started his "Dreams from my father" with a
quote from Chronicles (29:15):" For we are strangers before them,
and sojourners, as were all our fathers".
Reading Marcus Chowns "We need to talk about Kelvin"
easily brings you to the same frame of mind.

For starters: We are ghosts! 99.999999 per cent of
matter is empty space. Not only are the atoms
we are made of, very, very tiny indeed. The atoms themselves
are mostly nothingness circling more nothingness.

And what little substance there is to matter
soon evaporates when you realize that all
of the atoms that make up 'you' are quantum things,
endowed with quantum weirdness - or madness if you like!
Take quantum entanglement: Particles
born together bahaves as though they know about each other,
no matter how far apart. Communicating with each other,
somehow, at infinite speed. With
everything born 13.7 billion years ago
in the fireball of the Big Bang - One can speculate that
everything in the universe is now bound together,
i.e. everything knows about everything else in the universe,
through some inifinite speed communication process.

When we stand on the Earth, solid ground (ha ha),
our weight compresses atoms below, squeezing electrons
in atoms closer to the nuclei. According to Heisenberg,
electrons aren't too crazy about having their position
exposed. So they resist by gaining a higher momentum.
Fighting the compression so to speak. The 'solidity'
of the ground is Heisenbergs uncertainty principle kicking in:
The more sure we are of the location of a particle,
the less we can know about its momentum.
The 'solidity' of the ground is teaching us that there are limits
to what we can know about the world so to speak.

Most things we know from our everyday world are not
identical. They may look indistinguishable, but when we
look closer, at a detailed molecular level, they are not.
Not so with electrons - everyone out there in the
universe is absolutely identical. There is no way to tell
them apart. And likewise for quarks.
It follows that they have no inner structure, which would
allow us to tell them apart.
So they are just weird to begin with, not weird due to otherwise
rational inner parts.

The (weird) parts, we are made of, have been processed
in stars before they became parts of humans. Take iron.
A massive star develops an onion like interior,
with heavier and heavier elements closer to its core.
Finally it undergoes silicon buring which creates iron.
which is bad news for the star, as burning iron doesnt
give more energy, it takes energy. Without energy
being produced there is nothing to oppose gravity from
collapsing the star. Which eventually leads
to a cataclysmic explosion of the star, that for a short time,
outshine an entire galaxy of a 100 billion stars.
Sending out the iron that will eventually end up in the bodies
of humans.

Looking out in the night sky, we can of course see many stars.
Actually, in a infinite universe, the night sky should be
completely bright with starlight, coming from stars
in all directions in an endless universe. But it
is not (Olbers paradox).
Ok, the universe is to young for stars to have had time to
fill it up with light, and actually, the stars
dont have the energy to fill up the entire universe,
no matter how powerful they appear.

The universe is a pretty big place!
It wasnt always. Way back at the Big Bang
it was small. And small tends to be synonymous with Quantum.
Yet, our everyday world doesnt seem to be
quantum weird. So, how did the world loose its
quantumness?
For matter there might be an answer. Here the clustering
of matter into big things like galaxies and people
might have caused the decoherence.
The quantum waves representing the particles (and allows them to
be in many places at the same time), interact
and 'decides' to be real, instead of ghostly quantum,
when particles come together in large amounts.

But space time itself - why did that decide to
be relatively smooth, instead of totally chaotic quantum? No one knows.

Marcus Chown doesn't go into (in this book) what a
quantum world actually means for our consciousness.
Are our minds being flipped around according
to 'ghostly influence' by the rest of the universe? -
or better still, are our minds flipping the rest of universe
around according to our thinking?
At the very least, surely our minds live in a quantum
world, should mean something?

However small the quantum thing is everywhere!
The universe is infinite, so it doesnt mattter that much
if the quantums effects are small. It is still
enough to make everything mind boogling.
E.g. It is very unlikely, but eventually, everything can be produced
in spacetime out of 'thin air' and random quantum process.
Lego bricks, cars, spaceships and brains.
And with an infinite amount of space-time it
is a certainty that these things will eventually
be produced. Including 'Boltzmann brains'!
Actually, 'Boltzmann brains' will outnumber other 'real' brains, like
human brains, that have been build by evolution over
billions of years.

So, Boltzmann brains will sit out there in the utter emptyness
of space - and stare out in nothingness... They are
the typical observers in our universe?!

The Boltzmann brains might not be communicating
with us. And apparently noone else is!
It might be that the galaxy is a galaxy of dolphins,
that are happy swimming around in alien seas.
Or that communication is extremely dangerous,
with killer species out there in deep space.
Or that it is just very hard to reach
a technological civilisation
(The five steps that made us - a) advent of bacteria b)
complex cells with nuclei c) multicellular life
d) intelligence e) human civilisation - each took
some 800 million years)

Or perhaps is it much better to make
your own simulation of the whole thing
at your own home planet. Complete with humans
and dinosaurs in it (as Stephen Wolfram
has suggested). Perhaps everything, everything
can be generated by a computer program!

Reality it might not be. But who knows about
reality anyway?

-Simon

Author: Stephen William Hawking
By Bantam Press

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Excellent, 2009-06-19
The book arrived very quickly and in excellent condition. I was very impressed with it, thank you!

Author: Miranda Lundy
By Wooden Books

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Sacred Geometry by Miranda Lundy, 2009-08-27
I was looking for a replacement copy of a book I used to have (THE OLD STRAIGHT TRACK by Alfred Watkins which I did find and purchase) when I came across this "little beauty" and thought that since the subject was the same as Watkins' book, I might find it just as interesting and am looking forward to reading it, but not yet as I have just borrowed Volume 1 of John Evelyn's diaries from the library. (Evelyn was my 15 times great-grandfather.)

Author: Roger Penrose
By The Bodley Head Ltd

Author: Simon Singh
By Harper Perennial

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Great book, 2010-05-24
I can only agree with the great reviews already included under the 5 star rating. In recent times I find myself watching my ipod whilst out traveling, but with this book I read it cover to cover and the ipod never left my pocket. A great read in a topic that can so easily become dull or over complicated.
I recommend it to anyone with any level of interest in this topic, whether it be for a basic understanding of the Big Bang, or cosmology in general, or especialliy in the way in which cosmology has developed over time. Excellent book.

Author: Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack S. Cohen
By Ebury Press

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the science of discworld, 2010-01-09
yet another essential read for discworld fans, this is not your usual outing into the world of mad wizards, instead its part story and part background, all in all still worth owning

Author: Stuart Clark
By Quercus Publishing Plc

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