About this item
Prepare to learn everything we still dont know about our strange and mysterious Universe.Humanitys understanding of the physical world is full of gaps. Not tiny little gaps you can safely ignore - there are huge yawning voids in our basic notions of how the world works. PHD Comics creator Jorge Cham and particle physicist Daniel Whiteson have teamed up to explore everything we dont know about the Universe: The enormous holes in our knowledge of the cosmos. Armed with entertaining and lucid explanations of science, they give us the best answers currently available for a lot of questions that are still perplexing scientists, including:Why does the Universe have a speed limit?Why arent we all made of antimatter?What (or who) is attacking Earth with tiny, superfast particles?What is dark matter, and why does it keep ignoring us?It turns out the Universe is full of weird things that dont make any sense. But Cham and Whiteson make a compelling case that the questions we cant answer are as interesting as the ones we can.This introduction to the biggest mysteries in physics also helpfully demystifies many complicated things we do know about, from quarks and neutrinos to gravitational waves and exploding black holes. With equal doses of humor and delight, Cham and Whiteson invite us to see the Universe as a possibly boundless expanse of uncharted territory thats still ours to explore.
About the Author
Jorge Cham is a Chinese-Panamanian post-doc best known for his popular newspaper and web comic strip . He first started drawing PhD Comics as a graduate student at Stanford University, and has since been syndicated in several university newspapers and in three published book collections. Jorge Cham received his Bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech in 1997, and earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He subsequently worked at Caltech as an instructor and as a researcher on neural prosthetics. In 2005, Cham began an invited speaking tour of over 80 major universities delivering his talk titled "The Power of Procrastination". In this lecture, Cham talks about his experiences creating the comic strip and examines the sources of grad students' anxieties. He also explores the guilt and the myths associated with procrastination and argues that in many cases it is actually a good thing.
