How did a single "genesis event" create billions of galaxies, black holes, stars and planets? How did atoms assemble -- here on earth, and perhaps on other worlds -- into living beings intricate enough to ponder their origins? What fundamental laws govern our universe?This book describes new discoveries and offers remarkable insights into these fundamental questions. There are deep connections between stars and atoms, between the cosmos and the microworld....

Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, a former director of the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy and author, most recently, of the bestselling Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe. Our universe seems strangely ''biophilic,'' or hospitable to life. Is this happenstance, providence, or coincidence? According to cosmologist Martin Rees, the answer depends on the answer to another...

A tale of eighteenth-century invention and competition, commerce and conflict, this is a lively, illustrated, and accurate chronicle of the search to solve the longitude problem, the question of how to determine a ships position at seaand one that changed the history of mankind. Ships, Clocks, and Stars brings into focus one of our greatest scientific stories: the search to accurately measure a ships position at sea. The incredible, illustrated volume...