Showing titles in Astronomy & Space Science

This is a comprehensive beginner's guide to all things conspiracy! Learn how to decode Illuminati symbolism that's hidden in plain sight with the help of an expert in spotting occult secrets. Conspiracy theorists like David Icke got you confused? Wondering how a reptilian can live among us and shape shift in and out of our dimensions? Are your favorite entertainers part of a transhumanistic alien agenda with mind control signals coming from Saturn and the Moon?

In the wake of World War II, with America ascendant and the Soviet Union devastated by the conflict, the Space Race should have been over before it started. But the underdog Soviets scored a series of victories—starting with the 1957 launch of Sputnik and continuing in the years following--that seemed to achieve the impossible. It was proof, it seemed, that the USSR had manpower and collective will that went beyond America's material advantages. They had asserted themselves as a world power. But in The Wrong Stuff, John Strausbaugh tells a different story.

Over the past few decades, a handful of scientists have been racing to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only four percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown. Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of the quest to find this “dark” matter and an even more bizarre substance called “dark energy”. This is perhaps the greatest mystery in all of science, and solving it will bring fame, funding, and certainly a Nobel Prize.

Best-selling author Simon Winchester writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs boson. Precision is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives - a camera, a phone, a computer, a bicycle, a car, a dishwasher perhaps - all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection....

In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built.

Using interviews, NASA oral histories, and recently declassified material, Into the Black pieces together the dramatic untold story of the Columbia mission and the brave people who dedicated themselves to help the United States succeed in the age of space exploration. On April 12, 1981, NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral. It was the most advanced, state-of-the-art flying machine ever built, challenging the minds and imagination of America's top engineers and pilots.

It was a time of bold new technology, historic moments, and international jousting on the final frontier. But it was also a time of human drama, of moments less public but no less dramatic in the lives of those who made the golden age of space flight happen. These are the moments and the lives that Into That Silent Sea captures, a book that tells the intimate stories of the men and women, American and Russian, who made the space race their own and gave the era its compelling character.

A richly detailed and dramatic account of one of the greatest achievements of humankind. At 9:32 A.M. on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the last frontier of human imagination: the moon.

Christophe Galfard's mission in life is to spread modern scientific ideas to the general public in entertaining ways. Using his considerable skills as a brilliant theoretical physicist and successful young-adult author, The Universe in Your Hand employs the immediacy of simple, direct language to show us, not explain to us, the theories that underpin everything we know about our universe.

Ragnarok. Armageddon. Doomsday. Since the dawn of time, man has wondered how the world would end. In The Last Three Minutes, Paul Davies reveals the latest theories. Voiced in clear language that makes the cutting-edge science of quarks, neutrinos, wormholes, and metaverses accessible to the layman, The Last Three Minutes treats listeners to a wide range of conjectures about the ultimate fate of the universe.

This is an indispensable guide to physics that offers readers an overview of the most popular physics topics written in an accessible, irreverent, and engaging manner while still maintaining a tone of wry skepticism. Even the novice will be able to follow along, as the topics are addressed using plain English and (almost) no equations. Veterans of popular physics will also find their nagging questions addressed, like whether the universe can expand faster than light.

CIA Project OXCART, Project Gusto produced the program code-named Oxcart to develop the stealthy A-12 Archangel as a new U-2 follow-on aircraft. Under CIA Project Oxcart, the stealthy A-12 Archangel was flight-tested at Area 51, Nevada, under a shroud of secrecy. Flying at 95,000 feet and 2,221 mph or Mach 3.35, the A-12 was the fastest, highest-flying jet-powered, piloted aircraft ever, faster than the Air Force's SR-71, who officially holds the speed record. Selecting a place called Area 51 in Nevada and beneath a shroud of secrecy, the Central Intelligence Agency first flew the U-2, the ...

Fatal Flight brings vividly to life the year of operation of R.101, the last great British airship - a luxury liner three and a half times the length of a 747 jet, with a spacious lounge, a dining room that seated 50, glass-walled promenade decks, and a smoking room.

On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency released a map of the afterglow of the big bang. Taking in 440 sextillion kilometers of space and 13.8 billion years of time, it is physically impossible to make a better map: We will never see the early universe in more detail. On the one hand, such a view is the apotheosis of modern cosmology; on the other, it threatens to undermine almost everything we hold cosmologically sacrosanct.

On January 28, 1986, NASA's space shuttle Challenger exploded after blasting off from Cape Canaveral. Christa McAuliffe, America's "Teacher in Space", was instantly killed, along with the other six members of the mission. At least that's what most of us remember. Kevin Cook tells us what really happened on that ill-fated, unforgettable day. He traces the pressures - leading from NASA to the White House - that triggered the fatal order to launch on an ice-cold Florida morning.

Bestselling author of Death Is Fiction, Fear an Illusion, Stephen Hawley Martin, writes that of the two worldviews prevalent today, neither coincides with what is now known by a handful of individuals to be true. In this book he reveals for the first time a clear picture of reality based on the findings of consciousness researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the outcomes of a series of quantum mechanics experiments that have been verified in laboratories across the globe. It’s no wonder, he says, that most people sleepwalk through life. They have no idea who and ...

The Big Bang is all but dead, and we do not yet know what will replace it. Our universe's "beginning" is at an end. What does this have to do with us here on Earth? Our lives are about to be dramatically shaken again - as altered as they were with the invention of the clock, the steam engine, the railroad, the radio and the Internet.

Let us journey, with beloved physicist Carlo Rovelli, into the heart of a black hole. We slip beyond its horizon and tumble down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we see geometry fold. Time and space pull and stretch. And finally, at the black hole’s core, space and time dissolve, and a white hole is born. Rovelli has dedicated his career to uniting the time-warping ideas of general relativity and the perplexing uncertainties of quantum mechanics. In White Holes, he reveals the mind of a scientist at work.

The inside look at how the battle of the space billionaires began and why it matters, Escaping Gravity is former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver’s firsthand account of how a handful of revolutionaries outmaneuvered the system of political patronage and bureaucracy that threatened the space agency. The success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and countless other commercial space efforts were preceded by decades of work by a group of people Garver calls “space pirates.”

Humans from the earliest civilizations were spellbound by the night sky - craning their necks each night, they used the stars to orient themselves in the large, strange world around them. Stargazing is a pursuit that continues to fascinate us: from Copernicus to Carl Sagan, astronomers throughout history have spent their lives trying to answer the biggest questions in the universe. Now, award-winning astronomer Emily Levesque shares the stories of modern-day stargazers.