—a book by Anil Ananthaswamy
Long duration balloon launch in Antarctica
What is the nature of dark matter? Why is the expansion of our universe accelerating? What is the origin of mass? Why does our universe seem fine-tuned for life? Are there other universes out there? Will we ever know?
THE EDGE OF PHYSICS tells the story of our quest to understand the universe, as seen through the eyes of a traveller. It's a journey to the ends of the Earth —Lake Baikal in Siberia, the Atacama Desert in the Chilean Andes, an abandoned mine in North America, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the subterranean lair of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, the barren Karoo in South Africa, the frozen frontier of Antarctica and the Hanle Valley in the Indian Himalayas —in search of the telescopes, detectors and experiments that promise to shed light on the most pressing questions in physics and cosmology today.
Advance Praise
“Anil Anathaswamy takes us on a thrilling ride around the globe and around the cosmos, to reveal the real work that goes into understanding our universe.” —Sean Carroll, theoretical physicst at the California Institute of Technology and author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“An excellent book. The author has a great knack of making difficult subjects comprehensible. I thoroughly enjoyed it.” —Sir Patrick Moore, former president of the British Astronomical Society and presenter of the BBC’s The Sky at Night
“Ananthaswamy’s juxtaposition of extreme travel and extreme science offers a genuinely novel route into the story of modern cosmology...a well written and enormously accessible account of what it takes to push past the edge of human knowledge.” —Thomas Levenson, author of Newton and the Counterfeiter and Einstein in Berlin
“Clean, elegant prose, humming with interest.” —Robert MacFarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places
"The author mucks in with scientists performing the world's most extreme experiments, creating a travelogue that celebrates the blood, sweat and tears that drive our understanding of the universe." —The Guardian, UK, A look ahead to what's new in 2010