Download The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe AudioBook Free

With this deeply original publication, science copy writer Anil Ananthaswamy sets out searching for the telescopes and detectors that offer to answer the biggest questions in modern cosmology. How come the universe expanding at an ever before faster rate? What is the type of the "dark subject" which makes up almost a quarter of the world? Why does the universe seem fine-tuned for life? Are there others besides our own?

Ananthaswamy soon sees himself at the ends of the globe—in distant and sometimes dangerous places. Take the Atacama Desert in the Chilean Andes, one of the coldest, driest places on earth, where not a cutter of grass can survive. Its spectacularly clear skies and dry atmosphere allow astronomers to assemble excellent images of galaxies vast amounts of light-years away. Ananthaswamy takes us inside the Western european Southern Observatory’s LARGE Telescope on Support Paranal, where four significant domes available to the sky every night "like dragons waking up."

He also takes us deep inside an abandoned flat iron mine in Minnesota, where half-mile-thick rock and roll shields physicists as they hunt for elusive dark subject particles. Also to the East Antarctic Glaciers Sheet, where technicians are drilling 1.5 miles into the clearest ice on earth. They’re building the world’s major neutrino detector, that could finally help reconcile quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of basic relativity.

The stories of folks who work at these and other dramatic research sites—from Lake Baikal in Siberia to the Indian Astronomical Observatory in the Himalayas to the subterranean lair of the top Hadron Collider—lead to a engaging new portrait of the world and our mission to understand it. An atmospheric, interesting, and illuminating read, The Border of Physics depicts science as a individuals process, taking cosmology back down to globe in the most vibrant terms.