Over 50 years ago, astronomers launched the world's first orbiting telescope. This allowed them to gaze further into outer space and examine anything that appears in the sky above our heads, from comets and planets to galaxy clusters and stars. Since then, almost 100 space telescopes have been launched from Earth and are orbiting our planet, with 26 still active and relaying information back to us.
As a result of these space-based instruments, such as NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope, we know much more about the universe than we did half a century ago. But why is Hubble, orbiting just 540 kilometres above the Earth, so much more effective than a ground-based telescope? How can a glorified camera tell us not only what distant objects look like, but their detailed chemical composition and three-dimensional structure as well?
In Eyes in the Sky, science writer Andrew May takes us on a journey into space to answer these questions and more. Looking at the development of revolutionary instruments, such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, May explores how such technology has helped us understand the evolution of the Universe.
Dreams, schemes and opportunity as space opens for tourism and commerce. Twentieth century space exploration may have belonged to state-funded giants such as NASA, but there is a parallel history which has set the template for the future. Even before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, private companies were exploiting space via communication satellites - a sector that is seeing exponential growth in the internet age. In human spaceflight, too, commercialisation is making itself felt. Billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have long trumpeted plans to make space travel a possibility for ordinary people and those ideas are inching ever closer to reality. At the same time, other companies plan to mine the Moon for helium-3, or asteroids for precious metals. Science writer Andrew May takes an entertaining, in-depth look at the triumphs and heroic failures of our quixotic quest to commercialise the final frontier.
Extraterrestrial life is a common theme in science fiction, but is it a serious prospect in the real world? Astrobiology is the emerging field of science that seeks to answer this question. The possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos is one of the most profound subjects that human beings can ponder. Astrophysicist Andrew May gives an expert overview of our current state of knowledge, looking at how life started on Earth, the tell-tale 'signatures' it produces, and how such signatures might be detected elsewhere in the Solar System or on the many 'exoplanets' now being discovered by the Kepler and TESS missions. Along the way the book addresses key questions such as the riddle of Fermi's paradox ('Where is everybody?') and the crucial role of DNA and water - they're essential to 'life as we know it', but is the same true of alien life? And the really big question: when we eventually find extraterrestrials, will they be friendly or hostile?
Mars is back. Suddenly everyone - from Elon Musk to Ridley Scott to Donald Trump - is talking about going to the Red Planet.
When the Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon in 1969, many people imagined Mars would be next. However NASA's Viking 1, which landed in 1976, was just a robot. The much-anticipated crewed mission failed to materialise, defeated by a combination of technological and political challenges.
Four decades after Viking and almost half a century after Apollo technology has improved beyond recognition - as has politics. As private ventures like SpaceX seize centre stage from NASA, Mars has undergone a seismic shift - it's become the prime destination for future human expansion and colonisation.
But what's it really like on Mars, and why should anyone want to go there? How do you get there and what are the risks? Astrophysicist and science writer Andrew May answers these questions and more, as he traces the history of our fascination with the Red Planet.
The author has asserted his moral rights.
Aliens, flying saucers, ESP, the Bermuda Triangle, antigravity ... are we talking about science fiction or pseudoscience? Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference.
Both pseudoscience and science fiction (SF) are creative endeavors that have little in common with academic science, beyond the superficial trappings of jargon and subject matter. The most obvious difference between the two is that pseudoscience is presented as fact, not fiction. Yet like SF, and unlike real science, pseudoscience is driven by a desire to please an audience-in this case, people who "want to believe." This has led to significant cross-fertilization between the two disciplines. SF authors often draw on "real" pseudoscientific theories to add verisimilitude to their stories, while on other occasions pseudoscience takes its cue from SF-the symbiotic relationship between ufology and Hollywood being a prime example of this.
This engagingly written and well researched audiobook explores a wide range of intriguing similarities and differences between pseudoscience and the fictional science found in SF.
The Cold War saw scientists in East and West racing to create amazing new technologies, the like of which the world had never seen. Yet not everyone was taken by surprise. From super-powerful atomic weapons to rockets and space travel, readers of science fiction (SF) had seen it all before.
Sometimes reality lived up to the SF vision, at other times it didn't. The hydrogen bomb was as terrifyingly destructive as anything in fiction, while real-world lasers didn't come close to the promise of the classic SF ray gun. Nevertheless, when the scientific Cold War culminated in the Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s, it was so science-fictional in its aspirations that the media dubbed it "Star Wars."
This entertaining account, offering a plethora of little known facts and insights from previously classified military projects, shows how the real-world science of the Cold War followed in the footsteps of SF-and how the two together changed our perception of both science and scientists, paving the way for the world we live in today.
As end-of-the-world scenarios go, an apocalyptic collision with an asteroid or comet is the new kid on the block, gaining respectability only in the last decade of the 20th century with the realisation that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by just such an impact. Now the science community is making up for lost time, with worldwide efforts to track the thousands of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, and plans for high-tech hardware that could deflect an incoming object from a collision course - a procedure depicted, with little regard for scientific accuracy, in several Hollywood movies.
Astrophysicist and science writer Andrew May disentangles fact from fiction in this fast-moving and entertaining account, covering the nature and history of comets and asteroids, the reason why some orbits are more hazardous than others, the devastating local and global effects that an impact event would produce, and - more optimistically - the way future space missions could avert a catastrophe.
People are used to seeing "fake physics" in science fiction-concepts like faster-than-light travel, antigravity, and time travel, to name a few. The fiction label ought to be a giveaway, but some SF writers-especially those with a background in professional science-are so adept at "technobabble" that it can be difficult to work out what is fake and what is real. To confuse matters further, Isaac Asimov's 1948 piece about the fictitious time-traveling substance thiotimoline was written, not as a short story, but in the form of a spoof research paper.
The boundaries between fact and fiction can also be blurred by physicists themselves-sometimes unintentionally, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek, sometimes to satirize perceived weaknesses in research practices. Examples range from hoaxes aimed at exposing poor editorial standards in academic publications, through "thought experiments" that sound like the plot of a sci-fi movie to April Fools' jokes. Even the latter may carry a serious message, whether about the sociology of science or poking fun at legitimate but far-out scientific hypotheses.
This entertaining book is a joyous romp exploring the whole spectrum of fake physics-from science to fiction and back again.
