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This book is based on an in-depth conversation between Howard Burton and Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Director of the Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University. This extensive conversation provides a comprehensive account of a marvellous scientific adventure story in the quest for a natural quasicrystal. You will be taken on a fascinating ride through the physics of materials, from theory, to the laboratory, to the discovery of a new state of matter, that culminated in Paul Steinhardt's dramatic Siberian expedition. Paul Steinhardt talks about his encounters with mineral smugglers, secret diaries and quasi-mythical characters during his \"Indiana Jones\" expedition from Florence to Israel, Amsterdam to California, Princeton to Kamchatka which led him to find quasicrystals that are quite literally out of this world...This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, Informed Authority, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. Introducing Quasicrystals - Innovative symmetries through visual disharmoniesII. Building Models - Forcing forbidden symmetriesIII. Out of the Blue - The real world intervenesIV. Competing Explanations - A three-horse raceV. Looking to Nature - Developing a separation algorithmVI. New Year's Delight - Persistence pays offVII. Confronting the Impossible - Encountering rock-hard scepticism VIII. Tracking Khatyrkite - Smoke, mirrors, and the holotype sampleIX. Kamchatka - Closure, and perhaps another beginning X. Passing It On - How to keep the flame of science burning brightlyAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations Series: Presented in an accessible, conversational format, Ideas Roadshow books not only explore frontline academic research featuring world-leading researchers but also reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research.

Neil Turok, chairman of the mathematical-physics department at the University of Cambridge, and Paul J. Steinhardt, physics professor at Princeton University, suggest that the universe is going through a series of rebirths, forever cycling between superhot conflagrations akin to the Big Bang and the cooler cosmos that exists today. In one stroke, the so-called cyclic theory rewrites both the origin and the fate of the universe.

Humanity's ongoing quest to unlock the secrets of dark matter and dark energyHeart of Darkness describes the incredible saga of humankind's quest to unravel the deepest secrets of the universe. Over the past thirty years, scientists have learned that two little-understood components—dark matter and dark energy—comprise most of the known cosmos, explain the growth of all cosmic structure and hold the key to the universe's fate. The story of how evidence for the so-called \"Lambda-Cold Dark Matter\" model of cosmology has been gathered by generations of scientists throughout the world is told here by one of the pioneers of the field, Jeremiah Ostriker, and his coauthor Simon Mitton.From humankind's early attempts to comprehend Earth's place in the solar system, to astronomers' exploration of the Milky Way galaxy and the realm of the nebulae beyond, to the detection of the primordial fluctuations of energy from which all subsequent structure developed, this book explains the physics and the history of how the current model of our universe arose and has passed every test hurled at it by the skeptics. Throughout this rich story, an essential theme is emphasized: how three aspects of rational inquiry—the application of direct measurement and observation, the introduction of mathematical modeling, and the requirement that hypotheses should be testable and verifiable—guide scientific progress and underpin our modern cosmological paradigm.This monumental puzzle is far from complete, however, as scientists confront the mysteries of the ultimate causes of cosmic structure formation and the real nature and origin of dark matter and dark energy.

A new idea by four cosmologists is being called the first credible alternative to the reigning big bang model and its long-standing add-on, inflation. A version of the early universe that explains flatness and isotropy without invoking inflation is discussed.

The model of the universe envisioned by [Paul Steinhardt] and Neil Turok of Cambridge in the journal Science sees the Big Bang as merely a turning point on an infinite road: an endless series of big bangs make the universe expand and an equally endless series of subsequent crunches make it contract.

Don't give up hope. Some physicists suspect that the fate of the universe isn't so certain. Perhaps the universe will turn out to be cyclic after all. Maybe the universe had no beginning -- it has always been around, just bouncing back and forth between bang and crunch. In the current big-bang theory, the universe begins once -- when space and time both burst into existence. Some small patch of the newborn space then \"inflates\" very rapidly for a tiny fraction of a second, creating a hospitable realm for stars, planets and people. That realm continues to expand, forming the visible universe that its inhabitants can observe. For one thing, the physicists point out, the recent observation that the expansion of the universe is speeding up came as a surprise. That acceleration requires some dark repulsive energy that was not in the original recipe for the inflationary expansion. But once you have the dark energy, maybe you can redo the recipe in a way to explain the universe without invoking inflation -- and get repeating cycles as a bonus.

The notion of a cyclical cosmos is not entirely new. Hindu philosophers centuries ago described a universe that went through cycles of birth, death and rebirth every 8.62 billion years, [Paul Steinhardt] said. The time scale was a bit different than that proposed by the modern scientists, and Steinhardt and [Neil Turok] are also proposing some bizarre physics involving a fifth dimension to make their scenario work. Steinhardt and Turok revived the notion of a fiery end, however, by developing a new theory of the origin of the universe. This new picture, announced last April by Steinhardt and University of Pennsylvania physicist Burt Ovrut, does away with one of the more difficult notions inherent in the Big theory: that everything in the observable universe started out packed into a space the size of a pinpoint. At some point, Steinhardt said, the lack of density in our universe will start it all moving toward that other parallel universe again--the one that helped get it all started. Eventually our universe will collide with it, with the impact destroying all remaining matter in our universe and kicking off a whole new cycle.

[Paul Steinhardt] favors a variable energy strength, maintained by an elusive cosmic fluid that he calls quintessence. A constant repulsive force would present serious problems. For one thing, it would be hard to explain why the strength of a constant repulsion would have been too low to prevent galaxy formation in the early universe but too high to allow galaxies to form today.

  \"There are lots of ways for nothing to produce something,\" said [Lawrence Krauss], who wrote \"The Physics of Star Trek.\" Nothing can even give rise to a whole lot of something, as he described in \"A Universe From Nothing.\" The big difference between cosmology and religion, said Krauss, is that scientists are willing to change their minds. \"That's part of the process of science,\" he said. \"It's to keep questioning, to find out.\" You could call belief in science a faith, he said, \"but it's a shakable faith -- that's what makes science so wonderful.\" \"A universe coming from nothing is the way it seems to be. That shouldn't take away from our sense of meaning or wonder or awe,\" Krauss said. \"It should add to it.\"

WATERLOO, ON, Feb. 27 /CNW/ - The evidence that the universe emerged 14 billion years ago from an event called 'the Big Bang' is overwhelming. Yet the cause of this event remains deeply mysterious. In the conventional picture, the 'initial singularity' is unexplained. It is simply assumed that the universe somehow sprang into existence full of 'inflationary' energy, blowing up the universe into the large, smooth state we observe today. While this picture is in excellent agreement with current observations, it is both contrived and incomplete, leading us to suspect that it is not the final word. With Stephen Hawking, he later developed the Hawking-Turok instanton solutions describing the birth of inflationary universes. Most recently, with [Paul Steinhardt] at Princeton, he has been developing a cyclic model for cosmology, according to which the big bang is explained as a collision between two \"brane-worlds\" in M- theory. In 2006, Steinhardt and [Neil Turok] showed how the model could naturally incorporate a mechanism for relaxing the cosmological constant to very small values, consistent with current observations. Steinhardt and Turok cowrote the recent popular science book \"Endless Universe.\"