The bright galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae catalogued in the late 1700s by the famous comet hunter Charles Messier are still the most widely observed celestial wonders in the sky. The second edition of Stephen James O'Meara's acclaimed observing…
Every generation has looked up from the Earth and wondered at the beauty of the Moon. 50 years ago, a few Americans became the first to do the reverse - with the whole world watching through their eyes.
In this short but wide-ranging book, Oliver…
Quantum mechanics stands as one of the most remarkable achievements of the 20th century, providing startling insight into the nature of matter and a spectacularly successful predictive theory. However, while the predictive ability of the quantum…
Every amateur astronomer can easily recognize most of the constellations, but how many of us know the story behind them? What myths did the Ancient Greeks weave around the mighty hunter Orion that places him so prominently in the sky? Did you know…
A highly engaging study of mirages, illusions of multiple moons, the fata morgana, colored shadows and scores of other phenomena in a book praised by Science and Math Weekly as "a great depository of projects, science fair ventures, experiments,…
Einstein said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. But was he right? Can the quantum theory of fields and Einstein's general theory of relativity, the two most accurate and successful theories in all…
A group of leading physicists--Stephen Hawking, Kip S. Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris, and Alan Lightman--paints a vivid portrait of the possible future of black holes, gravity holes, and time travel in six readable essays that explore the…
Spanning centuries of top-notch science, bitter rivalry, outright fraud, and self-delusion, the author weaves a narrative centred around the brilliant, often eccentric, and controversial pioneers of high-pressure research. These new alchemists have…
Introduction; 1. A much misunderstood man; 2. Magnolias and marigolds: hippos and hiatuses; 3. Modern terrestrial deposits; 4. Ancient terrestrial deposits; 5. Modern shorelines; 6. Ancient shorelines; 7. Ancient platform deposits; 8. Off-shore…