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| A COSMIC REPORT.
Timothy Ferris sums up the universe in "The Whole Shebang." |
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Questions asked
in this forum:Was Einstein wrong? What was the location of the Big Bang ? What was the universe like before the Big Bang? If the universe is expanding, is gravity weakening? What is the universe expanding into?
NewsHour Backgrounders
June 27, 1997
David Gergen speaks with Timothy Ferris about his book "The Whole Shebang."
July 2, 1997
A look at July 4th landing of the Mars Pathfinder.
April 10, 1997:
Elizabeth Farnsworth glimpses the distant moons of Jupiter.
March 27, 1997:
Jeffrey Kaye explores the excitement over the Hale-Bopp comet.
Browse the Online NewsHour's science section:
Outside Links
NASA
If you listen to science writer Timothy Ferris, all the secure jobs are up in the air these days. Way up in the air, that is.
In his new book "The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report," Ferris points out that over the past 20 years, the number of cosmologists has grown exponentially; in 1977, there were under a hundred. Now there's over a thousand due to the phenomenal growth in the study of cosmology, the branch of astrophysics that studies the origins and structure of the universe.
Fortunately all these new scientists won't run out of work anytime soon. Ferris, who is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, explains that the boom in cosmologists has resulted in an expansion of our knowledge of the universe. In 1970, for example, scientists knew of about 200 galaxies. That figure has now grown to 100,000 galaxies. And scientists expect that even more exist beyond that. This makes cosmology the only science that is equal parts imagination and calculation, or as Ferris writes, "an ongoing story."
Cosmology may be an ongoing story, it is no longer science fiction. In "The Whole Shebang," Ferris explores the huge store of concrete knowledge we do have about the universe, from the Big Bang to Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
So what exactly is the Big Bang? What does it mean to say that the universe is expanding? How has our understanding of the universe affected law, religion and society? In this Author's Corner, Ferris explains "the whole shebang."
Questions asked in this forum:
Was Einstein wrong? What was the location of the Big Bang ? What was the universe like before the Big Bang? If the universe is expanding, is gravity weakening? What is the universe expanding into?
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