Too Far From Home

Title: Too Far From Home

Author: Chris Jones

Pages: 304

Genre: Non-Fiction, Science

Grade: B+

Synopsis: When the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated on its return to earth there were three astronauts orbiting the earth in the International Space Station.  Once the disaster struck nobody knew for a long time how or when these men would get home. This book focuses on the lives, careers and time spent in space of the Americans Don Petit and Ken Bowersox and the Russian Nikolai Budarin.  At the time, the International Space Station was fairly new, as was spending long amounts of time in space.  It was supposed to be a routine 14 week mission, which turned out to be much longer.

My Review: It took me a while to really get into this book, and it took me longer than I would have liked to finish it, but I did enjoy it.  It's not really a thriller, but it is centered around events that most of us probably remember.

An Inconvenient Truth

Title: An Inconvenient Truth

Author: Al Gore

Pages: 328

Genre: Science (or is it science fiction?)

Grade: A-

Synopsis: This book is about "the planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it."  The book is a companion piece to the documentary by the same name.  The contents within the book are pulled from a series of multimedia presentations that Al Gore has been giving to groups and governments for many years.

My Review: [Disclaimer: I fully subscribe to the science of human caused global warming...] I was excited to come across this book at the DI or a garage sale (I don't remember which).  This book was an easy read with lots of photographs, graphs and diagrams outlining the global warming crisis.  I have not seen the documentary, but the book felt like it was rushed to print in order to be a companion piece to the film.  The material in the book is quite convincing and presented in an easy-to-digest way, I find it very unfortunate that such a topic has been twisted into a political discussion, when the science should be able to stand on its own.

Physics of the Impossible

Title: Physics of the Impossible

Author: Michio Kaku

Pages: 7 discs?

Genre: Non-fiction, Science

Grade: B

Synopsis: Over the last 100 years, there have been many technological advancements that physicists prior would have deemed utterly impossible.  The author, Michio Kaku, explores many science fiction ideas and categorizes them in three categories: possible in the next 100 years, next 1,000 years, or that our understanding of the physical and atomic world would need to change in order for an idea to be possible.  He examines ideas ranging from invisibility and telekinesis to teleportation, space travel and time travel.

My Review:  While the book was interesting, I've never been that enthralled by some of the science fiction ideas that were being explored, so the book didn't grab me like it may others.  There were parts that were more interesting than others, and I think the content is pretty solid (Kaku is a Theoretical physicist with degrees from Harvard and Cal, and now teaching at the City College of New York).  That said, there is a lot of interesting advancements that may take place over the next 100+ years.

A Brief History of Time

Title: A Brief History of Time (Illustrated Version)

Author: Stephen Hawking

Pages: 248

Genre: Science

Grade: B+

Synopsis: This book covers complex topics that are typically discussed in college courses on Modern Physics (such as the course I took at the University of Utah). The famous physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffers from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), has a knack for explaining difficult topics in a way that the general population can understand (or at least grasp an idea of the concept). Topics covered in the book include Galileo and gravity, Newtonian physics, Maxwell's equations (which govern the study of electromagnetics), the Doppler effect, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Einstein's theories of relativity, black holes, wormholes, time travel and lengthy discussions of the origin and fate of the universe.

My Review: While I've taken various classes that have covered many of these topics, I found Hawking's explanations and the diagrams to be very helpful in understanding everything. I don't think that I would have enjoyed the non-illustrated version of the book as much as I enjoyed the illustrated version. The book can get a little boring at times, but for the most part it held my attention fairly well.

From the Book: "(p. 2) A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At teh end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever, " said the old lady. "But it turtles all the way down!"

"(p. 48) In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars."

"(p. 62) Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible."