Ripples in Spacetime

Ripples in Spacetime PDF Author: Govert Schilling
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971663
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A spacetime appetizer -- Relatively speaking -- Einstein on trial -- Wave talk and bar fights -- The lives of stars -- Clockwork precision -- Laser quest -- The path to perfection -- Creation stories -- Cold case -- Gotcha -- Black magic -- Nanoscience -- Follow-up questions -- Space invaders -- Surf's up for Einstein wave astronomy

Ripples in Spacetime

Ripples in Spacetime PDF Author: Govert Schilling
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971663
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
A spacetime appetizer -- Relatively speaking -- Einstein on trial -- Wave talk and bar fights -- The lives of stars -- Clockwork precision -- Laser quest -- The path to perfection -- Creation stories -- Cold case -- Gotcha -- Black magic -- Nanoscience -- Follow-up questions -- Space invaders -- Surf's up for Einstein wave astronomy

Ripples On A Cosmic Sea

Ripples On A Cosmic Sea PDF Author: David Blair
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780738201375
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Most people live and work entirely oblivious to the fact that a myriad of ghostly ripples are passing through them all the time. Generated in the depths of space by colliding stars and black holes, exploding supernovas and quasars, these so-called gravitational waves are literally ripples in the fabric of space itself. Sweeping across the cosmos at the speed of light, they encode vital clues about the exotic systems that produced them. Predicted by Einstein over eighty years ago, but never detected in the laboratory, gravitational waves have proven elusive to scientists. In the first book for a general reader on these amazing waves, Blair and McNamara weave a thrilling tale about the race to build the first gravitational wave antenna—a challenge that has prompted physicists and astronomers to devise some of the most breathtaking technology the world has ever seen. What these scientists find will allow us to listen to the explosion of stars, the creation of black holes, even the sound of the Big Bang itself, and will undoubtedly chart a new course for astronomy in the coming millennium.

Ripples in the Cosmos

Ripples in the Cosmos PDF Author: Michael Rowan-Robinson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780788194610
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
On 23 April 1992 a major science story appeared in headlines around the world. The announcement of the discovery of small-scale fluctuations in the cosmic microwave radiation, ripples in the cosmos, took most of the world's cosmologists by surprise. This was the discovery of the century, perhaps of all time.Ó What are the ripples? Why are they of such fundamental importance? What do they tell us about the beginning of the universe? This readable book sets the discovery in its wider context, that of the search for an explanation of how galaxies, clusters of galaxies formed in a universe which was initially of almost perfect uniformity. Illustrated.

Ripples On A Cosmic Sea

Ripples On A Cosmic Sea PDF Author: David G. Blair
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
As the authors show, the reward for this endeavor will be the opening up of an entirely new window on the universe.

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space PDF Author: Janna Levin
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307958205
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the soundtrack of our universe. Black holes are dark. That is their essence. When black holes collide, they will do so unilluminated. Yet the black hole collision is an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe. The profusion of energy will emanate as waves in the shape of spacetime: gravitational waves. No telescope will ever record the event; instead, the only evidence would be the sound of spacetime ringing. In 1916, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, his top priority after he proposed his theory of curved spacetime. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, the soundtrack to accompany astronomy’s silent movie. In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, Janna Levin recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, the aspirations, and the trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous, fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive waves. An experimental ambition that began as an amusing thought experiment, a mad idea, became the object of fixation for the original architects—Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Ron Drever. Striving to make the ambition a reality, the original three gradually accumulated an international team of hundreds. As this book was written, two massive instruments of remarkably delicate sensitivity were brought to advanced capability. As the book draws to a close, five decades after the experimental ambition began, the team races to intercept a wisp of a sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein’s most radical idea. Janna Levin’s absorbing account of the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this unfolding story offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Ripples in Spacetime

Ripples in Spacetime PDF Author: Govert Schilling
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780674981126
Category : SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
It has already been called the scientific breakthrough of the century: the detection of gravitational waves. Einstein predicted these tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime nearly a hundred years ago, but they were never perceived directly until now. Decades in the making, this momentous discovery has given scientists a new understanding of the cataclysmic events that shape the universe and a new confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein's project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe's structure and origin. The quest for gravitational waves involved years of risky research and many personal and professional struggles that threatened to derail one of the world's largest scientific endeavors. Govert Schilling takes readers to sites where these stories unfolded--including Japan's KAGRA detector, Chile's Atacama Cosmology Telescope, the South Pole's BICEP detectors, and the United States' LIGO labs. He explains the seeming impossibility of developing technologies sensitive enough to detect waves from two colliding black holes in the very distant universe, and describes the astounding precision of the LIGO detectors. Along the way Schilling clarifies concepts such as general relativity, neutron stars, and the big bang using language that readers with little scientific background can grasp.--

Dark Cosmos

Dark Cosmos PDF Author: Dan Hooper
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061976865
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The twentieth century was astonishing in all regards, shaking the foundations of practically every aspect of human life and thought, physics not least of all. Beginning with the publication of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, through the wild revolution of quantum mechanics, and up until the physics of the modern day (including the astonishing revelation, in 1998, that the Universe is not only expanding, but doing so at an ever-quickening pace), much of what physicists have seen in our Universe suggests that much of our Universe is unseen—that we live in a dark cosmos. Everyone knows that there are things no one can see—the air you're breathing, for example, or, to be more exotic, a black hole. But what everyone does not know is that what we can see—a book, a cat, or our planet—makes up only 5 percent of the Universe. The rest—fully 95 percent—is totally invisible to us; its presence discernible only by the weak effects it has on visible matter around it. This invisible stuff comes in two varieties—dark matter and dark energy. One holds the Universe together, while the other tears it apart. What these forces really are has been a mystery for as long as anyone has suspected they were there, but the latest discoveries of experimental physics have brought us closer to that knowledge. Particle physicist Dan Hooper takes his readers, with wit, grace, and a keen knack for explaining the toughest ideas science has to offer, on a quest few would have ever expected: to discover what makes up our dark cosmos.

The Detection of Gravitational Waves

The Detection of Gravitational Waves PDF Author: David G. Blair
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521021029
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
This book introduces the concepts of gravitational waves within the context of general relativity. The sources of gravitational radiation for which there is direct observational evidence and those of a more speculative nature are described. He then gives a general introduction to the methods of detection. In the subsequent chapters he has drawn together the leading scientists in the field to give a comprehensive practical and theoretical account of the physics and technology of gravitational wave detection.

Gravitational Waves

Gravitational Waves PDF Author: Brian Clegg
Publisher: Icon Books
ISBN: 1785783211
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
On 14 September 2015, after 50 years of searching, gravitational waves were detected for the first time and astronomy changed for ever. Until then, investigation of the universe had depended on electromagnetic radiation: visible light, radio, X-rays and the rest. But gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space and time – are unrelenting, passing through barriers that stop light dead. At the two 4-kilometre long LIGO observatories in the US, scientists developed incredibly sensitive detectors, capable of spotting a movement 100 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. In 2015 they spotted the ripples produced by two black holes spiralling into each other, setting spacetime quivering. This was the first time black holes had ever been directly detected – and it promises far more for the future of astronomy. Brian Clegg presents a compelling story of human technical endeavour and a new, powerful path to understand the workings of the universe.

The Nine Numbers of the Cosmos

The Nine Numbers of the Cosmos PDF Author: Michael Rowan-Robinson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0192862162
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
How old is the universe? How far away are the galaxies and how fast are they travelling away from us? How do galaxies form? Michael Rowan-Robinson answers these and many more questions in a highly original and intringuing way. He encapsulates our current knowledge (both what we do and don't know) of the origin and the nature of the universe into nine numbers, or independant characteristics. The complex ideas that underpin modern cosmology such as the origin of the elements and quantum therory are explained clearly and accessibly, and more speculative ideas like inflation and superstrings are also covered, but with a refreshing scepticism. Rowan-Robinson ends the book with a look to the future, predicting that with further space missions we will accurately know the nine numbers described in this book by the year 2015, but concludes that the origin of the Big Bang itself will still be a mystery by the end of the twenty-first century, and perhaps even in the year 3000.