Stephen Hawking’s Universe – David Filkin

This book is the easiest one to dive into and finish without any headaches. Better yet, this is actually a simpler version of Hawking’s book “A brief history of time”. So if you have fancied reading that book but were too afraid then try this one first. The great thing about the book is that it covers the history of the key people in the scientific revolutions that lead to our modern day understanding of the cosmos and it covers the history of the Universe as we know it. The book is also a companion to the TV series although I never saw that. Finally, it is full of colourful pictures and well worth every penny you pay for it.

Also posted to Amazon:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2IMNGXCC5AL31/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Once you have read it the I thoroughly recommend that you go on to read A Brief History of Time.

A brief history of time – Stephen Hawking

I read this book more than 10 years ago now, I actually borrowed a copy of the original version of the book and read it within a week (I’m not a fast reader but I was a teenager then). I thoroughly enjoyed it and soon after I purchased my own copy which is the 10th anniversary edition. Before I read this book I actually read Stephen Hawking’s Universe (Stephen Hawking’s Universe: The Cosmos Explained), which I found to be good preparation. At the time my knowledge of physics was that of high school level physics, which is enough to get you through both books. Both cover a bit of history of the key figures in the development of astronomy / cosmology but this book eventually goes into greater detail of the more difficult concepts.

Read the rest of my review on the Amazon page for the book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3SSQH9N4RPN78/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Black Holes & Time Warps – Kip S Thorne

One of my favourite books and also one of the most influential. I read this in my teens, about 12 years ago, in the same summer that I read Hawking’s Brief History of Time. Although I skimmed through the book again before writing this review. This book is perhaps easier to read and like Hawking’s book is full of diagrams to aid understanding. Some relativity is covered, including the idea of lightcones and how they relate to causality. This was actually one of the trickier concepts, in that I tried to fully understand what the lightcone diagram meant and what the consequences are of the information displayed upon one. They are key to understanding black holes and how they distort space-time.

Read the rest of my review on the Amazon page for the book:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2FFQSXTQSWES2/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Where FTL is actually impossible is when something travels faster than the speed of light in a vacuum and the space it occupies is not folding or bending. If it were possible then this would be a true version of FTL and also a violation of physics as we know it. Why so? Well the short explanation is that it would violate laws of energy conservation and that is never a good thing to try; there is a lot of physics that has been measured to be correct and is underpinned by assumptions of energy conservation, so breaking that would cause many rules to be violated at once. Such rules are well founded with good reason and not something to overturn quickly. That’s why we can safely ignore any experiment that suggests to have created or detected particles (or signals) that travel faster than light.

You may recall the media frenzy when “scientists suggested that” certain neutrinos in the 2011 CERN experiment were travelling faster than light but it wasn’t so in the end. I was betting against this discovery being true.

The concept of folding space on the other hand is different. In such cases the rules of physics are bent but not violated. If the distance between two points decreases then the speed needed to travel between them can be smaller (for the same amount of time). Simple, nay? Fold space, stroll across to the other side. The bending, or folding, of space is not quite the same as wormholes which are a particularly special case of folded space. Wormholes could be created when two black holes connect with each other across a great distance; that is to say that it is more of a tunnel than just a simple fold. Picturing that is hard too as it is essentially a “bridge through a 4th dimension”.

Coming up next: an article on FTL in fiction. Comments / questions are always welcome.