 For the rest of us
Stephen Hawking struck gold with this one. For all of us who aren't cosmologists or astronomers, this book explains it all clearly. If you want to learn about our universe, this is a definite first read!
Still waiting
I am really dessapointed with the service offering by Amazon. I placed my order on December 26, 2009. Although the estimated date was January 8, 2010 still I havent received the books. I thought Amazon is trustworthy but they are not. This will be my first and last order placement on Amazon.
A Primeval Atom: Hawking's World
I am fascinated by Dr. Hawking's work in cosmology, and gathered the fact that when he made the choice of either becoming a particle physicist or a cosmologist, he implicitly became both: For I do not believe there to be a discontinuity between the two fields. Ernest Sternglass, for example, in "Before the Big Bang," argues that an electron and positron are the truly fundamental particles, and that there were the basis of a primeval atom that gave rise to our universe. In his work, he suggests that particle physicists have paid insufficient attention to the relativistic effects on space-time curvature at the speeds that the original particles were moving electrodynamically--thus, they have not realized that a primitive pair of particles such as these may have spun out the entirety of our comos' Eiensteinian four-space: He suggests that the entire description that he gives of our cosmos is that of a rotating quantum cosmological black hole, and this is connected in my opinion with your discovery of Hawking radiation. The model Sternglass advances requires a 16 trillion year period before the Big Bang occurs; in this "era" of our cosmos' evolution, the relativistically rotating pair generate in kinetic energy all the mass that we see as the galactic structure of our beautiful comos, but, at some point, that energy had to be converted to mass, and some event had to produce that; i.e., the transition phase--as Einstein's energy/mass relation--had to have a cause. I have begun to theorize that the central piece in this puzzle could be the neutrino; in my opinion (which is not that of a physicist, but of a philosopher whose orientation is to Vienna's Circle of Logical positivists), the nucleus of hydrogen--i.e., its proton gives birth to a neutron by the mechanism of neutrino creation: Dr. Sternglass argued that in one unique (Born Statistical) case the sole orbiting electron of the proton is captured by the nucleus as has been observed or is predicted I am not sure which. However, this mechanism or quantum event may suggest that the neutron explodes into existence once the nuclei of hydrogen have absorbed the maximum quanta of electrons; in other words, just as Bohr discovered that the electrons can move from lower energy to higher energy orbits, so too, ex hypothesi, the nucleus can also vary--from lower energy states to higher, except that when it absorbs the highest degree of electron energy, it divides into itself and the neutron, thereby producing, in potentia, all of the possible states that matter can be in; Dr. Sternglass' model also has the great merit that it would allow us to logically derive certain of the fundamental constants of nature logico-emperically, and further, since along the lines of the Dirac large numbers conjecture, it sees a profound relationship between the small scale structure of our cosmos and the large. How does all of this relate to the neutrino? It makes some sense, I think, to look at the neutrino as the quantum constructed graviton; it is an extremely light particle, but it is not wieghtless (great picture, by the way!), and therefore it has structure on my view: I postulate a tripartite structure consisting of a tightly bound electron and positron bound by the neutrino. Since the neutrino is not wieghtless and has structure, how is it that it can contain particles which are heavier than its own mass: The only explanation I can give for this is that the electron and positron in this state are highly relativistically motional, but the more energy they absorb the lighter--hence potentially more massive--they are;moreover, in my view the entire quantum field is undergoing at all times conversions of energy to mass and from mass to energy; it is oscilating. It is my further conjecture that the Riemann zeta function is at the heart of this process, the very pulse of the atom and the entire quantum mechanical wave function of the universe. some support for Sternglass' view comes from a method that Brian stedjee, and a process that he developed for sorting out the fundamental particles: my work can be viewed here:PhysOrgForum Science, Physics and Technology Discussion Forums -> Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity And Gravity.Before the Big Bang: The Origins of the UniverseThe Life of the CosmosThe Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
 Seven good lectures
This book is a new edition of a book originally published in 1996 based in seven Cambridge lectures, basically describing some of the contributions of the author to cosmology and black holes. Among those: the singularity theorems coauthored with Penrose, the Hawking radiation of black holes (of which the author himself claims that it would get him the Nobel Prize if found in nature), the no boundary condition, etc.
Some of the concepts are very clearly explained such as the second law of thermodynamics, the black hole horizon, black hole evaporation, virtual particles, etc, although some others are more difficult to grasp.
There are some small errors, mainly with numbers that should be printed in exponential notation.
Unfortunately these lectures predate the discovery that the universe expansion is accelerating and the detailed results of the Wilkinson probe.
In any case the lectures are excellent reading and contain a lot of very good information. I was specially attracted to the fact that until the 1920's it was almost unthinkable that the universe is expanding, whereas it should have been a logic deduction of Newton's gravitational law and the fact that the universe is not collapsing.
 Accessible Hawking.
Good book overall. Gives a good overview of historical cosmology, as well as going over new concepts (i.e. String Theory). It is difficult to wrap your mind around some things (like when he talks about black holes and how the universe possibly started), but in general, this book is very accessible to anyone who wants to start learning about cosmology and physics.
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