Debbie TenBrink grew up on a farm in West Michigan, where her family has lived for over 150 years. She still lives within five miles of her childhood home with her husband, four children, and dog, Mojo (who is the only real-life character in her book).She has a Master’s degree in career and technical education, and she taught computer classes in two local colleges before beginning her current career as a software specialist for a law firm. In her free time, Debbie enjoys camping, hiking, sports, and any other activity she can use as an excuse to spend time in the great outdoors. Other hobbies include reading (of course), having long conversations with the characters living in her head, and an almost frightening interest in true crime TV shows. Her passion for writing began in childhood with short stories and poetry, and she can’t remember a time when she didn’t know that she would someday write a novel.

The universe has many secrets. It may hide additional dimensions of space other than the familier three we recognize. There might even be another universe adjacent to ours, invisible and unattainable . . . for now. Warped Passages is a brilliantly readable and altogether exhilarating journey that tracks the arc of discovery from early twentieth-century physics to the razor's edge of modern scientific theory. One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lisa Randall provides astonishing scientific possibilities that, until recently, were restricted to the realm of science fiction. Unraveling the twisted threads of the most current debates on relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity, she explores some of the most fundamental questions posed by Nature—taking us into the warped, hidden dimensions underpinning the universe we live in, demystifying the science of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond our own.

String theory is a model of fundamental physics whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects called strings, rather than the zero-dimensional point particles that form the basis for the standard model of particle physics. The phrase is often used as shorthand for Superstring theory, as well as related theories such as M-theory. By replacing the point-like particles with strings, an apparently consistent quantum theory of gravity emerges. Moreover, it may be possible to 'unify' the known natural forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear) by describing them with the same set of equations. Studies of string theory have revealed that it predicts higher-dimensional objects called branes. String theory strongly suggests the existence of ten or eleven (in M-theory) space-time dimensions, as opposed to the usual four (three spatial and one temporal) used in relativity theory.

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?

The author wrote the book to re-examine his encounter with God from a modern philosophical and humanities standpoint, and his "God" as seen by a doctor in his 50s contains the author's worries and exploratory journeys that have accumulated over the past 30 years.