"The acclaimed author of In Search of Schrödinger's Cat searches for life on other planetsAre we alone in the universe? Surely amidst the immensity of the cosmos there must be other intelligent life out there. Don't be so sure, says John Gribbin, one of today's best popular science writers. In this fascinating and intriguing new book, Gribbin argues that the very existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos is, from an astrophysicist's point...

"Roger Penrose, Co-Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences" Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Roger Penrose is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and the author of Cycles of Time and The Road to Reality (both Vintage). He is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Oxford. From two of the world's great physicists-Stephen...

"An astonishing exploration of planet formation and the origins of life by one of the world's most innovative planetary geologists. In 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 took the first photos of the far side of the moon. Even in their poor resolution, the images stunned scientists: the far side is an enormous mountainous expanse, not the vast lava-plains seen from Earth. Subsequent missions have confirmed this in much greater detail. How could this be,...

In exhilarating and behind-the-scenes detail, Panek takes his readers on a tour of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fuelled the search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe. Science journalist Panek (The Invisible Century) offers an insider's view of the quest for what could be the ultimate revelation: the true substance of the unseen dark matter and energy that makes up some...

"What if you could become God, with the ability to build a whole new universe in the lab? As startling as it sounds, modern physics suggests that within the next two decades, scientists may be able to perform this seemingly divine feat--to concoct an entirely new baby universe, complete with its own physical laws, star systems, galaxies, and even intelligent life. To create your own cosmos, you would need a particle accelerator, such as the Large...

Einstein's gravity theory-his general theory of relativity-has served as the basis for a series of astonishing cosmological discoveries. But what if, nonetheless, Einstein got it wrong? Since the 1930s, physicists have noticed an alarming discrepancy between the universe as we see it and the universe that Einstein's theory of relativity predicts. There just doesn't seem to be enough stuff out there for everything to hang together. Galaxies spin so...

Janna Levin is an Advanced Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. She holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked previously at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. Is the universe infinite, or is it just really big? Does nature abhor infinity? In startling and beautiful...