Magic universe : a grand tour of modern science / Nigel Calder.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Calder, Nigel, 1931-2014, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science--History--20th century.

Science.

Discoveries in science.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (769 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2005.

Summary:

Magic Universe brings current science to the general reader in an imaginative and wholly original way. It offers an exhilarating tour of the horizons of knowledge, from quarks to linguistics, climate change to cloning, and chaos to superstrings, presented as a set of self-contained stories. The stories are arranged as A - Z entries, but this is no conventional encyclopedia. Each story unfolds in a totally unpredictable way, seamlessly crossing disciplines,and told in engaging, accessible language.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Introduction: Welcome to the spider's web

Alcohol: Genetic revelations of when yeast invented booze

Altruism and aggression: Looking for the origins of those human alternatives

Antimatter: Does the coat that Sakharov made really explain its absence?

Arabidopsis: The modest weed that gave plant scientists the big picture

Astronautics: Will interstellar pioneers be overtaken by their grandchildren?

Bernal's ladder: Pointers

Big Bang: The inflationary Universe's sleight-of-hand

Biodiversity: The mathematics of co-existence

Biological clocks: Molecular machinery that governs life's routines

Biosphere from space: 'I want to do the whole world'

Bits and qubits: The digital world and its looming quantum shadow

Black holes: The awesome engines of quasars and active galaxies

Brain images: What do all the vivid movies really mean?

Brain rhythms: The mathematics of the beat we think to

Brain wiring: How do all those nerve connections know where to go?

Buckyballs and nanotubes: Doing very much more with very much less

Cambrian explosion: Easy come and easy go, among the early animals

Carbon cycle: Exactly how does it interact with the global climate?

Cell cycle: How and when one living entity becomes two

Cell death: How life makes suicide part of the evolutionary deal

Cell traffic: Zip codes, stepping-stones and the recognition of life's complexity

Cereals: Genetic boosts for the most cosseted inhabitants of the planet

Chaos: The butterfly versus the ladybird, and the Mercury Effect

Climate change: Shall we freeze or fry?

Cloning: Why doing without sex carries a health warning

Comets and asteroids: Snowy dirtballs and their rocky cousins

Continents and supercontinents: Collage-making since the world began.

Cosmic rays: Where do the punchiest particles come from?

Cryosphere: Ice sheets, sea-ice and mountain glaciers tell a confusing tale

Dark energy: Revealing the power of an accelerating Universe

Dark matter: A wind of wimps or the machinations of machos?

Dinosaurs: Why small was beautiful in the end

Discovery: Why the top experts are usually wrong

Disorderly materials: The wonders of untidy solids and tidy liquids

DNA fingerprinting: From parentage cases to facial diversity

Earth: Why is it so very different from all the other planets of the Sun?

Earthquakes: Why they may never be accurately predicted, or prevented

Earthshine: How bright clouds reveal climate change, and perhaps drive it

Earth system: Pointers

Eco-evolution: New perspectives on variability and survival

Electroweak force: How Europe recovered its fading glory in particle physics

Elements: A legacy from stellar puffs, collapsing giants and exploding dwarfs

El Niño: When a warm sea wobbles the global weather

Embryos: 'Think of the control genes operating a chemical computer'

Energy and mass: The cosmic currency of Einstein's most famous equation

Evolution: Why Darwin's natural selection was never the whole story

Extinctions: Were they nearly all due to bolts from the blue?

Extraterrestrial life: Could we be all alone in the Milky Way?

Extremophiles: Creatures that thrive in unexpected places

Flood basalts: Can impacting comets set continents in motion?

Flowering: Colourful variations on a theme of genetic pathways

Forces: Pointers

Galaxies: Looking for Juno's milk in the infant Universe

Gamma-ray bursts: New black holes being fashioned every day

Genes: Words of wisdom from our ancestors, in four colours

Genomes in general: The whole history of life in a chemical code.

Global enzymes: Why they now fascinate geologists, chemists and biologists

Grammar: Does it stand between computers and the dominion of the world?

Gravitational waves: Shaking the Universe with weighty news

Gravity: Did Uncle Albert really get it right?

Handedness: Mysteries of left versus right that won't go away

Higgs bosons: The multi-billion-dollar quest for the mass-maker

High-speed travel: The common sense of special relativity

Hopeful monsters: How they herald a revolution in evolution

Hotspots: Are there really chimneys deep inside the Earth?

Human ecology: How to progress beyond eco-colonialism

Human genome: The industrialization of fundamental biology

Human origins: Why most of those exhumations are only of great-aunts

Ice-rafting events: Glacial surges in sudden changes of climate

Immortality: Should we be satisfied with 100 years?

Immune system: What's me, what's you, and what's a nasty bug?

Impacts: Physical consequences of collisions with comets and asteroids

Languages: Why women often set the new fashions in speaking

Life's origin: Will the answer to the riddle come from outer space?

Mammals: Tracing our milk-making forebears in a world of drifting continents

Matter: Pointers

Memory: Tracking down the chemistry of retention and forgetfulness

Microwave background: Looking for the pattern on the cosmic wallpaper

Minerals in space: From stellar dust to crystals to stones

Molecular partners: Letting natural processes do the chemist's work

Molecules evolving: How the Japanese heretics were vindicated

Molecules in space: Exotic chemistry among the stars

Neutrino oscillations: When ghostly particles play hide-and-seek

Neutron stars: Ticking clocks in the sky, and their silent shadows

Nuclear weapons: The desperately close-run thing.

Ocean currents: A central-heating system for the world

Origins: Pointers

Particle families: Completing the Standard Model of matter and its behaviour

Photosynthesis: How does your garden grow?

Plant diseases: An evolutionary arms race or just trench warfare?

Plants: Pointers

Plasma crystals: How a newly found force empowers dust

Plate motions: What rocky machinery refurbishes the Earth's surface?

Predators: Come back Brer Wolf, all is forgiven

Prehistoric genes: Sorting the travelling salesmen from the settlers

Primate behaviour: Clues to the origins of human culture

Prions: From cannibals and mad cows to new modes of heredity and evolution

Protein-making: From an impressionistic dance to a real molecular movie

Protein shapes: Look forward to seeing them shimmy

Proteomes: The molecular corps de ballet of living things

Quantum tangles: From puzzling to spooky to useful

Quark soup: Recreating a world without protons

Relativity: Pointers

Smallpox: The dairymaid's blessing and the general's curse

Solar wind: How it creates the heliosphere in which we live

Space weather: Why it is now more troublesome than in the old days

Sparticles: A wished-for superworld of exotic matter and forces

Speech: A gene that makes us more eloquent than chimpanzees

Starbursts: Galactic traffic accidents and stellar baby booms

Stars: Hearing them sing and sizing them up

Stem cells: Tissue engineering, natural and medical

Sun's interior: How sound waves made our mother star transparent

Superatoms, superfluids and superconductors: The march of the boson armies

Superstrings: Retuning the cosmic imagination

Time machines: The biggest issue in contemporary physics?

Transgenic crops: For better or worse, a planetary experiment has begun.

Tree of life: Promiscuous bacteria and the course of evolution

Universe: 'It must have known we were coming'

Volcanic explosions: Where will the next big one be?

Sources of quotes

Name index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Subject index

Z.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-19-153967-8

OCLC:

64184137