The One Thing You Need to Know

The Simple Way to Understand the Most Important Ideas in Science

Marcus Chown

• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781789294804
• eBook ISBN: 9781789294828
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Physical & Theoretical Chemistry

From gravity to black holes, special relativity to global warming, this authoritative and entertaining book from bestselling author Marcus Chown breaks down complex science into manageable chunks, explaining the one thing you really need to know to get to grips with the subject. Rather than trying to bend your mind around all the vast and confounding details of things such as gravitational waves, electricity and black holes, wouldn't it be easier to understand just one central concept from which everything else follows?If you've ever found yourself fascinated by the idea of quantum computing but feel a little overwhelmed by the mindblowing subject of quantum mechanics or concerned by climate change but haven't been able to get to grips with the details of global warming, this book is for you. Let's take atoms, for example – what on earth are they? Well, if you start to think of them less like things you can't see with complex little nuclei and more like the alphabet of nature, which in different configurations can make a rose, a galaxy or a newborn baby, they might start to feel a little more understandable. Or gravitational waves – they sound poetic, but why are they creating so much excitement? Think of them as the voice of space, vibrations on the drumskin of space-time – before delving into all their complexities. In twenty-one short and engaging chapters, Chown explains the one thing you need to know to understand some of the most important scientific ideas of our time. Packed full of astounding facts, scientific history and the entertaining personalities at the heart of the most pivotal discoveries about the workings of our universe, this is an accessible guide to all the tricky stuff you've always wanted to understand more about.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Marcus Chown
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1: Gravity – Every piece of matter exerts an attractive force on every other piece of matter
• 2: Electricity – By exploiting a force 10,000 billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity we power the world
• 3: Global Warming – Molecules like carbon dioxide absorb heat radiated by the Earth’s surface and trap it in the atmosphere
• 4: Why The Sun is Hot – It contains a lot of mass
• 5: The Second Law of Thermodynamics – There are many more ways for things to be disordered than ordered, so if each is equally likely, order will gradually morph into disorder
• 6: Plate Tectonics – The Earth’s crust is fractured like crazy paving into plates, which rising magma causes to jostle with each other
• 7: Quantum Theory – Particles can behave as waves and waves can behave as particles
• 8: Atoms – They are the alphabet of nature and, by arranging them in different ways, it is possible to make a rose or a galaxy or a newborn baby
• 9: Evolution – Traits which enable organisms to compete successfully for scarce food resources, and so survive to reproduce, become more common with each successive generation
• 10: Special Relativity – Light is uncatchable
• 11: The Brain – The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves
• 12: General Relativity – Gravity is acceleration
• 13: Human Evolution – Three words characterize humans and their ancestors: migration, migration, migration
• 14: Black Holes – A sufficiently concentrated mass creates a bottomless pit in space-time from which nothing, not even light, can escape
• 15: The Standard Model – The complexity of the world stems from the permutations of just three fundamental building blocks glued together with three fundamental forces
• 16: Quantum Computers – They either exploit copies of themselves in parallel universes or behave as if they do
• 17: Gravitational Waves – They are vibrations of the drum skin of space-time – the voice of space
• 18: The Higgs Field – The basic building blocks of matter have no intrinsic masses but acquire them by interacting with the Higgs
• 19: Antimatter – A photon has zero charge so, when it changes into an electron, the charge of the electron must be cancelled out by a particle with opposite charge: an antiparticle
• 20: Neutrinos – Though fleeting ghosts that barely haunt the physical world, they are the second most common particle in the universe
• 21: The Big Bang – The universe began in a hot, dense state and has been expanding and cooling ever since
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Endnotes
• Index