Bøger af Chris Impey

McEvoy is a truth-seeker. He has moments when he sees through the surface sheen of the world to a deeper reality, and moments when his sense of self dissolves. The Scotsman is restless, a wanderer. He flings himself into new relationships, even as he flees family secrets. In Shadow World, we see through McEvoy's eyes as he grows from boisterous youth to a man defined equally by darkness and light. We meet his demons and his lovers. His adventure unfolds like beads on a string, with each episode separate yet connected. His journey takes him from the Arizona desert to the wilds of Patagonia, from the Silk Road in China to the lush countryside of Ireland, ending in a twilight zone near the Arctic Circle. Shadow World is a first novel by noted popular science writer Chris Impey. Shadow World inhabits the boundary between narrative fiction and science fiction. It explores the tension between artifacts and natural forms, between reality and illusion, between the science that is and the science that might be. The novel is filled with intriguing characters. We meet a death camp survivor for whom music is everything, a relentless archeologist who is rewriting the story of human civilization, a mercurial sculptor who has a personality that mirrors her art, identical twins who inhabit parallel worlds of science and religion, a brilliant but raunchy astrophysicist, and an enigmatic philosopher who seems to know McEvoy better than he knows himself. By the end of his twenty-year odyssey, McEvoy has gained a startling insight into his reality, and perhaps ours as well.

"WORLDS WITHOUT END: EXOPLANETS, HABITABILITY, AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY will present the scientific missions exploring exoplanets through the lens of habitability and our survival in the universe"--

Humble before the Void also recounts Impey’s experiences outside the classroom, from the monks’ eagerness to engage in pick-up basket­ball games and stream episodes of hip American sitcoms to the effects on his relationship with the teenage son who makes the trip with him. Moments of profound serenity and beauty in the Himalayas are contrasted with the sorrow of learning that other monks have set themselves on fire to protest the Chinese oppression in Tibet.

This book presents the keynote addresses of a unique meeting organized by the Vatican Observatory, which aimed to facilitate dialogue between science and religion among philosophers, theologians, and scientists.

The story of unmanned space exploration, from Viking to todayDreams of Other Worlds describes the unmanned space missions that have opened new windows on distant worlds. Spanning four decades of dramatic advances in astronomy and planetary science, this book tells the story of eleven iconic exploratory missions and how they have fundamentally transformed our scientific and cultural perspectives on the universe and our place in it.The journey begins with the Viking and Mars Exploration Rover missions to Mars, which paint a startling picture of a planet at the cusp of habitability. It then moves into the realm of the gas giants with the Voyager probes and Cassini's ongoing exploration of the moons of Saturn. The Stardust probe's dramatic round-trip encounter with a comet is brought vividly to life, as are the SOHO and Hipparcos missions to study the Sun and Milky Way. This stunningly illustrated book also explores how our view of the universe has been brought into sharp focus by NASA's great observatories-Spitzer, Chandra, and Hubble-and how the WMAP mission has provided rare glimpses of the dawn of creation.Dreams of Other Worlds reveals how these unmanned exploratory missions have redefined what it means to be the temporary tenants of a small planet in a vast cosmos.