Astronomy & Physics Audiobooks | Science & Technology

Blue: In Search of Nature's Rarest Color

A globe-trotting quest to find blue in the natural world-and to understand our collective obsession with this bewitching color Blue is a rare color-natural blue, that is. From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue-and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light. Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite color and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany-home of the last Spix's macaws. From deep underground where blue minerals grow into crystals to miles away in space where satellites gaze down at our 'blue marble' planet, wherever we do find blue, it always has a story to tell.

Kai Kupferschmidt (Author), Jonathan Yen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Incident on Simpac III: A Scientific Novel

A few hundred years into the future, a wave of space colonization follows a disastrous earlier attempt to inhabit nearby extrasolar planets. It is guided by a new computational method based on massive data-driven socio-cultural and socio-epidemiological modeling and using novel biological computers, fed with data on Earth's history of successes and failures. Yet, in the newly settled Simpac system, some unexpected and worrying anomalies begin cropping up, making an urgent expedition to the system necessary: is it the underlying data, the computations, or is some unknown entity tampering with the space colonization program? A race against time ensues as the lives of four strangers begin to converge. While grounded in the social systems aspect, the author posits that the future is likely to be characterized by more biology-based tools than most contemporary science fiction-which most often relies entirely on nonbiological hardware in terms of advanced technologies-predicts. The result is an entertaining and skillful blend of thriller and SF, complemented by a nontechnical appendix describing the underlying science.

Doug Brugge (Author), Alex Boyles (Narrator)

Audiobook

Consciousness and Science Fiction

Science fiction explores the wonderful, baffling, and wildly entertaining aspects of a universe unimaginably old and vast, and with a future even more immense. It reaches into that endless cosmos with the tools of rational investigation and storytelling. At the core of both science and science fiction is the engaged human mind-a consciousness that sees and feels and thinks and loves. But what is this mind, this aware and self-aware consciousness that seems unlike anything else we experience? What makes consciousness the hard problem of philosophy, still unsolved after millennia of probing? This audiobook looks into the heart of this mystery-at the science and philosophy of consciousness and at many inspiring fictional examples-and finds strange, challenging answers. This audiobook's content and entertaining style will appeal equally to science fiction enthusiasts and scholars, including cognitive and neuroscientists, as well as philosophers of mind. It is a refreshing romp through the science and science fiction of consciousness.

Damien Broderick (Author), Raphael Corkhill (Narrator)

Audiobook

Leadership Moments from NASA: Achieving the Impossible

Space exploration is as much a story of leadership and teamwork as it is a story of exploration and discovery. Leadership Moments from NASA delves into the organizational culture, leadership styles, and insights of NASA senior executives spanning five decades of human spaceflight, to share the lessons they learned from critical moments where they took on seemingly insurmountable challenges. How did they prioritize? How did they resolve differences? How did they decide what to do when no one had done it before? How did they build highly competent teams? How did they build organizational resilience? How did they fight complacency and rebuild a culture of safety and innovation? Through interviews with famous leaders such as Apollo's Gene Kranz, the first Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission's Joe Rothenberg, 'astronaut maker' George Abbey, and former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, this book shows how NASA recovered from tragedy and adversity, and how it developed a culture of competency that continues to attract the best and brightest.

Dr. Dave Williams, Elizabeth Howell Phd, Elizabeth Howell, Ph.D., Elizabeth Howell, Phd (Author), Matthew Josdal (Narrator)

Audiobook

Rockets and Ray Guns: The Sci-Fi Science of the Cold War

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.

Andrew May (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

Audiobook

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody? Second Edition: Seventy-Five Solution

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 billion galaxies in the universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the fourteen-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of these extraterrestrials?

Stephen Webb (Author), Dan Woren (Narrator)

Audiobook

Yuri Gagarin in London and Manchester: A smile that changed the world?

The first human spaceflight on 12th April 1961 shocked the West and made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the most famous person on the planet. As one of human civilisation’s seminal accomplishments it was borne out of technology designed for weapons of mass destruction. Following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, the Soviet Union charged headlong into the exploration of the Moon, Venus and Mars, demonstrating and honing their weapons of war in the name of science. Three months after his flight, still the only person to have been in Earth orbit, he came to Britain. Declassified confidential and secret government documents reveal for the first time the frantic diplomatic efforts to achieve a balance between celebrating one of humanity’s greatest achievements whilst grappling with the political dynamite of the unprecedented propaganda opportunity of a Soviet air force Major’s success being celebrated first by the Prime Minister and then by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Chronicled for the first time in these pages are the personal recollections, including never before published pictures, from people in Manchester and London of the impact of this handsome, charismatic cosmonaut who captured the hearts of ordinary working people in Britain. This unassuming diminutive Major with an engaging permanent smile brought hope to a world at the brink of thermonuclear war. For many in Britain during the coldest days of the Cold War, this cosmonaut was the only Russian they would ever see.

Gurbir Singh (Author), Gurbir Singh (Narrator)

Audiobook

Mercury in Retrograde: And Other Ways the Stars Can Teach You to Live Your Truth, Find Your Power, a

From lunar logic to retrograde real talk, eclipses to asteroids, practicing astrologer Rachel Stuart-Haas breaks down the astrological phenomena that impact your day-to-day life in this giftable guide to the heavens, and what they have in store. The sun, moon, stars, and other celestial bodies are constantly impacting our lives. They affect our decision making, relationships, communication. They signal change and grant us moments of self-reflection. And, if we let them, they challenge us to grow into the best versions of ourselves. In Mercury in Retrograde, practicing astrologer Rachel Stuart-Haas takes us on a fun and energizing exploration of the astrological phenomena that guide our lives. Unpacking eclipses, retrogrades, the major and minor aspects, asteroids, and moon wisdom, Stuart-Haas teaches readers how to go beyond their zodiac sun sign and natal chart (how the stars were aligned at their birth) and start thinking like a real astrologer to: -Align their energies with the Universe -Time major life decisions to auspicious moments -Improve their relationships, mental health, and well-being -Create meaningful rituals for self-care -And more! Perfect for armchair astrologists, fans of divination, and anyone looking to improve their relationships, mental health, and overall wellbeing, this wise, delightful, and easy-to-read book provides the first step to reclaiming your life and accomplishing all you've ever dreamed of.

Rachel Stuart-Haas (Author), Esther White (Narrator)

Audiobook

Black Holes: A Very Short Introduction

Black holes are a constant source of fascination to many due to their mysterious nature. This Very Short Introduction addresses a variety of questions, including what a black hole actually is, how they are characterized and discovered, and what would happen if you came too close to one. Professor Katherine Blundell looks at the seemingly paradoxical, mysterious, and intriguing phenomena of black holes. Outlining their nature and characteristics, both those resulting from the spectacular collapse of heavy stars, and the giant black holes found at the centers of galaxies, she separates scientific fact from science fiction, and demonstrates the important role they play in the cosmos.

Katherine Blundell (Author), Leila Birch (Narrator)

Audiobook

Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction

Quantum theory is the most revolutionary discovery in physics since Newton. This book gives a lucid, exciting, and accessible account of the surprising and counterintuitive ideas that shape our understanding of the sub-atomic world. It does not disguise the problems of interpretation that still remain unsettled seventy-five years after the initial discoveries. Uncertainty, probabilistic physics, complementarity, the problematic character of measurement, and decoherence are among the many topics discussed. This volume offers the listener access to one of the greatest discoveries in the history of physics and one of the outstanding intellectual achievements of the twentieth century.

John Polkinghorne (Author), Dennis Holland (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm

Your information has a life of its own, and it's using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we've failed to ask exactly why we're expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create-all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos-amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it's an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn't just something we produce; it's the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.

Caleb Scharf (Author), Jonathan Todd Ross (Narrator)

Audiobook

Asteroids: How Love, Fear, and Greed Will Determine Our Future in Space

A unique, wide-ranging examination of asteroid exploration and our future in space Human travel into space is an enormously expensive and unforgiving endeavor. So why go? In this accessible and authoritative book, astrophysicist Martin Elvis argues that the answer is the asteroid exploration, for the strong motives of love, fear, and greed. Elvis's personal motivation is one of scientific love-asteroid investigations may teach us about the composition of the solar system and the origins of life. A more compelling reason may be fear-of a dinosaur killer-sized asteroid hitting our planet. Finally, Elvis maintains, we should consider greed: asteroids likely hold vast riches, such as large platinum deposits, and mining them could provide both a new industry and a funding source for bolder space exploration. Elvis explains how each motive can be satisfied, and how they help one another. From the origins of life, to 'space billiards,' and space sports, Elvis looks at how asteroids may be used in the not-so-distant future.

Martin Elvis (Author), Nigel Patterson (Narrator)

Audiobook

Astronomy & Physics Audiobooks in Science & Technology