Published annually, Sky Guide Southern Africa  is a practical resource for all stargazers, whether novice, amateur or professional. It highlights the cosmic events for each month of the upcoming year, including planetary movements, predicted eclipses and meteor showers.
 
Star charts plot the evening sky for each season, facilitating the identification of stars and constellations. The guide contains a wealth of information about the Sun, Moon, planets, comets, meteors and bright stars, and includes photos, diagrams, charts and images.
 
The most trusted guide to the southern skies.

Take a look through the lens and discover the beauty and science of the magnificent night sky - and beyond!

This stunningly-illustrated space book is split into eight sections that cover every aspect of astronomy. Learn about the history of discoveries in the field and astronomical phenomena, from the earliest human civilizations to the present day, and then take a lavish visual tour of the Solar System, complete with the most spectacular photographs of the planets.

A magnificent month-by-month guide to the night sky, with profiles of all 88 constellations, over 100 star charts covering both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and an almanac of astronomical events over the next decade, Astronomy: A Visual Guide will help you to navigate your way around the night sky, and locate stars, galaxies, and other objects.

Soar into the pages of this spectacular space book to reveal:

• All 88 constellations with over 100 star charts and a guide to the latest space-observing equipment.
• Groundbreaking discoveries and the most awe-inspiring images of the universe.
• Written by Ian Ridpath, the editor of Norton's Star Atlas.
• Includes a 10-year calendar of celestial events such as eclipses and comet appearances.

Also featuring no-nonsense advice on how to observe the skies using the naked eye, binoculars, and telescopes, Astronomy: A Visual Guide is the perfect guide for keen amateur astronomers, as well as a great reference book for the whole family.

Award-winning University of Oxford researcher Dr Becky Smethurst charts five hundred years of scientific breakthroughs in astronomy and astrophysics.

Right now, you are orbiting a black hole.

The Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole, the strangest and most misunderstood phenomenon in the galaxy.

In this cosmic tale of discovery, Dr Becky Smethurst takes us from the earliest observations of the universe and the collapse of massive stars, to the iconic first photographs of a black hole and her own published findings.

A cosmic tale of discovery, Becky explains why black holes aren’t really ‘black’, that you never ever want to be ‘spaghettified’, how black holes are more like sofa cushions than hoovers and why, beyond the event horizon, the future is a direction in space rather than in time. Told with humour and wisdom, this captivating book describes the secrets behind the most profound questions about our universe, all hidden inside black holes.

A brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century—the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism—being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.

At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms.

In The End of Reality¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (“The Four”) —and shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, the enormous amount of taxpayer money to be funneled into the dystopian ventures of "The Four," the benefits of which will accrue to billionaires, exacerbate these disturbing trends.

The End of Reality is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of "The Four" with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.

Many regard Albert Einstein as the greatest physicist since Newton. What exactly did he do that is so important in physics? We provide an introduction to his physics at a level accessible to an undergraduate physics student. All equations are worked out in detail from the beginning. Einstein's doctoral thesis and his Brownian motion paper were decisive contributions to our understanding of matter as composed of molecules and atoms. Einstein was one of the founding fathers of quantum theory: his photon proposal through the investigation of blackbody radiation, his quantum theory of photoelectric effect and specific heat, his calculation of radiation fluctuation giving the first statement of wave-particle duality, his introduction of probability in the description of quantum radiative transitions, and finally the quantum statistics and Bose-Einstein condensation. Einstein's special theory of relativity gave us the famous E=mc(2) relation and the new kinematics leading to the idea of the 4-dimensional spacetime as the arena in which physical events take place. Einstein's geometric theory of gravity, general relativity, extends Newton's theory to time-dependent and strong gravitational fields. It laid the ground work for the study of black holes and cosmology. This is a physics book with material presented in the historical context. We do not stop at Einstein's discovery, but carry the discussion onto some of the later advances: Bell's theorem, quantum field theory, gauge theories and Kaluza-Klein unification in a spacetime with an extra spatial dimension. Accessibility of the material to a modern-day reader is the goal of our presentation. Although the book is written with primarily a physics readership in mind (it can also function as a textbook), enough pedagogical support material is provided that anyone with a solid background in introductory physics can, with some effort, understand a good part of this presentation.

Throughout history, people have tried to construct 'theories of everything': highly ambitious attempts to understand nature in its totality. This account presents these theories in their historical contexts, from little known hypotheses from the past to modern developments such as the theory of superstrings, the anthropic principle and ideas of many universes, and uses them to problematize the limits of scientific knowledge. Do claims to theories of everything belong to science at all? Which are the epistemic standards on which an alleged scientific theory of the universe - or the multiverse - is to be judged?
Such questions are currently being discussed by physicists and cosmologists, but rarely within a historical perspective. This book argues that these questions have a history and that knowledge of the historical development of 'higher speculations' may inform and qualify the current debate of the nature and limits of scientific explanation.

The Universal Force conveys the excitement of science and nature's mysteries. It describes gravitation as seen by examining the achievements of those great scientists who have struggled with the seemingly simple facts and managed to extract some truth about the nature of gravity, its origins, and its effects. Gravity is intimately tied up with motion, and therefore with time and space, and is responsible for planetary systems, the evolution of stars and the existence of black holes and the very beginning of the Universe. It is the universal force and to look at gravity is to look at the deepest aspects of nature.
The historical context from Aristotle's teleology through Galileo's conflict with the Church, to Newton's law, and Einstein's curved space, displays the evolution of the science of gravity as one of the greatest and most fascinating human achievements.
Contrary to popular opinion, all important science can be understood by anyone, with or without a scientific background! This book shows that the beauty and mysteries of science can be shared with everyone.

This book is aimed at students making the transition from a first course on general relativity to a specialized subfield. It presents a variety of topics under the general headings of gravitational waves in vacuo and in a cosmological setting, equations of motion, and black holes, all having a clear physical relevance and a strong emphasis on space-time geometry. Each chapter could be used as a basis for an early postgraduate project for those who are exploring avenues into research in general relativity and who have already accumulated the required technical knowledge. The presentation of each chapter is research monograph style, rather than text book style, in order to impress on interested students the need to present their research in a clear and concise format. Students with advanced preparation in general relativity theory might find a treasure trove here.

Semiconductor sensors patterned at the micron scale combined with custom-designed integrated circuits have revolutionized semiconductor radiation detector systems. Designs covering many square meters with million of signal channels are now commonplace in high-energy physics and the technology is finding its way into many other fields, ranging from astrophysics to experiments at synchrotron light sources and medical imaging. This book is the first to present a comprehensive discussion of the many facets of highly integrated semiconductor detectors systems, covering sensors, signal processing, transistors, and circuits, low-noise electronics, and radiation effects. The diversity of design approaches is illustrated in a chapter describing systems in high-energy physics, astronomy, and astrophysics. Finally, a chapter "Why Things Don't Work" discusses common pitfalls. Profusely illustrated, this book includes comprehensive discussions of sensors, signal processing, and electronics. Including fine tutorial material, it provides a unique reference in a key area of modern science.

General Relativity has passed all experimental and observational tests to model the motion of isolated bodies with strong gravitational fields, though the mathematical and numerical study of these motions is still in its infancy. It is believed that General Relativity models our cosmos, with a manifold of dimensions possibly greater than four and debatable topology opening a vast field of investigation for mathematicians and physicists alike. Remarkable conjectures have been proposed, many results have been obtained but many fundamental questions remain open. In this monograph, aimed at researchers in mathematics and physics, the author overviews the basic ideas in General Relativity, introduces the necessary mathematics and discusses some of the key open questions in the field.

Einstein's general theory of relativity is introduced in this advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate level textbook. Topics include special relativity, in the formalism of Minkowski's four-dimensional space-time, the principle of equivalence, Riemannian geometry and tensor analysis, Einstein field equation, as well as many modern cosmological subjects, from primordial inflation and cosmic microwave anisotropy to the dark energy that propels an accelerating universe.
The author presents the subject with an emphasis on physical examples and simple applications without the full tensor apparatus. The reader first learns how to describe curved spacetime. At this mathematically more accessible level, the reader can already study the many interesting phenomena such as gravitational lensing, precession of Mercury's perihelion, black holes, and cosmology. The full tensor formulation is presented later, when the Einstein equation is solved for a few symmetric cases. Many modern topics in cosmology are discussed in this book: from inflation, cosmic microwave anisotropy to the "dark energy" that propels an accelerating universe.
Mathematical accessibility, together with the various pedagogical devices (e.g., worked-out solutions of chapter-end problems), make it practical for interested readers to use the book to study general relativity and cosmology on their own.

This book introduces the modern field of 3+1 numerical relativity. The book has been written in a way as to be as self-contained as possible, and only assumes a basic knowledge of special relativity. Starting from a brief introduction to general relativity, it discusses the different concepts and tools necessary for the fully consistent numerical simulation of relativistic astrophysical systems, with strong and dynamical gravitational fields. Among the topics discussed in detail are the following; the initial data problem, hyperbolic reductions of the field equations, guage conditions, the evolution of black hole space-times, relativistic hydrodynamics, gravitational wave extraction and numerical methods. There is also a final chapter with examples of some simple numerical space-times. The book is aimed at both graduate students and researchers in physics and astrophysics, and at those interested in relativistic astrophysics.

General Relativity is a beautiful geometric theory, simple in its mathematical formulation but leading to numerous consequences with striking physical interpretations: gravitational waves, black holes, cosmological models, and so on. This introductory textbook is written for mathematics students interested in physics and physics students interested in exact mathematical formulations (or for anyone with a scientific mind who is curious to know more of the world we live in), recent remarkable experimental and observational results which confirm the theory are clearly described and no specialised physics knowledge is required. The mathematical level of Part A is aimed at undergraduate students and could be the basis for a course on General Relativity. Part B is more advanced, but still does not require sophisticated mathematics. Based on Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat's more advanced text, General Relativity and the Einstein Equations, the aim of this book is to give with precision, but as simply as possible, the foundations and main consequences of General Relativity. The first five chapters from General Relativity and the Einstein Equations have been updated with new sections and chapters on black holes, gravitational waves, singularities, and the Reissner-Nordstroem and interior Schwarzchild solutions. The rigour behind this book will provide readers with the perfect preparation to follow the great mathematical progress in the actual development, as well as the ability to model, the latest astrophysical and cosmological observations. The book presents basic General Relativity and provides a basis for understanding and using the fundamental theory.

For thousands of years, one scientific puzzle has fascinated and perplexed the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, and psychologists - why do the moon and sun appear so much larger on the horizon than when high up in the sky? Now, two leading psychologists have provided a compelling account of this fascinating illusion. Taking us through the history, the characters involved, the attempts made to explain the illusion, through to modern day studies of visual perception, the book is the most comprehensive account of this puzzle so far. This is a work which will remain, for some time to come, the definitive book on a mystery that has fascinated and tested the greatest minds throughout the ages. Accessibly written, it will appeal to readers of popular science, along with those within the disciplines of psychology, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, from undergraduate upwards.

The emphasis of Planetary Atmospheres is on comparative aspects of planetary atmospheres, generally meaning comparison with the Earth, including atmospheric composition, thermal structure, cloud properties, dynamics, weather and climate, and aeronomy. The goal is to look for common processes at work under different boundary conditions in order to reach a fundamental understanding of the physics of atmospheres. As part of a general Physics course, the material is chosen to emphasise certain aspects that will be of broad topical interest:
- evolutionary processes, setting the Earth in its context as a planet and a member of the Solar System
- the properties of atmospheres that affect the climate near the surface of each planet
- measurement techniques and models, where the same experimental and theoretical physics is applied under different conditions to investigate and explain atmospheric behaviour.
These might be thought of as the astronomical, environmental, and technical sides of the discipline respectively.
The book covers the basic physics of planetary atmospheres in a single text for students or anyone interested in this area of science. The approach is the same as in the author's previous book Elementary Climate Physics: an overview, followed by more detailed discussion of key topics arranged by physical phenomenon and not planet by planet as usually found in this field. There is an emphasis on acquiring and interpreting measurements, and the basic physics of instruments and models, with key definitions and some historical background in footnotes and in the glossary at the end of the book.

Understand the phases of the moon, learn to navigate by the North Star and discover how to travel through space and time from your own window in this book which uncovers how humankind has its history woven into the constellations that light up our skies. Written by NASA science writer Noelia González and fully illustrated by Sara Boccaccini Meadows, this is the perfect introduction to the night sky for families everywhere.

The theory of relativity convinced many philosophers that space and time are fundamentally alike, and that they are mere aspects of a more fundamental space-time. In The Nature of Time, Ulrich Meyer argues against this consensus view. Instead of a 'spatial' account of time that treats instants like positions in space, he presents the first comprehensive defense of a 'modal' account that emphasizes the similarities between times and the possible worlds in modal logic. Modal accounts of time are naturally cast in terms of a tense logic that accounts for temporal distinctions in terms of primitive tense operators. Tense logic was originally developed to provide a linguistic theory of verb tense in natural languages, but here Meyer proposes that it can be treated as a metaphysical theory of the nature of time. Contrary to popular belief, such modal accounts of time do not commit us to the view that there is something metaphysically special about the present moment, and they are easily reconciled with the theory of relativity.

Beat the boredom and take time out from screens with this pocket-sized book packed with facts, photos and fantastic spots for hours of fun! Kids will have fun collecting points in the night sky with more than 140 things to find. From stars and constellations to the moon and eclipses, they'll learn all about our galaxy and the sky at night. And once they've scored 1000 points, super-spotters can claim their official i-SPY certificate and badge. With more than 30 i-SPY books to collect, there's something for everyone! For even more fun outdoors check out i-SPY Nature (ISBN 9780008386467).

Building on a long tradition of effective pedagogy and comprehensive coverage, The Cosmic Perspective, Seventh Edition provides a thoroughly engaging and up-to-date introduction to astronomy for non-science majors. The text provides a wealth of features that enhance student skill-building, including new group work exercises that engage students in active learning, helping them retain concepts longer and build communication skills for the future. The Seventh Edition has also been fully updated to include the latest astronomical observations, results from recent space missions, and new theoretical developments that inform our understanding of the early universe. This text is also available in two volumes, which can be purchased separately: * The Cosmic Perspective: The Solar System, Seventh Edition (includes Chapters 1-13, 24) * The Cosmic Perspective: Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmology, Seventh Edition (includes Chapters 1-6, S2-S4, 14-24)

This book is a history of the development of mathematical astronomy in China, from the late third century BCE, to the early 3rd century CE - a period often referred to as 'early imperial China'. It narrates the changes in ways of understanding the movements of the heavens and the heavenly bodies that took place during those four and a half centuries, and tells the stories of the institutions and individuals involved in those changes. It gives clear explanations of technical practice in observation, instrumentation, and calculation, and the steady accumulation of data over many years - but it centres on the activity of the individual human beings who observed the heavens, recorded what they saw, and made calculations to analyse and eventually make predictions about the motions of the celestial bodies. It is these individuals, their observations, their calculations, and the words they left to us that provide the narrative thread that runs through this work. Throughout the book, the author gives clear translations of original material that allow the reader direct access to what the people in this book said about themselves and what they tried to do.