Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos
An awe-inspiring, unforgettable journey of scientific exploration from Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, the international bestselling authors of Why Does E=MC2? and The Quantum Universe, with 55 black-&-white and 45 full-color pages featuring photographs, diagrams, maps, tables, and graphs We dare to imagine a time before the Big Bang, when the entire universe was compressed into a space smaller than an atom. And now, as Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw show, we can do more than imagine: we can understand. Universal takes us on an epic journey of scientific exploration. It reveals how we can all come to grips with some of the most fundamental questions about our Earth, Sun, and solar system--and the star-filled galaxies beyond. How big is our solar system? How quickly is space expanding? How big is the universe? What is it made of? Some of these questions can be answered on the basis of observations you can make in your own backyard. Other answers draw on the astonishing information now being gathered by teams of astronomers operating at the frontiers of the known universe. At the heart of all this lies the scientific method. Science reveals a deeper beauty and connects us to each other, to our world, and to our universe. Science reaches out into the unknown. As Universal demonstrates, if we dare to imagine, we can do the same.
Series
Featured Series
10 released booksScience with Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
Science with Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw is a 10-book series first released in 2009 with contributions by Brian Cox, Jeffrey R. Forshaw, and Брайан Кокс,.
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A perfect book for cosmology enthusiasts. This book has a perfect balance of coarse and detailed explanations, that is, this book is not exactly for laymen but also not for people with physics degrees (well, this is subjective, but you need at least a background knowledge of high school math and physics). It is rare to find a book like this.
It is bold of the author to write a book that will convey the reader, through a logic ladder, one step at a time, from understanding how to determine the age of the Earth, to the mechanism of how our universe starts. Nevertheless, I would say, the author is successful to bring us to the beginning of the universe.
I love the fact that there are some parts of the book (they called it boxes) where the author gave a more detailed explanation. It is up to the reader to read this part or not; you can basically skip it if you are not interested in the greater details, but if you want to understand more about what was described in the main text, it is necessary to read it. Sometimes the author presented a few equations to support the flow of explanation, which I really appreciate.
On top of it, the illustration and the graphs are top-notch. Real photos and real graphs from real data are presented in this book. Moreover, they are there not only for aesthetics, but the author explains them in detail. I was overwhelmed when the author explains how to read the CMB power spectrum (which supports inflation theory and confirms past energy-matter distribution observation) for pages, including boxes; things that are missed in most cosmology books.
One thing to note that confuses me half of the book: the term Big Bang that is used by the author is not the time of ‘creation', but rather the time when photons start to escape the primordial plasma, i.e. when recombination happened. It is actually emphasized in the first chapter, but silly me, I missed that sentence, and find out when I reread the first chapter.
