I’ve been fascinated by science and space since I was a child and naturally gravitated toward science fiction. In many respects, it was a form of escapism, as I didn’t enjoy school. I always preferred escaping into another world or being taken on a journey to another world. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that most great science fiction is a commentary on our own world and the issues we face daily. Science fiction, more than any other genre, does a better job of exploring and dissecting aspects of our world, which in turn helps us better understand our world and our relationship with it.
The Accidental Time Machine is one of the few novels that I’ve read beginning to end in one sitting because I found it so interesting. This isn’t the type of novel that will change your life or change how you feel about something. It’s just good. A good, fun book that can be read in a couple of hours. Haldeman doesn’t waste any time getting the story going and from there he takes you on a ride more enjoyable than novels twice the length.
Grad- school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when he inadvertently creates a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose in taking a time-machine trip himself-or so he thinks.
I was caught by the astronomy virus when I was 15 years old and had my first view of Saturn through a telescope. Ever since, I’ve enjoyed writing about everything cosmic for a wide variety of audiences. Cosmology is one of my favorite topics, it’s really the most enigmatic scientific discipline. Who knows, someday, a young, brilliant 21st-century genius will find the solution to all those riddles by formulating a whole new view of the birth and evolution of the universe. That’s my secret hope.
This 1986 book (revised in 1999) helped me to understand the Big Bang theory. I read it during a holiday in Italy when I was just starting my career as an astronomy writer. What I had read about the Big Bang so far was either extremely elementary (not really explaining anything at all) or full of jargon and dense with equations.
But John Gribbin knew exactly how to strike the perfect balance between the two. While my wife and one-year-old son were enjoying the swimming pool, I delved into quantum physics, expanding space, and the cosmic background radiation, all presented at a level an interested high-school student could understand.
Obviously, some parts of this book are obsolete by now, but it’s still one of my all-time favorites.
My expertise on the origins of our universe comes out of fascination, nothing more. I am a long-time children’s writer who began my approach to this topic with awe. Just awe. In order to write The Stuff of Stars I read widely to expand my own understanding. A single line in this text can come out of hours of reading. The books I’m suggesting here, though, are not the scientific ones that informed my telling. Rather, I have searched out books that are exceptionally creative, accessible, interesting. Some are for the very young and some for those who share their learning with the very young.
It Started with a Big Bang: The Origin of Earth, You and Everything Else is another picture book that covers the same territory for the very young as The Stuff of Stars. The writing is conversational and accessible. The illustrations are compelling. The two books read side by side would support and inform one another.
In this accessible informational picture book, young readers can follow the fascinating story of how we got from the very beginning of the universe to life today on the “bright blue ball floating in space” called Earth. They'll learn about the big bang theory, how our solar system was formed, how life on Earth began in the oceans and moved to land, what happened to the dinosaurs and how humans evolved from apes to explore and build communities all over the planet ... and even travel to space. It's an out-of-this-world look at the beginning of everything!
My expertise on the origins of our universe comes out of fascination, nothing more. I am a long-time children’s writer who began my approach to this topic with awe. Just awe. In order to write The Stuff of Stars I read widely to expand my own understanding. A single line in this text can come out of hours of reading. The books I’m suggesting here, though, are not the scientific ones that informed my telling. Rather, I have searched out books that are exceptionally creative, accessible, interesting. Some are for the very young and some for those who share their learning with the very young.
This fascinating book presents science side by side with creation stories drawn from every part of the world. Ghosh’s scientific explanations of the origins of our universe are succinct and clear. He tells us what is known about our beginnings, what is supposed, and what we do not know and may never understand. And he lays out creation stories from many parts of the world along with information about the cultures from which those stories came. How Did It All Start? is perfect for older children or for adults who want to deepen their understanding of both the science and the myths that surround our beginnings.
How did it all start? What was there in the beginning? What exactly is the universe? The brilliant stars, distant galaxies, the sun, the moon and our planet Earth. Where did it all come from, and what is its future? The Big Bang is a cornerstone theory of modern cosmology. This book tries to give a simplified understanding to our curious readers.
Take a look at when and how life started and evolved? How, where and when did the humans arrive? What was the journey of humans out of Africa and peopling of the rest of the world like? What…
Don Lincoln is both a research scientist and a masterful science communicator. On the science side, he participated in the discovery of both the top quark and the Higgs boson. On the communicator side, he has written books, made hundreds of YouTube videos, and written for such visible venues as Scientific American and CNN. He has both the scientific chops and writer expertise to tell an exciting story about why the universe is the way it is.
If one sets out to understand the universe, one thing one needs to do is understand the laws and rules that govern the matter and energy that makes up the cosmos. The second thing one needs to understand is how it came into existence. In this book, Dan Hooper describes what we know about the first few minutes. Hooper is a theoretical cosmologist at Fermilab, America’s flagship particle physics laboratory. He’s also an excellent author, with a great narrative style. If you want to understand how the Big Bang banged, this is the book for you.
A new look at the first few seconds after the Big Bang-and how research into these moments continues to revolutionize our understanding of our universe
Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the…
As a science fiction author, reading excellent science nonfiction is like taking my mind on a trip to an unknown land, there to wander, sightsee, and reimagine my own fictional plots. During the past few years of COVID-restricted isolation, these books have replaced travel as a source of mind-expanding inspiration, affording me a refuge from the tempest of current events and leaving my brain churning with visions of future worlds. The choices below reflect a common thread: each is written or edited by an expert in the field, and the authors possess that rare combination of deep knowledge and the ability to communicate it in an engaging way.
In the book Reality is Not What It Seems, Carlo Rovelli exhorts us to “Stop dreaming of new fields and strange particles; supplementary dimensions, other symmetries, parallel universes, strings, and whatever else.”Oh, but I wanted to dream, and Michio Kaku always takes me on such a fun ride! I loved Kaku’s The Future of the Mind, which inspired me as I wrote my own science fiction novel. So I turned to him again when I wanted to learn more about string theory, the competing theory to Rovelli’s loop quantum gravity and Kaku’s own area of expertise. It was well worth it. At least now I can plumb the allure of that symmetry, the wonder of those parallel worlds, and the fullness of those eleven dimensions—even if I may never see them proven out in my lifetime.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The epic story of the greatest quest in all of science—the holy grail of physics that would explain the creation of the universe—from renowned theoretical physicist and author of The Future of the Mind and The Future of Humanity
When Newton discovered the law of gravity, he unified the rules governing the heavens and the Earth. Since then, physicists have been placing new forces into ever-grander theories.
But perhaps the ultimate challenge is achieving a monumental synthesis of the two remaining theories—relativity and the quantum theory. This would be the crowning achievement of…
I was of that generation of children turned on to science by reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos - plus watching the Voyager spacecraft at Jupiter on TV, seeing the 1979 total solar eclipse over my house, and having Mt St Helens erupt outside my childhood window. So, one guess what I wanted to be when I grew up? Since then, I’ve earned a PhD, used the largest telescopes on Earth, designed something driving around on Mars, written popular books, and had my science art collected by the Smithsonian. But all of that started with a single book I read as a kid. Thanks Carl.
Where do we come from? It’s hard to come up with a bigger question. This book is a fun, illustrated read that explores the history of how we got from Creation myths and Greek philosophers to the Big Bang. But at every step of the way Dr. Singh is clear our ancestors were not idiots but rather had valid logical reasons based on what they saw to believe what they did. His easy prose, coupled with informative cartoons, is my gold standard for how to make science popular. And I learned Hubble (the astronomer, not the space telescope) once got a standing ovation at the Academy Awards! How cool is that?
The bestselling author of Fermat's Last Theorem and The Code Book tells the story of the brilliant minds that deciphered the mysteries of the Big Bang. A fascinating exploration of the ultimate question: how was our universe created?
Albert Einstein once said: 'The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.' Simon Singh believes geniuses like Einstein are not the only people able to grasp the physics that govern the universe. We all can.
As well as explaining what the Big Bang theory actually is and why cosmologists believe it is an accurate description of the origins…
I have loved astronomy since high school when I built my first telescope. I subsequently have been lucky enough to become a professional astronomer. I studied physics and astronomy at Utrecht University. After obtaining my PhD, I was postdoc at Lick Observatory in California, and after that became professor of astronomy, first in Brussels and later in Amsterdam. I have always loved teaching as well as my research on the physics and formation and evolution of neutron stars and black holes in binary systems, on which I, together with my Danish colleague Thomas Tauris, published the first textbook, which came out in 2023 in the USA.
This fine book addresses questions such as “How did the universe originate?" "Are there other universes (the Multiverse)?" "Why, after all, is there a universe?"
Central in this book is the amazing fact that all observations indicate that the universe is flat, which implies that its total energy is zero. So, no energy was required to produce it: the universe can have been created out of Nothing! To understand how this would be possible, the author takes us to the wonders of quantum mechanics, which allow the universe to be created as a vacuum fluctuation in a space with more than four dimensions.
Krauss also presents a very nice overview of our present knowledge of the history and development of the expanding universe. In the later parts of the book, he also discusses what place, if any, God could still have in his present-day view of how the universe has…
Internationally known theoretical physicist and bestselling author Lawrence Krauss offers provocative, revelatory answers to the most basic philosophical questions: Where did our universe come from? Why is there something rather than nothing? And how is it all going to end? Why is there something rather than nothing?" is asked of anyone who says there is no God. Yet this is not so much a philosophical or religious question as it is a question about the natural world-and until now there has not been a satisfying scientific answer. Today, exciting scientific advances provide new insight into this cosmological mystery: Not only…
I was an Eagle Scout selected for the 1964 North Pole expedition, graduate of MIT with both BS and MS degrees in Aero Astro – yes, a true MIT rocket scientist. I quickly took planning roles at the “bleeding edge” of technology: missiles, nuclear power, heart pumps, DNA sequencing, telemedicine… In every case, however, the organizations were plagued by incompetence and corruption. As an individual, I interacted with activist leaders in movements for: peace, climate, social justice, ending poverty, etc. Again, incompetence and corruption. Throughout, I dug for answers into the wisdom of the classics and emerging viewpoints. Finally. All that effort paid off. I found the “big picture”!
When I stumbled on the new brain model that finally explained human consciousness, it set me on a lonely journey. The model was such a simple mechanism. How could no one else have found it? Well, I wasn’t actually the only one. As I discuss in Collapse 2020, the combination of complexity and the inability of ancient communication “styles” to manage modern complexity, even with the internet, has created a modern Tower of Babel. Dr. Tyrrell envisioned the same explanation: there was a large jump in human brain ability about 20,000 years ago due to a simple biological event. But, not very many humans have it – just as only a few people have red hair or 6 fingers.
This book sets out to draw together psychology, science and mysticism into the same river of human experience. In doing so it throws new light on questions that mankind has pondered for centuries. The authors take us on an exciting investigative voyage that produces clear reasons for why those who think human life is essentially meaningless are wrong. En route, through the lens of evolution, cultural history, poetry, psychology and a plethora of new scientific insights, they not only throw fresh light on ancient mysteries, the origin of creativity, hypnosis, spirituality, religion and indoctrination but also meet head-on the central…
I’m a historian who wants to understand the big picture as best I can. And while occasionally I can clear my schedule enough to read a 1,000pp book, realistically that won’t happen often so I am always on the alert for short books that aim to provide what I am looking for: a coherent vision of the whole of human history. That’s asking a lot of an author, but these five do it well.
This one squeezes a lot into 248 reader-friendly pages. It combines the Big History approach with the emphasis on connections that world historians typically admire. But it is mainly a human history: by page 38 humans are emerging, and from that point on the evolution of the Universe and life on earth are in the rear-view mirror. Also very readable.
Big History tells the story of the universe, from the beginning to now, by interweaving the fields of biology, geology and anthropology to offer an all-encompassing account of Earth's history. Flowing seamlessly from the birth of the universe to life on a planet inhabited by billions of people, this is a mind altering account of the fate of the Earth and of our role in this ongoing story. Featuring Cynthia Stokes Brown's paradigm-shifting movement, Big History is a seminal work written for academics, students and the layperson alike.
