Thorium is a better, safer, cheaper and more prolific replacement for uranium. It deserves to be given the title ‘The Eighth Element’, following Lord Browne’s book ‘Seven Elements That Have Changed the World’. He lists iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium and silicon. This report explains why thorium should be added to the list. It sets out the case for thorium as a nuclear fuel, explaining why it is safer, cheaper, and should be more acceptable to the public than uranium....

"[A] highly readable, accessible look at particle physics today and…a passionate defense and celebration of the scientific worldview" (Discovery News).One of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world and the bestselling author of Warped Passages, Lisa Randall is an expert in both particle physics (the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology (the study of the largest). In this book, Randall takes us on an amazing tour ...

The seventeen equations that form the basis for life as we know it.Most people are familiar with history's great equations: Newton's Law of Gravity, for instance, or Einstein's theory of relativity. But the way these mathematical breakthroughs have contributed to human progress is seldom appreciated. In In Pursuit of the Unknown, celebrated mathematician Ian Stewart untangles the roots of our most important mathematical statements to show that equations ha...

The legendary physicist explores his favorite subject in a pair of enlightening, accessible, and cleverly illustrated essays for curious readers, originally delivered as BBC lectures.“It is said that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, and nowhere is that more true than in the case of black holes. Black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science-fiction writers, but they are firmly matters of science fact.”For decades, Stephen Hawk...

Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are the two major pillars of 20th century physics. These theories, launched within five years of one another, revolutionized our understanding of nature. They utterly dismantled the conceptual basis of Newtonian physics that had been the gold standard of science for over 200 years, and introduced radically new concepts that defy human intuition. These theories may represent the greatest upheaval in the history of science. Both Relativity and Quantum Mechan...

The biggest question ever asked by science is: Where did everything come from?Science has answered this big question for nearly one hundred years. Everything was created after the big bang. If the Big Bang created the Universe and everything. What was it that created the Big Bang originally?What is it that went, Bang?

Our sun is an average star in our galaxy. It is a sphere of burning gas that provides light and heat. It makes our plants grow and allows them to turn carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen.If our sun were to shine a little less or a little more brightly, life as we knew it would not exist. A drop of less than 2% of the sun's energy output would turn Earth into an ice-covered planet.So how much do you know about this glowing sphere that controls our world. Can you answer these...

This book continues our exploration of the most profound theory of science, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. We examine more carefully the properties of spacetime, the unity of space and time. We explore the major features of curvature, how to measure it, and how to reduce its complexity to finding distances between nearby points. We find a simple expression, 2M/r, which proves remarkably helpful as we explore the Schwarzchild metric, black holes, time d...

This treatise offers an alternative paradigm to the 'Big Bang' theory of the origin of the universe. It takes a fresh look at current cosmological knowledge, suggests the existence of and defines a Megamassive Black Hole. The existence of such bodies allows a rational argument for a steady state universe. This paradigm does not require a singularity at a particular moment, arguably the beginning of time, nor expansion at many times the speed of light, or the existence of the Higgs Boson. I...

The physicist and author investigates the 20th century scientific revolution that changed our lives—and how it can go further—in this provocative essay.Much of the modern world we experience day to day has been profoundly transformed by a scientific revolution that began in the early twentieth century. But what has science done for us lately? In This Changes Everything, author and scientist Colin Gillespie suggests that the revolution has barely gotten off...

This book is the second stage of our exploration of Quantum Mechanics in the Everyone’s Guide Series. Readers will benefit from a prior reading of Quantum Mechanics: 1 Particles & Waves. Here, we explore wave packets, the quantum description of particles. We will see how wave packets lead inexorably to the Uncertainty Principle, a hallmark of Quantum Mechanics. We examine the physical and philosophic implications of uncertainty, and whether or not “God plays with dice.” ...

This is one of a planned series called Calculations for Science Fiction Writers. Later chapters will include a relativistic version of this one, and others on circular orbits, elliptical orbits rotational dynamics, and more. For those writers who want to get the details right!This article explains basic calculations related to constant acceleration. It should be of interest to science fiction writers who want to make their stories realistic, and to anyone interested in space travel...