Science But Not As We Know

Contents 2
How big is the Universe? 6
The star that redrew the cosmos 10
Expanding Universe 14
Welcome to the multiverse 18
We are all doomed! 22
Catch up with the stellar speed demons 26
Meet the smelly dwarf 30
Mercury’s secrets 33
How to catch a comet 36
Saturn’s amazing rings 40
The search for alien life 42
The hostile blue planet 46
The space rock that “killed” Pluto 50
The first human in space 56
Pioneer 10: the little spacecraft that could 60
Voyager: our distant emissary 64
Is there life on Mars? 68
Colonizing Mars 72
Mapping the Milky Way 76
Detecting killer asteroids 78
Looking beyond Mars for life 82
A Webb to catch the oldest stars 86
ESA’s Rosetta comet chaser 88
Gravity lensing to see the cosmos 92
Engage warp drive! 94
Space: the fatal frontier 96
It is only a theory 100
Why does anything exist? 104
Leap second 108
A weird, almost perfect Universe 111
What is dark matter? 114
Why is gravity so weak? 118
Dark matter builds the Universe 120
We are all made of stars 124
The story of the pulsar 128
Doing the black hole twist 132
Helium shortage 136
Death rays from outer space 140
Gravity slingshot 142
Is glass a liquid? 146
Curiosity: science’s heart 150
The story of the atom 156
Discovering the neutron 159
The world of the insanely tiny 162
The certainty of uncertainty 164
Seeking supersymmetry 168
Higgs boson: a bluffer’s guide 172
Quantum gravity 176
X-ray crystallography 179
Particle accelerators 182
Attack of the micro black holes 186
Index 190
Acknowledgments 192