Einstein's Greatest Blunder?

Einstein's Greatest Blunder? PDF Author: Donald Goldsmith
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674242425
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
This brief and witty book, by the award-winning science writer Donald Goldsmith, takes on key questions about the origin and evolution of the cosmos. By clearly laying out what we currently know about the universe as a whole, Goldsmith lets us see firsthand whether modern cosmology is in a state of crisis.

Einstein's Greatest Blunder?

Einstein's Greatest Blunder? PDF Author: Donald Goldsmith
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674242425
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
This brief and witty book, by the award-winning science writer Donald Goldsmith, takes on key questions about the origin and evolution of the cosmos. By clearly laying out what we currently know about the universe as a whole, Goldsmith lets us see firsthand whether modern cosmology is in a state of crisis.

Einstein's Greatest Mistake

Einstein's Greatest Mistake PDF Author: David Bodanis
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1408708086
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description
Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionised our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped to lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life he was also ignored by most working scientists, his ideas opposed by even his closest friends. This stunning downfall can be traced to Einstein's earliest successes and to personal qualities that were at first his best assets. Einstein's imagination and self-confidence served him well as he sought to reveal the universe's structure, but when it came to newer revelations in the field of quantum mechanics, these same traits undermined his quest for the ultimate truth. David Bodanis traces the arc of Einstein's intellectual development across his professional and personal life, showing how Einstein's confidence in his own powers of intuition proved to be both his greatest strength and his ultimate undoing. He was a fallible genius. An intimate and enlightening biography of the celebrated physicist, Einstein's Greatest Mistake reveals how much we owe Einstein today - and how much more he might have achieved if not for his all-too-human flaws.

Brilliant Blunders

Brilliant Blunders PDF Author: Mario Livio
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439192383
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on the lives of five great scientists, this “scholarly, insightful, and beautifully written book” (Martin Rees, author of From Here to Infinity) illuminates the path to scientific discovery. Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein all made groundbreaking contributions to their fields—but each also stumbled badly. Darwin’s theory of natural selection shouldn’t have worked, according to the prevailing beliefs of his time. Lord Kelvin gravely miscalculated the age of the earth. Linus Pauling, the world’s premier chemist, constructed an erroneous model for DNA in his haste to beat the competition to publication. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle dismissed the idea of a “Big Bang” origin to the universe (ironically, the caustic name he gave to this event endured long after his erroneous objections were disproven). And Albert Einstein speculated incorrectly about the forces of the universe—and that speculation opened the door to brilliant conceptual leaps. As Mario Livio luminously explains in this “thoughtful meditation on the course of science itself” (The New York Times Book Review), these five scientists expanded our knowledge of life on earth, the evolution of the earth, and the evolution of the universe, despite and because of their errors. “Thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written” (The Washington Post), Brilliant Blunders is a wonderfully insightful examination of the psychology of five fascinating scientists—and the mistakes as well as the achievements that made them famous.

Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius

Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius PDF Author: Hans C. Ohanian
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070425
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A thought-provoking critique of Einstein’s tantalizing combination of brilliance and blunder.”—Andrew Robinson, New Scientist Never before translated into English, the Manimekhalai is one of the great classics of Indian culture.

Exploring Black Holes

Exploring Black Holes PDF Author: Edwin F. Taylor
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780321512864
Category : Black holes (Astronomy)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Physics of the Universe

Physics of the Universe PDF Author: Mendel Sachs
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 1848166044
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents a new approach to the subject of cosmology. It fully exploits Einstein?s theory of general relativity. It is found that the most general formal expression of the theory replaces the (10-component) tensor formalism with a (16-component) quaternion formalism. This leads to a unified field theory, where one field incorporates gravitation and electromagnetism. The theory predicts an oscillating universe cosmology with a spiral configuration. Dark matter is explained in terms of a sea of particle?antiparticle pairs, each in a particular (derived) ground state. This leads to an explanation for the separation between matter and antimatter in the universe. There is a brief discussion of black holes and pulsars. The final chapter delves into philosophical considerations such as the different types of ?truth?, positivism versus realism and a discussion of the role of the Mach principle in physics and cosmology.

Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction

Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Peter Coles
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191579440
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a simple, non-technical introduction to cosmology, explaining what it is and what cosmologists do. Peter Coles discusses the history of the subject, the development of the Big Bang theory, and more speculative modern issues like quantum cosmology, superstrings, and dark matter. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Extravagant Universe

The Extravagant Universe PDF Author: Robert P. Kirshner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400883806
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Extravagant Universe tells the story of a remarkable adventure of scientific discovery. One of the world's leading astronomers, Robert Kirshner, takes readers inside a lively research team on the quest that led them to an extraordinary cosmological discovery: the expansion of the universe is accelerating under the influence of a dark energy that makes space itself expand. In addition to sharing the story of this exciting discovery, Kirshner also brings the science up-to-date in a new epilogue. He explains how the idea of an accelerating universe--once a daring interpretation of sketchy data--is now the standard assumption in cosmology today. This measurement of dark energy--a quality of space itself that causes cosmic acceleration--points to a gaping hole in our understanding of fundamental physics. In 1917, Einstein proposed the "cosmological constant" to explain a static universe. When observations proved that the universe was expanding, he cast this early form of dark energy aside. But recent observations described first-hand in this book show that the cosmological constant--or something just like it--dominates the universe's mass and energy budget and determines its fate and shape. Warned by Einstein's blunder, and contradicted by the initial results of a competing research team, Kirshner and his colleagues were reluctant to accept their own result. But, convinced by evidence built on their hard-earned understanding of exploding stars, they announced their conclusion that the universe is accelerating in February 1998. Other lines of inquiry and parallel supernova research now support a new synthesis of a cosmos dominated by dark energy but also containing several forms of dark matter. We live in an extravagant universe with a surprising number of essential ingredients: the real universe we measure is not the simplest one we could imagine.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider PDF Author: Don Lincoln
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 142143914X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
An insider's history of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider: why it was built, how it works, and the importance of what it has revealed. Since 2008 scientists have conducted experiments in a hyperenergized, 17-mile supercollider beneath the border of France and Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider (or what scientists call "the LHC") is one of the wonders of the modern world—a highly sophisticated scientific instrument designed to re-create in miniature the conditions of the universe as they existed in the microseconds following the big bang. Among many notable LHC discoveries, one led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for revealing evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle. Picking up where he left off in The Quantum Frontier, physicist Don Lincoln shares an insider's account of the LHC's operational history and gives readers everything they need to become well informed on this marvel of technology. Writing about the LHC's early days, Lincoln offers keen insight into an accident that derailed the operation nine days after the collider's 2008 debut. A faulty solder joint started a chain reaction that caused a massive explosion, damaged 50 superconducting magnets, and vaporized large sections of the conductor. The crippled LHC lay dormant for over a year, while technical teams repaired the damage. Lincoln devotes an entire chapter to the Higgs boson and Higgs field, using several extended analogies to help explain the importance of these concepts to particle physics. In the final chapter, he describes what the discovery of the Higgs boson tells us about our current understanding of basic physics and how the discovery now keeps scientists awake over a nagging inconsistency in their favorite theory. As accessible as it is fascinating, The Large Hadron Collider reveals the inner workings of this masterful achievement of technology, along with the mind-blowing discoveries that will keep it at the center of the scientific frontier for the foreseeable future.

The Cambridge Companion to Einstein

The Cambridge Companion to Einstein PDF Author: Michel Janssen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521828341
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 579

Get Book Here

Book Description
These fourteen essays by leading historians and philosophers of science introduce the reader to the work of Albert Einstein. Following an introduction that places Einstein's work in the context of his life and times, the essays explain his main contributions to physics in terms that are accessible to a general audience, including special and general relativity, quantum physics, statistical physics, and unified field theory. The closing essays explore the relation between Einstein's work and twentieth-century philosophy, as well as his political writings.