A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty - Tapa dura

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"What a delightful book! It pulls no punches or punch lines in explaining all the fun topics in physics and cosmology. From quarks to quasars, from electrons to extraterrestrials it's all here. Whether you are interested in how to build a time machine or a transporter, or would like to know why curiosity killed Schrödinger's Cat, you will find clear and memorably illustrated explanations. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the recent exciting developments in physics and astronomy."
J. Richard Gott, Professor of Astrophysics, Princeton University, and author of Time Travel in Einstein's Universe

"I wish I'd had Goldberg and Blomquist as my physics teachers. Strangelets that grow until they strangle the world! Instructions for building an awesome teleportation device, and then transforming it into a super-awesome time machine! Speculations on the odds against our own existence! [and even deeper speculations on being in two places at once!] I'm going to recommend this book to my students, who are science journalists and to any and all readers who want to have more fun in the universe."
Jonathan Weiner, Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism,and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Beak of the Finch

We don't like to mince words. If you have your heart set on building a faster-than-light drive or a time machine out of a DeLorean, knock yourself out. If you want to know whether these things are even possible and you like anthropomorphized fundamental particles, read A User's Guide to the Universe.

This plain-English, plain-hilarious handbook ushers you through all of the major discoveries of modern physics, from relativity to the Large Hadron Collider, without furrowing your brow even once. Put your mind at ease and jump into modern physics in a way you never imagined possible comfortably. Now is your chance to impress people at cocktail parties with your insights into the world of quantum weirdness, time and space, the expanding universe, and much, much more.

Who knows? You might even learn something.

De la solapa interior

If you head off in a spaceship traveling at nearly the speed of light, what horrors await you when you return? Can you change reality just by looking at it? Is it possible to build a Star Trek type transporter or a working time machine? Why would we build a billion-dollar particle accelerator that Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar have clearly predicted will destroy Earth? Can you be in two places at once? Or three? Or three thousand? If you, or someone you know, live in the universe, you can't afford to remain in ignorance any longer. You need to know the answers to these questions and most of them will surprise you.

In A User's Guide to the Universe, physicists Dave Goldberg and Jeff Blomquist make good on two promises: you'll get answers and you won't have to decipher any equations to understand them. (Well, maybe just one very short and very familiar equation.)

This quirky and fun book takes you on a fascinating tour of the universe as we know it by asking (and answering) weird and provocative questions on subjects as diverse as special relativity, quantum mechanics, randomness, time travel, the expanding universe, and much more.

You'll discover:

• How fast a light beam travels if you're running beside it

• Whether God does, in point of fact, play dice with the universe

• What happens if you fall into a black hole

• What lies outside the universe

• What happened before the Big Bang

• What dark matter might be

• And much, much more

Complete with the funniest footnotes you've ever seen in a physics book and dozens of charmingly absurd yet helpful illustrations, A User's Guide to the Universe turns mind-blowing science into enjoyable, comprehensible, and fascinating reading.