Your Place In The Universe

Your Place in the Universe:
Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence
Paul M. Sutter
Prometheus Books

Some things I learned from Your Place in the Universe by Paul M. Sutter (a cosmologist from Ohio State University):

1. The universe is not "infinitely" large, but it's so dang big it just might as well be! And it's approximately 13.8 billion years old, although it's hard to know if time worked the same way back when or will work the same way as it does now in the future.

2. We can see, taste, touch, smell, hear, and experience only about 5% of what all makes up the universe. About 30% of the remainder is called "dark matter" and it's what fills the vacuums/voids we see when we look out into the cosmos.

3. About 70% of what we can't directly experience is called "dark energy" and it's what is speeding up the galaxies as they speed away from each other. Yes, there's no speed limit in the universe because of dark energy. Light has a speed limit and it's possibly our speed limit when it comes to interstellar travel, but the universe itself is just getting faster the older it gets.

4. This means that, although we like to think of gravity as being strong enough to pull things like galaxies back into another "Big Bang," the odds of this happening are extremely low to non-existent. But this is still a theory, and who knows? There still isn't a "Grand Unifying Theory" or "GUT" that ties gravity to the electromagnetic, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. And how do we account and explain for dark energy in a GUT? (We don't--or at least we haven't yet.)

5. And for all we can observe of the "observable universe" we can only conjecture that the "universe is flat." Sutter doesn't go into the "holographic universe" idea, but he does explain why we can only say that the observable universe if "flat"--it's just too dang big to see enough of it to determine whether or not it does have a shape of any kind with our limited three (or four, counting time) dimensions.

6. My idea is that we can only experience a "flat universe" because we can't directly experience or conceptualize a more than four dimensional universe with our very limited four dimensional brains. (I have read about how a GUT will work mathematically with up to 17 dimensions, so there you go!)

7. Most of all, I learned that I wish I had taken more astronomy and physics courses in high school and college because it's such a fascinating subject, isn't it? 

Apollo: The Race To The Moon

Apollo: The Race To The Moon
Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox
Simon and Schuster
Purchase Link

You never know what rare gem you'll find on a old bookshelf. Apollo: The Race To The Moon is one such find. Published in 1989, it's still an excellent history of the Apollo program from its inception to its unfortunate early demise after the return of Apollo 17. For space history nuts like me, it's definitely a must-read. For anyone remotely interested in how the American "space race" began and the politics, organizational challenges and personalities involved, it is well worth it.

The men (and they were mostly white males, alas) who were tasked with fulfilling Kennedy's vision of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely within the decade" were of a different breed. Driven, dedicated, single-minded, innovative, dynamic--you can't come up with enough positive adjectives to describe them. They started with little to nothing and had to invent an organization to build launch, mission and recovery systems to meet a seemingly unreachable goal in a very short period of time. 

We get to know the personalities that have become synonymous with Apollo and the space program--Max Faget, Jim Webb, Joe Shea, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft, Werner Von Braun, among others. We feel their stress, their fears, their challenges. It was a time period and a place where the objective was more important than any one flight controller, scientist, astronaut, engineer or technician.

The Apollo program was truly  a time of team spirit and self-sacrifice for the good of the whole. Americans will probably never experience such an intense time period  to obtain such a lofty goal ever again.

Filled with fantastic facts, intriguing insights and introspective interviews, Apollo: The Race To The Moon will make you ask the pertinent question Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell once asked: "When are we going back?"

Rating: 4+ sushi rolls