Compact Cosmos

Author: Matt Tweed
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802714552
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 68

Book Description
Exploring the macrocosm from colossal galactic superclusters to quiet backwater planets, Matt Tweed offers a primer on the cosmos for anyone fascinated by the heavens. Taking a guided tour through the universe, we ride past quasars, jets, and galaxies to land on a curious world and examine an array of ideas about space and time. Tweed traces the evolution of stars and formation of planets, describing our "light bubble" and why we can't see any farther than we do. For a concise and accessible description of extra-solar planetary systems, black holes, pulsars, nebulae, great walls, dark matter, red shifts, and much more, The Compact Cosmos is an indispensable guide. Data tables, lists of cosmological constants, and distances from Earth to other bodies in space form a useful appendix.

Mind and Cosmos

Author: Thomas Nagel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199919755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 141

Book Description
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.

The New Cosmos

Author: A. Unsold
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781475717921
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Book Description

A Sense of the Cosmos

Author: Jacob Needleman
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description

Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods

Author: David Lewis-Williams
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 050077045X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
An exploration of how brain structure and cultural content interacted in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago to produce unique life patterns and belief systems. What do the headless figures found in the famous paintings at Catalhoyuk in Turkey have in common with the monumental tombs at Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland? How can the concepts of "birth," "death," and "wild" cast light on the archaeological enigma of the domestication of cattle? What generated the revolutionary social change that ended the Upper Palaeolithic? David Lewis-Williams's previous book, The Mind in the Cave, dealt with the remarkable Upper Palaeolithic paintings, carvings, and engravings of western Europe. Here Dr. Lewis-Williams and David Pearce examine the intricate web of belief, myth, and society in the succeeding Neolithic period, arguably the most significant turning point in all human history, when agriculture became a way of life and the fractious society that we know today was born. The authors focus on two contrasting times and places: the beginnings in the Near East, with its mud-brick and stone houses each piled on top of the ruins of another, and western Europe, with its massive stone monuments more ancient than the Egyptian pyramids. They argue that neurological patterns hardwired into the brain help explain the art and society that Neolithic people produced. Drawing on the latest research, the authors skillfully link material on human consciousness, imagery, and religious concepts to propose provocative new theories about the causes of an ancient revolution in cosmology and the origins of social complexity. In doing so they create a fascinating neurological bridge to the mysterious thought-lives of the past and reveal the essence of a momentous period in human history. 100 illustrations, 20 in color.

God and the Cosmos

Author: Harry Lee Poe
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830839542
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Theologian Harry Lee Poe and chemist Jimmy H. Davis argue that God's interaction with our world is a possibility affirmed equally by the Bible and the contemporary scientific record. Rather than confirming that the cosmos is closed to the actions of the divine, advancing scientific knowledge seems to indicate that the nature of the universe is actually open to the unique type of divine activity portrayed in the Bible.

Sciencia

Author: Matt Tweed
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802778992
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
Collects six short illustrated volumes covering topics in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, and astronomy.

The Hubble Cosmos

Author: David H. DeVorkin
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426215576
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
"To celebrate NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and its 25 years of accomplishments, let The Hubble Cosmos fill your mind with big ideas, brilliant imagery, and a new understanding of the universe in which we live. Relive key moments in the monumental Hubble story, from launch through major new instrumentation to the promise of discoveries to come. With more than 150 photographs including Hubble All-Stars -- the most famous of all the noteworthy images -- The Hubble Cosmos shows how this telescope is revolutionizing our understanding of the universe." --

Wonderful Worlds

Author: Robert Greenough
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1466932430
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 495

Book Description
Wonderful Worlds is an explanation to laymen of events in cosmos and earth history, sequences of species life, and interactions of the brain, mind, soul, genome, enzymes, organs, and body. We see development of cultures directed from positions of logic and reason, eventually describing what makes us human. Proposed as beginning even before the accepted moment of the big bang, the cosmos erupts later over billions of years to first life in a progression of species, eventually leading to a fresh look at Homo erectus and newly thought subspecies of Neanderthal, sapiens, and modern man. Presented here are at least thirty alternatives to generally accepted myth, magic, and misclassifications in history. Man with emotions, including an underlying spirituality, combined with soul, brain, mind, genome, and body has experienced his evolution for over 600,000 years of a 13.7 billion-year existence. Only in the past ten thousand years has man acted in society as an intelligent, technical, communicating, calculating, emotional, and spiritual resident of Earth, even to expanding in the universe. This comprehensive collection of alternative views should be on the reading shelf of every person inquisitive of his or her planet Earths birthright.

Neutron Stars

Author: Katia Moskvitch
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674919351
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
The astonishing science of neutron stars and the stories of the scientists who study them. Neutron stars are as bewildering as they are elusive. The remnants of exploded stellar giants, they are tiny, merely twenty kilometers across, and incredibly dense. One teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh several million tons. They can spin up to a thousand times per second, they possess the strongest magnetic fields known in nature, and they may be the source of the most powerful explosions in the universe. Through vivid storytelling and on-site reporting from observatories all over the world, Neutron Stars offers an engaging account of these still-mysterious objects. Award-winning science journalist Katia Moskvitch takes readers from the vast Atacama Desert to the arid plains of South Africa to visit the magnificent radio telescopes and brilliant scientists responsible for our knowledge of neutron stars. She recounts the exhilarating discoveries, frustrating disappointments, and heated controversies of the past several decades and explains cutting-edge research into such phenomena as colliding neutron stars and fast radio bursts: extremely powerful but ultra-short flashes in space that scientists are still struggling to understand. She also shows how neutron stars have advanced our broader understanding of the universe—shedding light on topics such as dark matter, black holes, general relativity, and the origins of heavy elements like gold and platinum—and how we might one day use these cosmic beacons to guide interstellar travel. With clarity and passion, Moskvitch describes what we are learning at the boundaries of astronomy, where stars have life beyond death.