Word: cosmically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tightly packed, free-ranging electrons created a dense fog that kept light from shining: the universe was hellishly hot, but utterly dark. Finally, the electrons were incorporated into atoms, and the light broke free in a gigantic flash. Astronomers can still see that ancient light, known as the cosmic background radiation, although it has cooled to about -270 degrees C (-454 degrees F) and is visible only to sensitive radio telescopes...
...universe that had slightly higher density when the light broke free -- the areas that later accreted under gravity to form the galaxies and clusters -- should be detectable as slightly warmer regions of the background radiation. Yet the radiation has been analyzed in detail -- most recently by the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite -- and its temperature is utterly uniform. Meanwhile, powerful telescopes have revealed unexpected agglomerations of galaxies tens of millions of light-years across. How could such giant structures have arisen from the smooth-textured aftermath of the Big Bang...
...exuberant intellectual fleeing Yale for the greener pastures of baseball, who dominates the book, as Reston paints a complex portrait of a flawed but fascinating administrator a bit too taken with his own public image. Still, Reston indulges in too much quotation of Giamatti's orotund utterances on the cosmic meaning of baseball and provides too little insight into the off-the-field politics of the game itself...
Still, says Gott, "it is an ingenious concept, and it got me thinking about other ways you might achieve time travel." Gott's idea is simpler than Thorne's. No black holes, no wormholes -- just a spaceship traveling at near light speed, and a peculiar object called a cosmic string. Like wormholes, cosmic strings may or may not exist; they are at present just theoretical constructs...
...those that describe the energy fields of the very early universe, shortly after the Big Bang. Under the right circumstances, physicists believe, very long, very thin strings of pure energy might have survived in their original state rather than cooling off with the rest of the universe. These cosmic strings would be infinitesimally thin but unbelievably dense, with a thousand trillion tons of mass for every inch of length. The enormous mass would warp the region around a cosmic string so that space itself would act like a distorting lens. Two light rays from a single source -- a star...