Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe - Softcover

Smoot, George; Davidson, Keay

 
9780061344442: Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe

Inhaltsangabe

In April 1992, a discovery was made that changed the way we view the world. Dr. George Smoot, distinguished cosmologist and adventurer, whose quest for cosmic knowledge had taken him from the Brazilian rain forest to the South Pole unveiled his momentous discovery, bringing to light the very nature of the universe. For anyone who has ever looked up at the night sky and wondered, for anyone who has ever longed to pull aside the fabric of the universe for a glimpse of what lies behind it. Wrinkles in Time is the story of Smoot’s search to uncover the cosmic seeds of the universe. Wrinkles in Time is the Double Helix of cosmology, an intimate look at the inner world of men and women who ask. "Why are we here?" It tells the story of George Smoot’s dogged pursuit of the cosmic wrinkles in the frozen wastes of Antarctica, on mountaintops, in experiments borne aloft aboard high-altitude balloons, U-2 spy planes, and finally a space satellite. Wrinkles in Time presents the hard science behind the structured violence of the big bang theory through breathtakingly clear, lucid images and meaningful comparisons. Scientists and nonscientists alike can follow with rapt attention the story of how, in a fiery creation, wrinkles formed in space ultimately to become stars, galaxies, and even greater delicate structures. Anyone can appreciate the implications of a universe whose end is written in its beginnings - whose course developed according to a kind of cosmic DNA, which guided the universe from simplicity and symmetry to ever-greater complexity and structure. As controversial as it may seem today, Wrinkles in Time reveals truths that, in an earlier century, would have doomed its proclaimers to thefiery stake. For four thousand years some people have accepted the Genesis account of cosmic origin; for most of this century, scientists debated two rival scientific explanations known as the steady state and big bang theories. And now, Wrinkles in Time tells what really happened

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George Smoot has been an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1974 and has been a physics professor at University of California-Berkeley since 1994. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Astrophysicist George Smoot spent decades pursuing the origin of the cosmos, "the holy grail of science," a relentless hunt that led him from the rain forests of Brazil to the frozen wastes of Antarctica. In his search he struggled against time, the elements, and the forces of ignorance and bureaucratic insanity. Finally, after years of research, Smoot and his dedicated team of Berkeley researchers succeeded in proving the unprovable—uncovering, inarguably and for all time, the secrets of the creation of the universe. Wrinkles in Time describes this startling discovery that would usher in a new scientific age—and win Smoot the Nobel Prize in Physics.

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