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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.
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?
The secret is to get really, really high and say a bunch of stuff that sounds really deep and science-y and then write a bunch of incomprehensible equations that supposedly illustrate the deep science-y stuff you said. You don't have to understand it, you just have to make it sound so impressive that everyone will just assume you're smarter than them because they don't understand it. This is how string theory was developed.
For the record, I submitted the review without any sort of link to the publisher (per the Slashdot book review policy). The /. editors add in those links.
And no, I don't work for the publisher. I genuinely read the book and enjoyed it.
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
You know that is highly improbable, otherwise someone would have invented the infinite improbability drive by now.
Every book review on Slashdot has such a link; it's been like this for at least as long as Amazon has had an affiliate policy (though I seem to recall the links used to go to Barnes & Noble, though I could be mistaken).
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
In this context it means: "To detain (a person) in conversation against their will." http://www.allwords.com/word-buttonhole.html
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.
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)
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.
Seriously, you DO know that the same was true at every point in history, right?
30 years ago, the then current theories were quite simply, the most accurate and comprehensive theories mankind had ever developed. Ditto 60 years ago. And 100. And 1000. And....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm hoping page 42 is something like "This page intentionally left blank" or something.
Seriously, you DO know that the same was true at every point in history, right?
30 years ago, the then current theories were quite simply, the most accurate and comprehensive theories mankind had ever developed. Ditto 60 years ago. And 100. And 1000. And....
And of course we all realize that for the past couple hundred years at least, these theories have been converging on greater and greater accuracy and precision, not 180 degree reversals, right?
I don't need to link Asimov again do I? Oh snap too late.
The enemies of Democracy are