All posts tagged: cosmology

“Where is everybody?”

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Here’s an intriguing question to start the new year with. Last autumn I interviewed Marcus Chown about his latest popular science title, We Need to Talk about Kelvin. At the end of the interview (which you can find here), we made this short video in which Marcus tackled a question famously posed by the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, who developed the first nuclear reactor. Turning to his fellow scientists one day over lunch in 1950, he asked, “Where is everybody?” He wasn’t referring to absent colleagues, but the apparent absence of signs of other intelligent life in the universe. Click on the video below to hear Marcus’s take on whether we are alone…

Books of the Decade – Christopher Potter

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Christopher Potter, after a distinguished career in publishing of over two decades, published his own first book this year: You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, which the Sunday Times called “wonderful stuff, the most thoughtful pop science book of the last few years” and which New Scientist praised for its “crisp, authoritative writing and deft handling of difficult subjects”. In August, Christopher appeared in programme 29 on Podularity – “A Walk across the Universe” – which you can listen to by clicking here. [Author photograph: © Joyce Ravid] Philip Roth: The Humbling (2009) The Humbling is Philip Roth’s seventh novel of this decade, and though far from being his finest, even Roth under par is more appealing to me than the work of almost anyone else alive and writing today. The Human Stain, published at the beginning of this decade, still resonates in my mind. With another novel already promised for 2010 – Nemesis – we can only hope for another decade of astonishing fecundity. Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of …

29. A walk across the universe

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Christopher Potter: You Are Here [ 20:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz several centuries ago. It’s one of the main questions animating Christopher Potter‘s first book, You Are Here. And given that there is something, how did it come into being? And how for that matter did we come into being, several billions of years after the universe began? These are some of the potentially dizzying questions that set Christopher’s investigation of the universe and our place in it in motion. This “portable history of the universe” ranges in its purview from the infinitely large and far away – distances measured in billions of light years – to the infinitely small (which he calls “the realm of tininess”), which is equally important to our understanding of how the universe works.