Mapping the Heavens

WARNING

You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com

The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos

Priyamvada Natarajan

View Inside Format: Paper
Price: $16.00
YUP
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.

Also Available in:
Hardcover

A noted astrophysicist presents a lively and accessible introduction to radical ideas and discoveries that are transforming our knowledge of the universe
 
“A strikingly lucid account of the expansion, not just of the universe, but of the way we have tried to understand it, from the Babylonians to black holes and dark matter.”—Richard Holmes, “By the Book,”New York Times Book Review
 
“Part history, part science, all illuminating. If you want to understand the greatest ideas that shaped our current cosmic cartography, read this book.”—Adam G. Riess, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011
 
This book provides a tour of the “greatest hits” of cosmological discoveries—the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. She not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance.
 
The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe.

Priyamvada Natarajan is professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University and holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship at the Dark Center, Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and an honorary professorship at the University of Delhi, India.
ISBN: 9780300227031
Publication Date: May 23, 2017
288 pages, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4
14 color + 33 b/w illus.

Sales Restrictions: No rights in Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Maldives). Sold to Harper Collins India.reprint (South Asia) rights sold to HarperCollins Publishers India. Export restrictions for Indian Subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives