Death by black hole epub free download

However, in real life he is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and is an extremely accomplished astrophysicist. In a lot of ways, he is the Carl Sagan of our generation. He is very well known for his ability to take scientific concepts and distill them into something that we can understand.

Cooper Opens in a new browser tab. He lives in New York City. S Science. Share this:. These laws are in evidence on Earth and everywhere we have thought to look in the universe—from the domain of particle physics to the large-scale structure of the universe.

In spite of all this boasting, all is not perfect in paradise. As already noted, we cannot see, touch, or taste the source of 85 percent of the gravity of the universe. Just add a few components to the equations and all will be well. It has happened once before. In , Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity, which reformulated the principles of gravity in a way that applied to objects of extremely high mass, a realm unknown to Newton, and where his law of gravity breaks down.

The lesson? Our confidence flows through the range of conditions over which a law has been tested and verified. The broader this range, the more powerful the law becomes in describing the cosmos.

For black holes and the large-scale structure of the universe, we need general relativity. They each work flawlessly in their own domain, wherever that domain may be in the universe. In America, school boards vote on the subjects to be taught in the classroom, and in some cases these votes are cast according to the whims of social and political tides or religious philosophies. Around the world, varying belief systems lead to political differences that are not always resolved peacefully.

And some people talk to bus stop stanchions. After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion. We do. A lot. When we do, however, we are usually expressing opinions about the interpretation of ratty data on the frontier of our knowledge. Wherever and whenever a physical law can be invoked in the discussion, the debate is guaranteed to be brief: No, your idea for a perpetual motion machine will never work— it violates laws of thermodynamics.

And without violating momentum laws, you cannot spontaneously levitate and hover above the ground, whether or not you are seated in the lotus position. Although, in principle, you could perform this stunt if you managed to let loose a powerful and sustained exhaust of flatulence. Knowledge of physical laws can, in some cases, give you the confidence to confront surly people.

A few years ago I was having a hot-cocoa nightcap at a dessert shop in Pasadena, California. I had ordered it with whipped cream, of course. When it arrived at the table, I saw no trace of the stuff. Since whipped cream has a very low density and floats on all liquids that humans consume, I offered the waiter two possible explanations: either somebody forgot to add the whipped cream to my hot cocoa or the universal laws of physics were different in his restaurant.

Unconvinced, he brought over a dollop of whipped cream to test for himself. After bobbing once or twice in my cup, the whipped cream sat up straight and afloat.

What better proof do you need of the universality of physical law? Examples of such cosmic tomfoolery abound. In modern times we take for granted that we live on a spherical planet. But the evidence for a flat Earth seemed clear enough for thousands of years of thinkers.

Just look around. As one might expect, nearly every map of a flat Earth depicts the map-drawing civilization at its center. Now look up. They keep their places, rising and setting as if they were glued to the inside surface of a dark, upside-down cereal bowl.

So why not assume all stars to be the same distance from Earth, whatever that distance might be? And of course there is no bowl. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. That simple argument boldly assumes that all stars are intrinsically equally luminous, automatically making the near ones brighter than the far ones.

Stars, however, come in a staggering range of luminosities, spanning ten orders of magnitude—ten powers of So the brightest stars are not necessarily the ones closest to Earth. In fact, most of the stars you see in the night sky are of the highly luminous variety, and they lie extraordinarily far away.

If most of the stars we see are highly luminous, then surely those stars are common throughout the galaxy. Nope again. High-luminosity stars are the rarest of them all. The prodigious energy output of high-luminosity stars is what enables you to see them across such large volumes of space.

Suppose two stars emit light at the same rate meaning that they have the same luminosity , but one is a hundred times farther from us than the other. We might expect it to be a hundredth as bright.

Fact is, the intensity of light dims in proportion to the square of the distance. So in this case, the faraway star looks ten thousand times dimmer than the one nearby.

When starlight spreads in all directions, it dilutes from the growing spherical shell of space through which it moves. But surely they are stationary in space. To sum up, if you allow the heavenly bodies to move individually, then their distances, measured from Earth upward, must vary.

This will force the sizes, brightnesses, and relative separations among the stars to vary too from year to year. But no such variation is apparent. Edmond Halley of comet fame was the first to figure out that stars moved. Greek astronomer Hipparchus. The star had indeed moved, but not enough within a single human lifetime to be noticed without the aid of a telescope.

You know all seven our names for the days of the week can be traced to them : Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. Since ancient times, these wanderers were correctly thought to be closer to Earth than were the stars, but each revolving around Earth in the center of it all. Aristarchus of Samos first proposed a Sun-centered universe in the third century B. If Earth moved we would surely feel it.

At least not visibly. For the same reason, if you stand in the aisle of a cruising airplane and jump, you do not catapult backward past the rear seats and get pinned against the lavatory doors. That effect would not be measured until , by the German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel. Fearful that this heretical work would freak out the establishment, Andreas Osiander, a Protestant theologian who oversaw the late stages of the printing, supplied an unauthorized and unsigned preface to the work, in which he pleads: I have no doubt that certain learned men, now that the novelty of the hypothesis in this work has been widely reported—for it establishes that the Earth moves and indeed that the Sun is motionless in the middle of the universe—are extremely shocked….

Once Earth no longer occupied a unique place in the cosmos, the Copernican revolution, based on the principle that we are not special, had officially begun. At the center of the universe? No way. Nobody was going to fall for that one again; it would violate the freshly minted Copernican principle.

If the solar system were in the center of the universe, then no matter where we looked on the sky we would see approximately the same number of stars. But if the solar system were off to the side somewhere, we would presumably see a great concentration of stars in one direction—the direction of the center of the universe.

Slightly more than a century later, the Dutch astronomer Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn—using the best available methods for calculating distance—sought to verify once and for all the location of the solar system in the galaxy.

When seen through a telescope, the band of light called the Milky Way resolves into dense concentrations of stars. Careful tallies of their positions and distances yield similar numbers of stars in every direction along the band itself. Above and below it, the concentration of stars drops symmetrically. No matter which way you look on the sky, the numbers come out about the same as they do in the opposite direction, degrees away. Kapteyn devoted some 20 years to preparing his sky map, which, sure enough, showed the solar system lying within the central 1 percent of the universe.

But the cosmic cruelty continued. Little did anybody know at the time, especially not Kapteyn, that most sight lines to the Milky Way do not pass all the way through to the end of the universe. The Milky Way is rich in large clouds of gas and dust that absorb the light emitted by objects behind them. When we look in the direction of the Milky Way, more than 99 percent of all stars that should be visible to us are blocked from view by gas clouds within the Milky Way itself.

Globular clusters are tight concentrations of as many as a million stars and are seen easily in regions above and below the Milky Way, where the least amount of light is absorbed.

Shapley reasoned that these titanic clusters should enable him to pinpoint the center of the universe—a spot that, after all, would surely have the highest concentration of mass and the strongest gravity. Where was this special place he found? Sixty thousand light-years away, in roughly the same direction as—but far beyond—the stars that trace the constellation Sagittarius. It coincides with what was later found to be the most powerful source of radio waves in the night sky radio waves are unattenuated by intervening gas and dust.

Once again the Copernican principle had triumphed. The solar system was not in the center of the known universe but far out in the suburbs. For sensitive egos, that could still be okay. Surely the vast system of stars and nebulae to which we belong comprised the entire universe.

Surely we were where the action was. In An Original Theory of the Universe , for instance, Wright speculates on the infinity of space, filled with stellar systems akin to our own Milky Way:. We may conclude…that as the visible Creation is supposed to be full of sidereal Systems and planetary Worlds,…the endless Immensity is an unlimited Plenum of Creations not unlike the known Universe…. The rest of the nebulae turn out to be relatively small, nearby clouds of gas, found mostly within the Milky Way band.

That the Milky Way is just one of multitudes of galaxies that comprise the universe was among the most important discoveries in the history of science, even if it made us feel small again. The offending evidence came in the form of a photographic plate taken on the night of October 5, Hubble discovered a highly luminous kind of star within Andromeda that was already familiar to astronomers from surveys of stars much closer to home. The distances to the nearby stars were known, and their brightness varies only with their distance.

By applying the inverse-square law for the brightness of starlight, Hubble derived a distance to the star in Andromeda, placing the nebula far beyond any known star within our own stellar system. Andromeda was actually an entire galaxy, whose fuzz could be resolved into billions of stars, all situated more than 2 million light-years away. Not only were we not in the center of things, but overnight our entire Milky Way galaxy, the last measure of our self-worth, shrank to an insignificant smudge in a multibillion-smudge universe that was vastly larger than anyone had previously imagined.

Just six years after Hubble demoted us, he pooled all the available data on the motions of galaxies. Turns out that nearly all of them recede from the Milky Way, at velocities directly proportional to their distances from us. Finally we were in the middle of something big: the universe was expanding, and we were its center. As a matter of fact, a theory of the universe had been waiting in the wings since , when Albert Einstein published his paper on general relativity—the modern theory of gravity.

When applied to the cosmos, general relativity allows the space of the universe to expand, carrying its constituent galaxies along for the ride. A remarkable consequence of this new reality is that the universe looks to all observers in every galaxy as though it expands around them.

But surely there is only one cosmos—the one where we live in happy delusion. At the moment, cosmologists have no evidence for more than one universe. But if you extend several well-tested laws of physics to their extremes or beyond , you can describe the small, dense, hot birth of the universe as a seething foam of tangled space-time that is prone to quantum fluctuations, any one of which could spawn an entire universe of its own.

The idea relegates us to an embarrassingly smaller part of the whole than we ever imagined. Hubble summarized the issues in his work Realm of the Nebulae, but these words could apply at all stages of our endarkenment: Thus the explorations of space end on a note of uncertainty….

We know our immediate neighborhood rather intimately. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos.

Have a nice day. Most people assume that the more information you have about something, the better you understand it. One of the challenges of scientific inquiry is knowing when to step back—and how far back to step—and when to move in close. In some contexts, approximation brings clarity; in others it leads to oversimplification. As we will see in Section 3, a single particle cannot have a temperature, because the very concept of temperature addresses the average motion of all the molecules in the group.

In biochemistry, by contrast, you understand next to nothing unless you pay attention to how one molecule interacts with another. So, when does a measurement, an observation, or simply a map have the right amount of detail?

But the answer is deeper than anyone had imagined. Explorers and cartographers have been mapping coastlines for centuries. Unwind the string along the perimeter of Britain, from Dunnet Head down to Lizard Point, making sure you go into all the bays and headlands. You find that the survey map shows the coastline to be longer than the atlas did. So which measurement is correct?

Yet you could have chosen a map that has even more detail—one that shows every boulder that sits at the base of every cliff.

Where does all this end? Each time you measure it, the coastline gets longer and longer. If you take into account the boundaries of molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, will the coastline prove to be infinitely long? Not exactly. Perhaps the concept of one-dimensional length is simply ill- suited for convoluted coastlines.

The ordinary concepts of dimension, Mandelbrot argued, are just too simplistic to characterize the complexity of coastlines. Broccoli, ferns, and snowflakes are good examples from the natural world, but only certain computer-generated, indefinitely repeating structures can produce the ideal fractal, in which the shape of the macro object is made up of smaller versions of the same shape or pattern, which are in turn formed from even more miniature versions of the very same thing, and so on indefinitely.

As you descend into a pure fractal, however, even though its components multiply, no new information comes your way—because the pattern continues to look the same. By contrast, if you look deeper and deeper into the human body, you eventually encounter a cell, an enormously complex structure endowed with different attributes and operating under different rules than the ones that hold sway at the macro levels of the body.

Crossing the boundary into the cell reveals a new universe of information. One of the earliest representations of the world, preserved on a 2,year-old Babylonian clay tablet, depicts it as a disk encircled by oceans. Fact is, when you stand in the middle of a broad plain the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, for instance and check out the view in every direction, Earth does look like a flat disk. Noticing a few problems with the concept of a flat Earth, the ancient Greeks—including such thinkers as Pythagoras and Herodotus—pondered the possibility that Earth might be a sphere.

In the fourth century B. One of them was based on lunar eclipses. Every now and then, the Moon, as it orbits Earth, intercepts the cone-shaped shadow that Earth casts in space. For that to be true, Earth had to be a sphere, because only spheres cast circular shadows via all light sources, from all angles, and at all times. If Earth were a flat disk, the shadow would sometimes be oval. Only when Earth was face-on to the Sun would its shadow cast a circle. Given the strength of that one argument, you might think cartographers would have made a spherical model of Earth within the next few centuries.

But no. The earliest known terrestrial globe would wait until —92, on the eve of the European ocean voyages of discovery and colonization. But the devil, as always, lurks in the details. The degree was slightly longer at the Arctic Circle, which could only be true if Earth were a bit flattened. Newton was right.

The faster a planet spins, the greater we expect its equatorial bulge to be. A single day on fast-spinning Jupiter, the most massive planet in the solar system, lasts 10 Earth-hours; Jupiter is 7 percent wider at its equator than at its poles.

And if you really want to do things right, climb Mount Chimborazo in central Ecuador, close to the equator. In the small Earth orbiter Vanguard 1 sent back the news that the equatorial bulge south of the equator was slightly bulgier than the bulge north of the equator.

Not only that, sea level at the South Pole turned out to be a tad closer to the center of Earth than sea level at the North Pole. Next up is the disconcerting fact that Earth is not rigid. Its surface rises and falls daily as the oceans slosh in and out of the continental shelves, pulled by the Moon and, to a lesser extent, by the Sun.

Tidal forces distort the waters of the world, making their surface oval. A well-known phenomenon. But tidal forces stretch the solid earth as well, and so the equatorial radius fluctuates daily and monthly, in tandem with the oceanic tides and the phases of the Moon.

Will the refinements never end? Perhaps not. Fast forward to Thus, the geoid embodies the truly horizontal, fully accounting for all the variations in Earth shape and subsurface density of matter. Carpenters, land surveyors, and aqueduct engineers will have no choice but to obey. Orbits are multidimensional, unfolding in both space and time. Aristotle advanced the idea that Earth, the Sun, and the stars were locked in place, attached to crystalline spheres.

It was the spheres that rotated, and their orbits traced—what else? To Aristotle and nearly all the ancients, Earth lay at the center of all this activity. Nicolaus Copernicus disagreed.

In his magnum opus, De Revolutionibus, he placed the Sun in the middle of the cosmos. Copernicus nonetheless maintained perfect circular orbits, unaware of their mismatch with reality. Half a century later, Johannes Kepler put matters right with his three laws of planetary motion—the first predictive equations in the history of science—one of which showed that the orbits are not circles but ovals of varying elongation.

We have only just begun. Consider the Earth-Moon system. Meanwhile, not only do the Moon and Earth tug on each other, but all the other planets and their moons tug on them too. Plus, each time the Earth- Moon system takes a trip around the Sun, the orientation of the ellipse shifts slightly, not to mention that the Moon is spiraling away from Earth at a rate of one or two inches per year and that some orbits in the solar system are chaotic.

All told, this ballet of the solar system, choreographed by the forces of gravity, is a performance only a computer can know and love. If you find it, you move on to the next open question. Nevertheless, one would be misguided to declare that Copernicus was wrong simply because his orbits were the wrong shape.

His deeper concept—that planets orbit the Sun—is what mattered most. From then on, astrophysicists have continually refined the model by looking closer and closer.

Copernicus may not have been in the right ballpark, but he was surely on the right side of town. So, perhaps, the question still remains: When do you move closer and when do you take a step back? A block ahead of you is a silver-haired gentleman wearing a dark blue suit. If you stand 10 feet away, you might see men in tophats, women in long skirts and bustles, children, pets, shimmering water. Which way best captures how nature reveals itself to us? Both, really.

Almost every time scientists look more closely at a phenomenon, or at some inhabitant of the cosmos, whether animal, vegetable, or star, they must assess whether the broad picture—the one you get when you step back a few feet—is more useful or less useful than the close-up. The urge to pull back is strong, but so, too, is the urge to push ahead. For every hypothesis that gets confirmed by more detailed data, ten others will have to be modified or discarded altogether because they no longer fit the model.

And years or decades may pass before the half-dozen new insights based on those data are even formulated. Case in point: the multitudinous rings and ringlets of the planet Saturn. But before Galileo first looked up with a telescope in , nobody had any awareness or understanding of the surface, composition, or climate of any other place in the cosmos.

In Galileo noticed something odd about Saturn; because the resolution of his telescope was poor, however, the planet looked to him as if it had two companions, one to its left and one to its right. Galileo formulated his observation in an anagram,. At one stage they looked like ears; at another stage they vanished completely. As Galileo had done half a century earlier, Huygens wrote down his groundbreaking but still preliminary finding in the form of an anagram.

Within three years, in his book Systema Saturnium, Huygens went public with his proposal. Twenty years later Giovanni Cassini, the director of the Paris Observatory, pointed out that there were two rings, separated by a gap that came to be known as the Cassini division. By the end of the twentieth century, observers had identified seven distinct rings, lettered A through G. Not only that, the rings themselves turn out to be made up of thousands upon thousands of bands and ringlets.

Those relatively close inspections all yielded evidence that the ring system is more complex and more puzzling than anyone had imagined. For one thing, the particles in some of the rings corral into narrow bands by the so-called shepherd moons: teeny satellites that orbit near and within the rings.

The gravitational forces of the shepherd moons tug the ring particles in different directions, sustaining numerous gaps among the rings. The cosmo-chemistry of the environment suggests that Saturn might once have had several such moons. Saturn, by the way, is not the only planet with a ring system. Close-up views of Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune— the rest of the big four gas giants in our solar system— show that each planet bears a ring system of its own.

As we will see in Section 2, many comets and some asteroids, for instance, resemble piles of rubble, and they swing near planets at their peril.

I recently received some upsetting news about Saturn from a colleague who studies ring systems. He noted with sadness that the orbits of their constituent particles are unstable, and so the particles will all be gone in an astrophysical blink of an eye: million years or so. My favorite planet, shorn of what makes it my favorite planet!

Turns out, fortunately, that the steady and essentially unending accretion of interplanetary and intermoon particles may replenish the rings. The ring system—like the skin on your face—may persist, even if its constituent particles do not. What kind of news? Here and there in all those rings are features neither expected nor, at present, explainable: scalloped ringlets with extremely sharp edges, particles coalescing in clumps, the pristine iciness of the A and B rings compared with the dirtiness of the Cassini division between them.

All these new data will keep Porco and her colleagues busy for years to come, perhaps wistfully recalling the clearer, simpler view from afar.

For a century or two, various blends of high technology and clever thinking have driven cosmic discovery. But suppose you have no technology. Suppose all you have in your backyard laboratory is a stick. What can you learn? The New York Times bestselling tour of the cosmos from three of today's leading astrophysicists Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists.

Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J.

Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all—from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel. Describing the latest discoveries in astrophysics, the informative and entertaining narrative propels you from our home solar system to the outermost frontiers of space. How do stars live and die? Why did Pluto lose its planetary status?

What are the prospects of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? How did the universe begin? Why is it expanding and why is its expansion accelerating? Is our universe alone or part of an infinite multiverse?

Answering these and many other questions, the authors open your eyes to the wonders of the cosmos, sharing their knowledge of how the universe works. Breathtaking in scope and stunningly illustrated throughout, Welcome to the Universe is for those who hunger for insights into our evolving universe that only world-class astrophysicists can provide.

Now, Tyson invites us to go behind the scenes of his public fame by revealing his correspondence with people across the globe who have sought him out in search of answers.

In this hand-picked collection of letters, Tyson draws upon cosmic perspectives to address a vast array of questions about science, faith, philosophy, life, and of course, Pluto. His succinct, opinionated, passionate, and often funny responses reflect his popularity and standing as a leading educator. Although Einstein understood that black holes were mathematical solutions to his equations, he never accepted their physical reality—a viewpoint many shared.

This all changed in the s and s, when a deeper conceptual understanding of black holes developed just as new observations revealed the existence of quasars and X-ray binary star systems, whose mysterious properties could be explained by the presence of black holes. Black holes have since been the subject of intense research—and the physics governing how they behave and affect their surroundings is stranger and more mind-bending than any fiction.

From Schwarzschild black holes to rotating and colliding black holes, and from gravitational radiation to Hawking radiation and information loss, Steven Gubser and Frans Pretorius use creative thought experiments and analogies to explain their subject accessibly. The Little Book of Black Holes takes readers deep into the mysterious heart of the subject, offering rare clarity of insight into the physics that makes black holes simple yet destructive manifestations of geometric destiny.

Tyson and Goldsmith? Drawing on recent scientific breakthroughs and the current cross-pollination among geology, biology, astrophysics, and cosmology,? From the first image of a galaxy birth to Spirit Rover's exploration of Mars, to the discovery of water on one of Jupiter's moons, coauthors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith conduct a galvanizing tour of the cosmos with clarity and exuberance.

The New York Times bestseller: "You gotta read this. It is the most exciting book about Pluto you will ever read in your life. Only in New York. Pluto is entrenched in our cultural and emotional view of the cosmos, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, award-winning author and director of the Rose Center, is on a quest to discover why.

He stood at the heart of the controversy over Pluto's demotion, and consequently Plutophiles have freely shared their opinions with him, including endless hate mail from third-graders. With his inimitable wit, Tyson delivers a minihistory of planets, describes the oversized characters of the people who study them, and recounts how America's favorite planet was ousted from the cosmic hub. A new window opens onto the cosmos Almost every day we are challenged by new information from the outermost reaches of space.

The main characters of this science, non fiction story are ,. The book has been awarded with , and many others. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator.