Astronomy articles — For more on inflation, read Adam Frank’s “Seeing the dawn of time” (August 2005). Steve Nadis wrote about a leading cosmologist in “The lost years of Michael Turner” (April 2004).
Print — Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (Knopf, 2004) and The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (W. W. Norton, 1999) touch on branes and quantum weirdness.
The PBS science show NOVA ran a three-part series based on The Elegant Universe; you’ll find more information about the show at www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant.
David Deutsch, a member of the Quantum Computation and Cryptography Research Group at Oxford University’s Clarendon Laboratory, wrote about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics in The Fabric of Reality (Penguin Press, 1997).
Web — David Deutsch wrote “The structure of the multiverse,” a paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society in 2002. In it, he explains how information flow in the multiverse determines its structure — especially what appear to be parallel universes. It’s available at xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0104033. You can also visit his web site at www.qubit.org/people/david/index.php?path=Home.
University of Waterloo, Ontario, philosopher Steven Weinstein discusses “Anthropic reasoning in multiverse cosmology and string theory” in a scholarly but accessible 2005 paper at philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002388.
David Langlois of the Institute for Astrophysics in Paris gave an invited review talk on “Cosmology in a brane universe” at a 2002 workshop on the cosmology of extra dimensions. A version of this talk is available at arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0301022.
Steve Nadis profiled cosmologists Alan Guth, Paul Steinhardt, Andrei Linde, and Alexander Vilenkin in the Online Extra associated with his April 2002 article, “Cosmic inflation comes of age” at www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=1118.
Web — The WMAP site, map.gsfc.nasa.gov, has everything from the satellite’s technical specifications to cosmology 101 to papers concerning the first data release. And, of course, it has the unmistakable sky map.
University of Chicago astrophysicist Sean Carroll has an online book about cosmology at pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/cfcp/primer.
Web — For more on CSL-1, see astronomer Giuseppe Longo’s Cosmic Strings web page at people.na.infn.it/~longo/Ricerca/Cosmic_strings/Cosmic%20strings.htm. A good introductory article on the topic is available at people.na.infn.it/~longo/Ricerca/Cosmic_strings/Articoli/PedeStr.pdf.
Astronomy articles — Ray Jayawardhana explored black holes in June 2002’s “Beyond black.” In the same issue, Princeton University physicist Edward Wittten asked if advances in string theory will explain dark matter and dark energy in “Universe on a string.”
Print — See Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam Press, 2001) and Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps (W. W. Norton, 1994) for surveys of the topics in the article.
Web — For a complete introduction to NASA’s Beyond Einstein program, including videos, presentations, and mission fact sheets, visit the program’s web site at universe.nasa.gov.
In May 2004, Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Laboratory held a conference called “Beyond Einstein: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.” Papers and presentations given at the conference are available at www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/einstein.
Does the solar system distort our view of the cosmic microwave background? Dan Falk discussed this issue in “Anomalies of the CMB” on Astronomy.com at www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=2640.
Print — James Kaler’s Stars (Scientific American Library, 1992) provides a concise introduction to stellar spectroscopy and its history.
Web — Fly among the stars with Celestia, a free, open-source desktop planetarium program available for computers running the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems. Learn more at the program’s site: www.shatters.net/celestia.
For technical details on the Voyager spacecraft, as well as press-release images and raw data, visit The Voyager Mission at pds-rings.arc.nasa.gov/voyager/.
