A quick note about The Big Rip

Today’s episode of Quirks & Quarks ends with a discussion of The Big Rip, the driving idea behind “Last Contact.” And I’m trying to write an inchoate story about Mars, so I was also interested in their discussion of the Phoenix Lander, due to land on Mars next Sunday.

Cosmic Jackpot

A good book you might wish you had read before tackling “The House Beyond Your Sky,” is Cosmic Jackpot. In clear, entertaining arguments, Paul Davies works his way through the various flavors of theories attempting to explain the “Goldilocks” problem. That is, there are a small set of critical constants that have to be within [...]

The House Beyond Your Sky

Some science fiction reads like popular science writing dressed up in story. “The House Beyond Your Sky,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum, is a story you really can’t understand unless you already know some science. The references to cosmology–like simulated universes and critical constants–go completely unexplained. And you know what? I like being treated as an adult.

Our Cosmic Origins

The second cosmology book recommended in Spin is Our Cosmic Origins, by Armand Delsemme. A slender book, it gives a good summary of the origins of the Solar System, but skims over a lot of explanation. Understanding and accepting it is largely dependant on reading other books. Being a cometologist, he goes into fascinating detail [...]

The Life and Death of Planet Earth

One of the books recommended at the end of Spin, The Life and Death of Planet Earth, by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, shows you what the Spin protects the Earth from. The book has an interesting structure, telling the creation and history of our world by mirroring it in the future.

Programming the Universe

The one Big Idea I learned from Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd, is that random input, processed through rules, creates structured output. Information is encoded in the attributes (the location, velocity, etc of every particle) of physical objects, and the laws of physics operate on them like programming instructions. So for the universe, we [...]

The View From the Center of the Universe

In The View from the Center of the Universe, Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams attempt to create a new mythos, that is, a story that explains our world, based on science. Actually, I think they did a better job of explaining what they are trying to say in their various interviews than in [...]

The Universe in a Single Atom

Much has been made of the Dalai Lama’s stance that if science can disprove any tenets of Buddhism, then they would accept it, since Buddhism is an experiential and experimental religion. The Universe in a Single Atom, by the Dalai Lama, accepts modern physics and cosmology, hopes the combination of monks and scientists will expand [...]