Knocking on Heaven's Door

Fülszöveg

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Knocking on Heaven's Door
"Lisa Randall has written Knocking on Heaven's Door in the same witty, informal style with which she explains physics in person, making complex ideas fascinating and easy to understand. Her book presents the latest physics developments with excursions into culture and public policy, explaining science in ways that just might make you think differently—and encourage you to make smarter decisions about the world." —PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON
"I didn't think it was possible to write a complex, detailed look at the world of physics that the non-scientist could understand, but then Lisa Randall wrote this amazing, insightful, and engaging book and proved me wrong." —CARLTON CUSE, award-winning producer and writer of Lost
"Science has a battle for hearts and minds on its hands: a battle on two fronts—against superstition and ignorance on one flank, and against pseudo-intellectual obscurantism on the other. How good it feels to have Lisa... Tovább

Fülszöveg

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Knocking on Heaven's Door
"Lisa Randall has written Knocking on Heaven's Door in the same witty, informal style with which she explains physics in person, making complex ideas fascinating and easy to understand. Her book presents the latest physics developments with excursions into culture and public policy, explaining science in ways that just might make you think differently—and encourage you to make smarter decisions about the world." —PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON
"I didn't think it was possible to write a complex, detailed look at the world of physics that the non-scientist could understand, but then Lisa Randall wrote this amazing, insightful, and engaging book and proved me wrong." —CARLTON CUSE, award-winning producer and writer of Lost
"Science has a battle for hearts and minds on its hands: a battle on two fronts—against superstition and ignorance on one flank, and against pseudo-intellectual obscurantism on the other. How good it feels to have Lisa Randall's unusual blend of topflight science, clarity, and charm on our side."
— RICHARD DAWKINS, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion
"A deep and deeply wonderful explanation of how science—and the rest of the known universe— actually works." —DANIEL GILBERT, author of Stumbling on Happiness
"Lisa Randall's focus on the essential relationship between technology and scientific thinking prompts fascinating debate, and this is a great primer for those nonscientists who are trying to figure out the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider."
— ELON MUSK, CEO/CTO of SpaceX, CEO of Tesia Motors, and co-founder of PayPal
"Many books call to mind superlatives, but this one has them all. It explains the greatest scientific endeavor in history—one that is exploring the earliest, smallest, largest, and most powerful phenomena in the universe, and that may answer the deepest questions about the nature of physical reality. Lisa Randall's lucid explanations of concepts at the frontiers of physics—including her own -dazzling ideas—are highly illuminating, and her hearty defense of reason and science is a welcome contribution to the contemporary world of ideas. Read this book today to understand the science of tomorrow." —STEVEN PINKER, author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought
"Lisa Randall is the rarest rarity—a theoretical physics genius who can write and talk to the rest of us in ways we both understand and enjoy. This book takes nonspecialists as close as they'll ever get to the inner workings of the cosmos."
— LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS, former treasury secretary
"Lisa Randall does a great job of explaining to the nonphysicist the basic science approaches of modern physics and what the latest experiments might reveal. This is a must-read to appreciate what is coming in our future."
—J. CRAIG VENTER, sequencer of the human genome and developer of the first synthetic life
USA $29.99
From one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, a rousing defense of the role of science in our lives
The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven's Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science.
There could be no better guide than Lisa Randall. The bestselling author of Warped Passages is an expert in both particle physics {the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology {the study of the largest). In Knocking on !Heaven's Door, she explores how we decide which scientific questions to study and how we go about answering them. She examines the role of risk, creativity, uncertainty, beauty, and truth in scientific thinking through provocative conversations with leading figures in other fields (such as the chef David Chang, the forecaster Nate Silver, and the screenwriter Scott Derrickson), and she explains with wit and clarity the latest ideas in physics and cosmology. Randall describes the nature and goals of the largest machine ever built: the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator below the border of France and Switzerland— as well as recent ideas underlying cosmology and current dark matter experiments.
The most sweeping and exciting science book in years, Knockingon l-ieaven's Door makes clear the biggest scientific questions we face and reveals how answering them could ultimately tell us who we are and where we came from.
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Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and ^
cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Frank J. Baird, \
Jr., Professor of Science. Her work has made her among the "
most cited and influential theoretical physicists today, and has been featured in Discover, the Economist, Newsweek, !
Scientific American, and many top-ranked scientific journals. She has been one of lime magazine's "100 Most Influential |
People" and Rolling Stone's "RSlOO: Agents of Change," ! '
and her first book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mys- "
teries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, was named a New York Times Notable Book In 2005. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and j Sciences. When not solving the problems of the universe, Randall can be found rock climbing, skiing, or contributing to art-science connections. Her libretto for Hypermusic Prologue premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2009.
www.harpercollins.com/lisarandali
Available from HarperCollins e-books
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Jacket and case design by Allison Saltzman Case photographs: Hubble telescope finds dark matter ring in galaxy cluster, \
by M. J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University), courtesy of NASA and ESA;
Large Hadron Collider by Jamie Wiseman © by Daily Mail/Rex/Alamy Author photograph by Christopher Kim Vissza