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A User's Guide To the Universe
alfredw writes "Have you ever wanted to buttonhole a physicist at a cocktail party? Do you have the burning desire to sit down with a professor and ask a laundry list of 'physics' questions about time travel and black holes? Do you want to know more about modern physics, but want to do it with pop culture experiments instead of mathematics? If you answered 'yes' to any of those questions, then you're in the target audience for A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty." Keep reading for the rest of alfredw's review.
A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty
author
Dave Goldberg, Jeff Blomquist
pages
304pp
publisher
Wiley
rating
8
reviewer
alfredw
ISBN
9780470496510
summary
A fun, light read about interesting areas of modern physics that will entertain while it educates.
A User's Guide to the Universe (hereinafter "A User's Guide") is the physicist's answer to Phil Plait's Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End.... What Goldberg and Blomquist have created is a fun, light read about interesting areas of modern physics that will entertain while it educates. The book assumes very little scientific background on the part of the reader. Those with some knowledge (this is Slashdot, after all) will find the explanations of well-known concepts (the double slit experiment, for example) lucid, direct, brief and entertaining.
A User's Guide covers topics like relativity, time travel, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and alien life. It does so with a very tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and footnotes that act as the authors' very own peanut gallery. While this humor lightens up what could otherwise be a few dry areas of discussion, the littering of the text with pop-culture references is bound to make the book feel a bit dated in years to come. For now (March 2010), though, A User's Guide is so fresh you might call it ripe.
Unlike Death from the Skies, this book is well illustrated. The pen-and-ink cartoons are omnipresent, and serve to both illustrate the text, and to take every opportunity for a joke (cheap or otherwise) that presents itself. Overall, I felt that the cartoons were a strong addition to the book, as they can provide a needed laugh in a serious section, or can eliminate the proverbial thousand words when describing an experiment or concept.
The chapter on time travel is a stand-out. It presents several "practical" designs for time machines, which use black holes, cosmic strings or wormholes as components. I am an avid reader of pop-sci books, and I found designs that were new to me. The discussion of the Grandfather Paradox (if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you were never born and could never have committed murder) and ways around it are very helpful and present a solid physical framework for thinking about these issues. When the Grandfather Paradox is reformulated using pool balls, instead of thinking humans, it becomes clear that the issues are physical and not metaphysical. Also, the authors helpfully include a chart ranking sci-fi shows and movies for their time travel savvy.
You'll also find a strong and entertaining treatment of inflationary cosmology, including discussions of the evidence behind the theory and a look at some consequences. This book avoids both a heavy technical treatment and a historical look at the development of the theory (see, for example, Alan Guth's The Inflationary Universe for that) and instead dives right in to the juiciest parts. This style is well-suited to the reader who wants the funs bits without all of the baggage.
If you're curious about quantum mechanics, the second chapter contains a one of the best introductions in the field. By asking questions like "can we build a Star Trek transporter?" the authors drive a quick and satisfying tour through the weirdness of the microscopic world. This "evil genius hands-on" approach is this book's most important contribution to pop sci literature, and its most endearing feature. You'll start by looking at Star Trek, but end with the mysteries of the double-slit experiment, wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle.
Finally, at the end of the book, the authors helpfully include two sets of references: one to the pop sci literature, and one to the technical literature. Many of the best pop physics books of the past are listed, and the bibliography could serve as useful direction to more depth for the interested.
Overall, A User's Guide accomplishes what it sets out to do. It combines a hands-on, question-driven approach to physics with a tongue-in-cheek, pop-culture-based sense of humor. And then it throws on a layer of great cartoons to make the entire package something that most science books aren't: enjoyable. This book is fine, and you may well learn something in the process.
You can purchase A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
A User's Guide covers topics like relativity, time travel, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and alien life. It does so with a very tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and footnotes that act as the authors' very own peanut gallery. While this humor lightens up what could otherwise be a few dry areas of discussion, the littering of the text with pop-culture references is bound to make the book feel a bit dated in years to come. For now (March 2010), though, A User's Guide is so fresh you might call it ripe.
Unlike Death from the Skies, this book is well illustrated. The pen-and-ink cartoons are omnipresent, and serve to both illustrate the text, and to take every opportunity for a joke (cheap or otherwise) that presents itself. Overall, I felt that the cartoons were a strong addition to the book, as they can provide a needed laugh in a serious section, or can eliminate the proverbial thousand words when describing an experiment or concept.
The chapter on time travel is a stand-out. It presents several "practical" designs for time machines, which use black holes, cosmic strings or wormholes as components. I am an avid reader of pop-sci books, and I found designs that were new to me. The discussion of the Grandfather Paradox (if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you were never born and could never have committed murder) and ways around it are very helpful and present a solid physical framework for thinking about these issues. When the Grandfather Paradox is reformulated using pool balls, instead of thinking humans, it becomes clear that the issues are physical and not metaphysical. Also, the authors helpfully include a chart ranking sci-fi shows and movies for their time travel savvy.
You'll also find a strong and entertaining treatment of inflationary cosmology, including discussions of the evidence behind the theory and a look at some consequences. This book avoids both a heavy technical treatment and a historical look at the development of the theory (see, for example, Alan Guth's The Inflationary Universe for that) and instead dives right in to the juiciest parts. This style is well-suited to the reader who wants the funs bits without all of the baggage.
If you're curious about quantum mechanics, the second chapter contains a one of the best introductions in the field. By asking questions like "can we build a Star Trek transporter?" the authors drive a quick and satisfying tour through the weirdness of the microscopic world. This "evil genius hands-on" approach is this book's most important contribution to pop sci literature, and its most endearing feature. You'll start by looking at Star Trek, but end with the mysteries of the double-slit experiment, wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle.
Finally, at the end of the book, the authors helpfully include two sets of references: one to the pop sci literature, and one to the technical literature. Many of the best pop physics books of the past are listed, and the bibliography could serve as useful direction to more depth for the interested.
Overall, A User's Guide accomplishes what it sets out to do. It combines a hands-on, question-driven approach to physics with a tongue-in-cheek, pop-culture-based sense of humor. And then it throws on a layer of great cartoons to make the entire package something that most science books aren't: enjoyable. This book is fine, and you may well learn something in the process.
You can purchase A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Heh, trick question. There are no female physicists.
..."have you ever wanted to butthole a physicist".
Well, brains ARE sexy.
Did anyone else read this as 'Surviving the penis of black holes?'
I'd sure like to get out of here before the Vogons demolish the planet.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
As if anybody really understands this stuff. Get back to me when you have a Grand Unified Theory that isn't as full of holes as a brick of Swiss cheese.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
does "buttonhole" mean what I think it means? (eg: something to do with your butt hole?)
I just started watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos on Hulu. I'm 25 and was just a bit too young to watch it when it aired in the 80's, but damn if that isn't the *most* inspiring show about the universe I have ever seen! Immediately after watching it I couldn't stop thinking about space travel. I haven't read an actual book for about 8 years, and this weekend i bought "A Brief History of Time" to learn even more. I'm looking at getting a decent telescope too.
If you have any interest in this stuff, go watch Cosmos! It's all on Hulu and its free (if your country is allowed access).
Really, so inspiring its crazy!
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
This sounds more like a publisher's sales pitch than a review, and it is accompanied by an affiliate link. How did editors allow something like this? Please don't buy this book through the link provided. If you must buy it, go to amazon.com and search for it. At least don't encourage spam on slashdot since editors obviously don't care.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
On the top of my list - buttonhole a physicist at a cocktail party!
try "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose. Highly recommended; it's more of a physicist's summary of physics. The first third is just introductory mathematics, required for understanding the physics outlined in the rest of its 1000+ pages.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Cosmology is is changing rapidly and made several sharp turns during my lifetime. And the vast amount of new astronomical data pouring in thanks to Moore's Law suggests we'll see a few more sharp turns before its over.
On the other hand particle physics appears to have stagnated the past couple decades after verifying the last couple quarks and the Standard Theory. Its now wallowing in untestable theories like Strings and Quantum Gravity.
"Have you ever wanted to buttonhole a physicist at a cocktail party?"
Only if she was hot...
You know that is highly improbable, otherwise someone would have invented the infinite improbability drive by now.
DON'T PANIC.
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Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty"
as Surviving the Penis of Black Holes...
Are we sure this book wasn't written by Jeff Goldblum?
The author of this article must have used the insights on time-travel to build a time-machine, travel to Wednesday and return with the XKCD comic from that day...
To be entitled: "My Hobby: Buttonholing physicists at cocktail parties."
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
From what I remember photons are massless but carry momentum. (Admittedly I only took up to physics 102 so my understanding of modern physics is definitely limited.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
In italics, it looks like it says "Surviving the Penis of Black Holes".
Gives it a new twist...
Glad I read that first sentence a second time...
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Photons do not have mass. You may be thinking of neutrinos, which were once thought to be massless, but have been found to have a very small mass. Only massless particles can travel at the speed.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
... in Italic, Perils looks more like 'Penis' :(
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Without your cogent and well referenced criticisms, we would all blindly trust whatever those stupid, stupid scientists tell us. Seriously, though, you DO know that our current theories are quite simply, the most accurate and comprehensive theories mankind has ever developed, right? Your knee-jerk dismissal illustrates nothing more than your own ignorance and prejudice.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Here, this may help clear up your misunderstanding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Photons have no mass. That's one of the things that define them. There is a nice article on wikipedia about it :-)
I guess maybe it's just the Science and History channel but some of the answers he gives on those shows I just thought were useless. I mean first he prattles on about how weird gravity is in Newtonian mechanics because matter magically reaches out with a mysterious force to pull on objects at a distance directly. Nobody knows what that force is and this always bothered physicists. No that's not what happens we have to listen to Einstein and how he explained that really what happens is space is warped and objects are moving through this space in basically straight lines and it's so much better and doesn't have that spooky action at a distance stuff. I guess he didn't notice one thing, how does space get warped? Oh yeah, matter magically reaches out with a mysterious force to pull on space itself. Then by pulling on space objects at a distance are moved indirectly. (I get that relativity works better. My problem with Kaku's explaination was he had a bug up his ass over that mysterious force acting over a distance when talking about Newton. Yet when he talked about Einstein it didn't seem to bother him that some how matter still needs to "grab" over a distance. I was thinking to myself, "Wait why should matter warp space at all?") Well that and when he tried to explain how we know E=MC^2 as pretty much "Well that's what Einstein said it was." (Ok, I looked that one up on Wikipedia. I actually understood their explaination and it made me understand relativity more. That was cool.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Judging by the comments, this review serves as an excellent Rorschach test.
That one is easy: Because it is light, whatever speed it goes is the speed of light. :-)
No, photons have exactly zero mass (well, actually all we can say for sure is that their mass is far below anything we can measure, but if they had any mass, they would not travel at the invariant speed (c), but slightly below (but still so fast that any light we have yet measured is so close to c that we can't see the difference). The big question is: If we found a photon mass, would we still call the invariant speed the speed of light?
Anyway, out theories say the photon doesn't have any mass, and the experiments don't contradict this assumption.
That's not a problem for light, because it doesn't get accelerated to that speed, but as massless particle, it goes at speed of light right from its creation up to its destruction.
Photons have no mass, but inertia. Indeed, in the direction it goes it has infinite inertia: You cannot slow it down, nor speed it up (you might object to this claim because of the lower speed of light in media, but that's the group velocity, which isn't the speed of photons). In the direction orthogonal to its direction of flight it has inertia proportional to its energy (you can change the direction in which the light flies, as every mirror proves; the light pressure shows that there's a force involved).
It can't.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm curious how much more one would get out of this versus reading Brian Greenes' books. Or is it more like a newer version of this with a bit more time behind it?
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
About a dozen times during the astro observing class he taught at Yale he pointed skyward and said, "Behold: Jove, king of the planets!" He also wrote a nifty image stacking applet for students.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
And another thing:
My understanding is that all light (EM waves) travel at the speed of light c.
(I know that it varies depending on the medium the light travels through, but assume a vacuum)
Why? Why can't there be fast light and slow light? Why does it all have to be the same speed??
Because photons have no mass. Anything without mass goes at the invariant speed, because that's the only speed where it can exist.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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If you read carefully, you will see that while high the guy was trying to read up on how hard drives work. All those curled up dimensions and wormholes are just hard drive analogies.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Photons don't have mass, fucktard. GB2 physics class.
Sounds like an odd thing to do, but if she's cute i'll be a gentleman and offer to push in her stool.
Are there any cute female phycisists?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
That was my girlfriend, and she went off with him. He promised her that once she understood the Schroedinger equation, she would really get into big bangs.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Batteries are charged up from the electric grid, and they are designed to provide only the lighter, faster electrons from the top of the generators. Periodically, then will connect to the bottom of the generators to clean out all the large, slow electrons that have accululated in the bottom. This is when you get the brownouts, as the fat, slow electrons generate slow photons, which shift the colors down to the slower, browner colors of the spectrum.
The battery makers know about this secret, so on days when they are draining the generators, the battery makers switch to alternative power sources, such as solar power, so you don't have to worry about brown flashlights. Solar power doesn't have this problem, because the atmosphere filters out most of the fat electrons. This is what causes the Aurora Borealis, the fat photons hit the atmosphere, and explode. The smaller ones don't hit as hard because they are lighter, so they don't explode. When your battery is almost out of power, you will see that the fat electrons at the bottom of the battery start to come out, and your flashlight will dim.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Another great book on physics for the uninitiated is Isaac Asimov's non-fiction book, Understanding Physics. Even after all these decades, it's still a fantastic book, and a surprisingly easy read.
The battery can produce photons as a single photon doesn't have much of energy: around 1 eV which is 1.602*10^-19 J. One battery has around 1.5 V and 1000 mAh, that would be 1,5 Wh or 5,4 kJ. A single AAA battery can generate 3,37*10^22 photons with 1 eV (implying 100% efficiency). E = mc^2 = h. being frequency, h being planck's constant, c being the speed of light, m being mass and E for energy. Moving photons do have a (virtual?) mass as in they are affected by gravity and they do affect others with their own gravity, albeit very weak one. They don't have any rest mass, which is mass at rest.
Yes they do. And one of them, Lisa Randall of Harvard, is one I'd like to buttonhole a few times.
Because photons have no mass. Anything without mass goes at the invariant speed, because that's the only speed where it can exist.
So why can some gauge boson's be massless while others have mass?
Wow.... Priceless
On the other hand particle physics appears to have stagnated the past couple decades
Maybe that's why they built the Large Hadron Collider?
Free Martian Whores!
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I used to BE a physicist you ignorant clod!
No, no, and no.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Physics without math is like cooking without food...kind of misses the whole point
Yes, as in: The mass determines the inertia.
No, as in: The mass equals the inertia. That's only true in the non-relativistic limit. For relativistic speeds, inertia depends not only on the mass, but also on the velocity and on the direction of the force. This also means that in general, the acceleration isn't any more in the direction of the force (this is only true if the force either goes in the direction of movement, in the opposite direction, or exactly perpendicular).
No. The quoted text actually refers to the so-called "Zitterbewegung" which only occurs if you have both positive and negative energy solutions (i.e. both electrons and positrons) in your wave packet. It seems that the actual meaning of it is still discussed, but it's definitively not just that electrons move that way (you need both electrons and positrons to reproduce it). So it's some more complex effect, and even an apparent motion at the speed of light doesn't mean there's really something moving at the speed of light. One article I've seen claims that it's an effect of vacuum polarization, where a virtual electron-positron pair is created near the electron and the electron annihilates with the virtual positron, and the electron of the pair replaces the original one. That of course implies that speed of light is no problem, because the electron at the later position didn't actually move there.
Well, if the Higgs theory is right, they don't really have mass, but obtain that mass by interacting with the Higgs field.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We know that photons have a small amount of mass, and we know that the force required to accelerate to the speed of light approaches infinity.
Photons don't have any mass. Not sure where you get that idea. They have energy due to their frequency, and energy and mass are equivalent as far as general relativity is concerned, but the photon doesn't literally have a rest mass. This is because the photon is never at rest.
Your confusion arises because you aren't using the correct definitions of energy and momentum. When you use the proper relativistic definitions, there is nothing confusing about it.
To the issue of how a photon, which is massless, can possibly carry a momentum, you can explain this several ways. The simplest, but more opaque explanation is that photons always originate from charged matter. Because a photon carries energy (I don't see how you can dispute THAT fact), this means the energy of the charged particle which emits a photon must change somehow. Suppose this change is of the kinetic type (as opposed to a change purely in electronic state). This means the momentum of the charged particle changes, because its velocity changes. But the momentum cannot change without putting the extra momentum elsewhere -- basic conservation of momentum. Ergo, the momentum MUST be in the photon.
A more physically revelatory way of looking at it is to consider it from a wave perspective. An EM wave has an electric component and a magnetic component. When the electric component interacts with a charged particle, it causes this particle to oscillate. As the particle oscillates, it moves through the magnetic field from the very same light wave. This produces a Lorentz force which generally points in the same direction the light wave is propagating -- ergo, light carries momentum.
Well, massless gauge bosons are no problem, because gauge bosons should be massless. So the real question is: How can gauge bosons have mass? Well, that's why the Higgs mechanism was invented. The Higgs mechanism says that in principle the electroweak gauge bosons are all massless, however, there's the Higgs mechanism, which causes spontaneous symmetry breaking, and the broken symmetry allows the W and Z bosons to apparently have mass.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm hoping page 42 is something like "This page intentionally left blank" or something.
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42
Since when do user's read the guide anyway? Is there a quick start guide?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/26358649/A-User-s-Guide-to-the-Universe-Surviving-the-Perils-of-Black-Holes-Time-Paradoxes-and-Quantum-Uncertainty
A great podcast on most of the same topics.
Astronomy Cast
And it was Kip Thorne's book Black Holes and Time Warps. Fantastic book targeted at the layperson with many of the examples described in this review as well. Except it was written 1995. 5 star reviews on amazon. what more can i say? How about a forward from Hawking. It has that too. http://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269906159&sr=8-1
Real men start with QED as a light bedside reading! And then switch to the real challenging stuff! ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...may I recommend:
"The Cartoon Guide to Physics"
http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Physics-Larry-Gonick/dp/0062731009
Which is a fun and easy introduction. It's good for introducing your kids to physics, too!
Haven't read that particular work by Penrose, but I do have to second the recommendation for the Cartoon Guide to Physics.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
its interesting with time travels. Maybe in the future a death sentence would be carried out by travelling back and make sure the convicted were never born