A leading astronomer takes readers behind the scenes of the thrilling science of stellar archaeology and explains how sections of the night sky are "excavated" in the hunt for extremely rare, 13-billion-year-old relic stars and how this quest reveals tantalizing new details about the origins and evolution of the cosmos.

In this meditation on religion and science, Lightman explores the tension between our yearning for permanence and certainty, and the modern scientific discoveries that demonstrate the impermanent and uncertain nature of the world. As a physicist, he has always held a scientific view of the world. But one summer evening, while looking at the stars from a small boat at sea he was overcome by the sensation that he was merging with a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute and immaterial. This is his exploration of these seemingly contradictory impulses, and the journey along the different paths of religion and science that become part of his quest. -- adapted from publisher info.

This work chronicles the history of China for over four hundred years through the spring of 1989.

In Search of Stardust is the first comprehensive popular science book about micrometeorites. It's illustrated with 1,500 previously unpublished images from high-resolution color microscopes and scanning electron microscopes.

The book attempts to present a new perspective to its readers for looking self and surrounding world. It tries to tell that we humans, all living beings and all non living things, moon, planets, stars, galaxies are made of the same matter particles. How everything is cosmically connected? How all matter, all space, all energy has been formed during the cosmic evolution? What are different ways to decipher such understanding? What are the scientific principles, laws and theories which help in explaining and understanding them? What are the tools and techniques which enable us to look, to experience and to test them? How vast is the universe and how small and insignificant we are? In short, the book provides a cosmic perspective for self realization to mankind. The Bhagavad Gita mentions one of the paths for salvation as Gyan Yoga (the path of knowledge for self realization). This book is a step forward in that direction. While giving brief account of cosmos, the book tries to soften human ego and expects its readers to keep our earthly differences aside and realize our cosmic connection.

Look for Freddie and his friends, surrounded by a variety of zany people and objects, in many interesting settings. Each scene includes a list of objects and characters to find.

The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way. Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands. Alongside the photographs, Sussman relays fascinating – and sometimes harrowing – tales of her global adventures tracking down her subjects and shares insights from the scientists who research them. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future.