A user's guide to the universe: surviving the perils of black holes, time paradoxes, and quantum uncertainty

Abstract

Acknowledgments. Introduction. So, what do you do? 1 Special Relativity. happens if I'm traveling at the speed of light, and I try to look at myself in a mirror? can't you tell how fast a ship is moving through fog? How fast does a light beam go if you're running beside it? you head off in a spaceship traveling at nearly the speed of light, what horrors await you when you return? you reach the speed of light (and look at yourself in a mirror)? Isn't relativity supposed to be about turning atoms into limitless power? 2 Quantum Weirdness. Schrodinger's Cat Dead or Alive? Is light made of tiny particles, or a big wave? you change reality just by looking at it? you look at them closely enough, what are electrons, really? Is there some way I can blame quantum mechanics for all those times I lose things? I build a transporter, like on Star Trek ? a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? 3 Randomness. God play dice with the the physical world is so unpredictable, why doesn't it always seem that way? How does carbon dating work? Does God play dice with the universe? 4 The Standard Model. Why didn't the Large Hadron Collider destroy Earth? What do we need a multibillion-dollar accelerator for, anyway? How do we discover subatomic particles? are there so many different rules for different particles? Where do the forces really come from? can't I lose weight (or mass)-all of it? How could little ol' LHC possibly destroy the great big world? we discover the Higgs, can physicists just call it a day? 5 Time Travel. Can I build a time I build a perpetual motion machine? Are black holes real, or are they just made up by bored physicists? What happens if you fall into a black hole? you go back in time and buy stock in Microsoft? Who does time travel right? How can I build a practical time machine? What are my prospects for changing the past? 6 The Expanding Universe. If the universe is expanding, what's it expanding Where is the center of the universe? What's at the edge of the universe? What is empty space made of? How empty is space? Where's all of the stuff? is the universe accelerating? What is the shape of the universe? What's the universe expanding into? 7 The Big Bang. happened before the Big can't we see all the way back to the Big Bang? Shouldn't the universe be (half) fi lled with antimatter? Where do atoms come from? How did particles gain all that weight? Is there an exact duplicate of you somewhere else in time and space? is there matter? What happened at the very beginning of time? What was before the beginning? 8 Extraterrestrials. there life on other planets? Where is everybody? How many habitable planets are there? How long do intelligent civilizations last? What are the odds against our own existence? 9 The Future. don't we know? What is Dark Matter? How long do protons last? How massive or nuetinos? What won't we know anytime soon? Further Reading. Technical Reading. Index.