Current understanding of our universe dictates that all matter will eventually thin out to zero density, with huge black holes finally evaporating away into massless energy. Roger Penrose—one of the most innovative mathematicians of our time—turns around this predominant picture of the universe’s “heat death,” arguing how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating, expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the “Big Bang”...

In the years since the publication of Hawking's A Brief History of Time, readers have repeatedly told Hawking of their great difficulty in understanding some of the book's most important concepts. This is the reason for A Briefer History: his wish to make its content more accessible to readers--as well as to bring it up-to-date with the latest scientific observations and findings. Purely technical concepts, such as the mathematics of chaotic boundary...

Provides an introduction to today's scientific ideas about the cosmos and reviews past theories. Also covers black holes, quarks, antimatter, and other mysteries of physics.

A foremost string theorist discusses such topics as Newton's perspectives on space, Einstein's fusion of space and time, and recent breakthroughs on multidimensional universe theory.

"Michio Kaku, renowned theoretical physicist and author of Hyperspace and The Future of Humanity, tells the story of the greatest quest in science. When Newton discovered the laws of motion and gravity, he unified the rules of heaven and earth. From then on, physicists have been discovering new forces and incorporating them into ever-greater theories. But the major breakthroughs of the 20th century--relativity and quantum mechanics--are incompatible,...

Superman invites the reader to fly along with him as he explores and explains the universe.

The universe is big. Really big. And it gets bigger every day. In Cosmological Enigmas, Mark Kidger weaves together history, science, and science fiction to consider questions about the bigness of space and the strange objects that lie trembling at the edge of infinity. What are quasars, blazars, and gamma-ray bursters? Could we ever travel to the stars? Can we really expect aliens to contact us? From the profound (what evidence do we have to support...

Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform...

Physicist Brian Greene discusses the historical quest for a grand unified theory in physics which will reconcile quantum physics and general relativity, and considers the possibility that superstring theory may bring an end to that search.