Featured Conservative Authors
Conservative Book Zone
Conservative Classics
General Market Books
Shop our bookstore where you will find books for each conservative topic you are looking for!
|
|
|
|
|
|
Einstein's Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe
| Our Price |
$ 21.54
|
|
| Retail Value |
$ 25.95 |
|
| You Save |
$ 4.41 (17%) |
|
| Item Number |
2426433 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Item Description...
Overview
Evalyn Gates transports us to the edge of science to explore the tool that unlocks the secrets of dark matter and dark energy. Based on the theory of general relativity, gravitational lensing, or 'Einstein's Telescope', is enabling discoveries that are taking us towards the next revolution in scientific thinking--one that may change our understanding of where the Universe came from and where it is going.
Publishers Description
Dark energy. Dark matter. These strange and invisible substances don't just sound mysterious: their unexpected appearance in the cosmic census is upending long-held notions about the nature of the Universe. Astronomers have long known that the Universe is expanding, but everything they could see indicated that gravity should be slowing this spread. Instead, it appears that the Universe is accelerating its expansion and that something stronger than gravity--dark energy--is at work. In Einstein's Telescope Evalyn Gates, a University of Chicago astrophysicist, transports us to the edge of contemporary science to explore the revolutionary tool that unlocks the secrets of these little-understood cosmic constituents. Based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravitational lensing, or "Einstein's Telescope," is enabling new discoveries that are taking us toward the next revolution in scientific thinking--one that may change forever our notions of where the Universe came from and where it is going. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 305
Dimensions: Length: 1.25" Width: 6.5" Height: 9.75"
Weight: 1.32 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Release Date Feb 23, 2009
ISBN 0393062384
EAN 9780393062380
|
Availability 2 units.
Availability accurate as of May 30, 2012 03:44.
Usually ships within one to two business days from Commerce GA.
Orders shipping to an address other than a confirmed Credit Card / Paypal Billing address may incur and additional processing delay.
|
More About Evalyn Gates
Product Categories
Similar Products
Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Savy and Scientific Jan 7, 2010 |
| I read this book alongside Dan Hooper's new book on Supersymmetry (see related review of this book). While Mr. Hooper comes at dark matter from the perspective of a particle physicist and supersymmetry, Ms. Gates provided a very nice juxtaposition (for me at least) by coming at dark matter from the cosmic perspective as an astrophysicist, and from the distinct perspective of gravitational lensing - the essence of the title of the book. As a current graduate student in Astronomy, I really enjoyed the obvious knowledge and background that Ms. Gates brought to this subject. I also enjoyed Ms. Gates' humorous presentation. Handled wrongly, sometimes humour can detract from the flow and presentation, but Ms. Gates (in my opinion) nicely used her dry wit to add to the presentation and to provide moments of levity throughout the text. The book will be very enjoyable to any reader interested in science and provides a very nice summary of dark matter and the techniques employed to quantify it. It doesn't deal too much with dark energy, other than to confirm that observations show that the Universe's expansion is accelerating and giving possible explanations for it in a summary way. But I don't fault the author for this; dark energy is very much more mysterious than dark matter at this point, and it seemed the author's intent here was to concentrate on dark matter. I very much recommend this book. | | | | A quick read that shows clearly why we have to overturn what we thought the Universe was made of Dec 14, 2009 |
Coming in at a reasonable 270 pages of main text, this very readable and thoroughly engaging book takes the reader from when cosmologists and astrophysicists "thought they were so close" to having it all figured out and yet showing us that as early as the 1930's theorists were postulating dark matter (as early as 1933 Zwicke called it "dunkle Materie"). But it wasn't until 1970 that a second observation of the speeds at which gas clouds were orbiting around the Andromeda Galaxy that put dark matter on the map for good.
It turns out the Universe is filled with the stuff. And by "stuff" they aren't even sure what it is made of, but WIMPs are the most likely candidate. To make matters worse, Dark Energy appears to exist as a negative pressure within the entire Universe acting as a sort of renewed "Inflation" that is speeding up the expansion against normal gravity's will.
How do we know all of this? Well, in the book, the author Evalyn Gates lays out the territory upon which these discoveries came to light. The territory is General Relativity and the famous first prediction it made, that light will be bent by the curvature of spacetime around a very massive gravitating body like the Sun - a method now affectionately known as "Einstein's Telescope". Today this confirmation of Einstein's grand vision of the cosmos is being utilized in ways that Einstein himself considered only hypothetical-gravitational lensing of distant objects by galactic glusters, single galaxies and even dark matter itself.
In a very simple and readable way, Dr. Gates takes the reader very carefully, but very swiftly, through 100 years of cosmology to the present making it understandable and interesting. The book never gets weighed down much in jargon and she keeps the examples light and refreshing using mundane and ordinary relationships to make simpler these complex concepts.
The book has an opening Glossary of Acronyms and extensive and helpful notes from each Chapter at the end of the book that the reader can refer to when he or she feels the need. I bought this book because it was published very recently, in February of 2009, and it has helped me round out my research on the subject of modern cosmology in my attempt to understand the challenges of the big-bang model.
I highly recommend this wonderful little book to all science enthusiasts and anyone else that might want to take a peek into our present understanding of just what the Universe is made of and how we are presently going about taking down the data needed to make the claims found in this book.
Buy it today. | | | | Wonderful Oct 24, 2009 |
| "Einsteins Telescope" is excellent! Gates explains how we know dark matter and dark energy exist, and what we are doing to understand their mysterious nature. This was a very entertaining book, filled with a lot of good information. I would recommend this to anyone interested in modern cosmology, especially those who want to know more about dark matter and dark energy. | | | | Outstanding popularization Oct 8, 2009 |
As others have written this is an outstanding popular treatment of cosmology as of late 2008.
If you are interested in the cosmos you you live you will enjoy this book.
Also worth reading in a different vein is: "Death From the Skies." | | |  | Cosmos exploration Sep 20, 2009 |
Evalyn Gates has done a superb job of explaining the "how" of current cosmos research. My background is Hollywood journalism, not science writing, but Evalyn Gates pulls galaxies into my living room with plain English and humor. Like Hawking, Geeene and Randall, she makes the current frontier understandable.
Howard Williams | | | Write your own review about Einstein's Telescope: The Hunt for Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe
|
|
