Helen Plum Library

An introduction to modern physics by a founder of the loop quantum gravity theory shares seven succinct lessons on topics ranging from general relativity and quantum mechanics to elementary particles and black holes

Rhett Allain writes the popular Dot Physics blog for Wired and in this book he takes a longer, smarter look at his most popular topics, from the purely fun (How much bubble wrap would you need to safely jump off a 6th floor building?) to the completely mind-boggling (Why does a mirror reverse left to light, but not top to bottom?). Allain is a physics professor and he's become very good at finding physics questions buried in the latest movie, video...

Following the hugely successful The Science Book and The Math Book comes a richly illustrated chronology of physics, containing 250 short, entertaining, and thought-provoking entries. In addition to exploring such engaging topics as dark energy, parallel universes, the Doppler effect, the God particle, and Maxwell's demon, the book's timeline extends back billions of years to the hypothetical Big Bang and forward trillions of years to a time of "quantum...

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...

"The Physics of Life illuminates the meaning of evolution in its broadest scientific sense and empowers the reader with a new view of the intertwined movement of all life -- evolution is more than biological. The same physical effect is present in all patterns and flows -- from population growth, to air traffic, to government expansion, to the urge for better ideas. Evolution is everywhere, and the same elegant principles of physics apply to all things....

Generations have grown up knowing that the equation E=mc2 changed the shape of our world, but never understanding what it actually means, why it was so significant, and how it informs our daily lives today--governing, as it does, everything from the atomic bomb to a television's cathode ray tube to the carbon dating of prehistoric paintings. In this book, David Bodanis writes the "biography" of one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history--that...

A mind-bending, relentlessly paced science-fiction thriller, in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious--and awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes,...

"An award-winning science writer traces our millennia-long effort to understand the phenomenon of gravity--the greatest mystery in physics, and a force that has shaped our universe and our minds in ways we have never fully understood until now"--

With practice tests and answers in each chapter, "Barron's E-Z Physics" is an ideal self-help manual for students who want a clear, concise review of such topics as motion, energy, electricity, properties of light, and nuclear physics

The twentieth century gave us two great theories of physics. The general theory of relativity describes the behavior of very large things, and quantum theory the behavior of very small things. In this landmark book, John Gribbin-one of the best-known science writers of the past thirty years-presents his own version of the Holy Grail of physics, the search that has been going on for decades to find a unified "Theory of Everything" that combines these...