Bøger af Janna Levin

Our solar system is currently orbiting a black hole 26,000 light years away at a speed of 200 km per second. In Black Hole Survival Guide physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey into a black hole, explaining what would happen to you in there and why.

The authoritative story of Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne's Nobel Prize-winning discovery of gravitational waves-by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer.With A New PrefaceIn 1916, Einstein predicted the presence of gravitational waves. One century later, we are recording the first sounds from space, evidence of the waves' existence caused by the collision of two black holes. An authoritative account of the headline-making discovery by theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space recounts the fascinating story of the obsessions, aspirations, and trials of the scientists who embarked on an arduous fifty-year endeavor to capture these elusive wavesFive decades after the experiment was dreamed up, the team races to intercept a wisp of sound with two colossal machines, hoping to succeed in time for the centenary of Einstein's most radical idea. With unprecendented access to the surprises, disappointments, achievements, and risks in this remarkable story, Janna Levin's absorbing account offers a portrait of modern science that is unlike anything we've seen before.

Is the universe infinite, or is it just really big? Does nature abhor infinity? In startling and beautiful prose, Janna Levin's diary of unsent letters to her mother describes what we know about the shape and extent of the universe, about its beginning and its end. She grants the uninitiated access to the astounding findings of contemporary theoretical physics and makes tangible the contours of space and time-those very real curves along which apples fall and planets orbit.Levin guides the reader through the observations and thought-experiments that have enabled physicists to begin charting the universe. She introduces the cosmic archaeology that makes sense of the pattern of hot spots left over from the big bang, a pursuit on the verge of discovering the shape of space itself. And she explains the topology and the geometry of the universe now coming into focus-a strange map of space full of black holes, chaotic flows, time warps, and invisible strings. Levin advances the controversial idea that this map is edgeless but finite-that the universe is huge but not unending-a radical revelation that would provide the ultimate twist to the Copernican revolution by locating our precise position in the cosmos.As she recounts our increasingly rewarding attempt to know the universe, Levin tells her personal story as a scientist isolated by her growing knowledge. This book is her remarkable effort to reach across the distance of that knowledge and share what she knows with family and friends-and with us. Highly personal and utterly original, this physicist's diary is a breathtaking contemplation of our deep connection with the universe and our aspirations to comprehend it.

A strong gravitational wave will briefly change that distance by less than the thickness of a human hair. We have perhaps less than a few tenths of a second to perform this measurement. This is a story of the detection of gravitational waves at Ligo, one of the most ambitious feats in scientific history.