Marcus is currently doing a blog tour for his new book - here is his schedule
Marcus is currently doing a blog tour for his new book - here is his schedule
Some of Marcus's recent (hopefully fun) articles & interviews
Marcus on Videos and on the radio talking about Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer
at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is now cosmology
consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist.
Click on cover image to buy or order
Click on cover image to buy or order
Click on cover image for more
To buy one of the following books, click on a cover image
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After reading countless books claiming to explain quantum theory and relativity to "dummies" - and ending up baffled! - I thought "There's got to be a better way". As Einstein said: "Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone." I was convinced he was right - so I wrote this book. Learn how the entire human race could fit in the volume of a sugar cube; how every breath you take contains an atom breathed out by Marilyn Monroe; how 1% of the static on a TV tuned between the stations is from the big bang. "Weird, sexy and mind-blowing." (Nature) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] |
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What happened before the big bang? What's beyond the edge of the Universe? What is the origin of the complexity of biology? Why do we experience a 'present'? Can life survive forever in the Universe? Find the answers to these ultimate questions and more, learn how the big bang may have been spawned by a collision between 'island universes'; how all of us might be resurrected in a computer simulation at the end of time; how a single remarkable number contains the answer to every question we could ever ask; how the most widely accepted theory of the Universe's origin implies Elvis is alive and well and living in another space domain (in fact, an infinite number of other space domains!); how a computer program a mere 4 lines long could be generating everything. "A limousine among popular-science vehicles." (The Guardian) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] [Interview in Metro] [Article in The Daily Telegraph] [Article in Dazed & Confused] |
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Can time run backwards? Are there an infinity of realities stacked together like the pages of a never-ending book? Was our Universe created by superior beings in another Universe? These are just a few of the mind-blowing questions addressed in The Universe Next Door. "An exuberant book. A parallel universe where science is actually fun." (The Independent) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] |
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One of the great untold stories of science: how we discovered the origin of atoms and found, to everyone's astonishment, that we are far more intimately connected to the stars than anyone ever guessed - literally, stardust made flesh. The Magic Furnace brings cosmology down to earth, connecting the very small and close to home - the atoms in our bodies - to the very big and far away - the Universe with its galaxies and stars. "A giddy page-turner" (The Daily Mail) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] |
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The very human story of the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, the fading afterglow of the Big Bang in which the Universe was born 12 to 14 billion years ago. Incredibly, it still permeates all of space, the oldest fossil in Creation, carrying with it a unique snapshot of the Universe as it was a mere 300,000 years after its fiery birth. "Beautiful science, beautifully told" (The Australian) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] |
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After reading countless books claiming to explain quantum theory and relativity to "dummies" - and ending up baffled! - I thought "There's got to be a better way". As Einstein said: "Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone." I was convinced he was right - so I wrote this book. Learn how the entire human race could fit in the volume of a sugar cube; how every breath you take contains an atom breathed out by Marilyn Monroe; how 1% of the static on a TV tuned between the stations is from the big bang. "Weird, sexy and mind-blowing." (Nature) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] |
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Can time run backwards? Are there an infinity of realities stacked together like the pages of a never-ending book? Was our Universe created by superior beings in another Universe? These are just a few of the mind-blowing questions addressed in The Universe Next Door. "For sheer intellectual exhilaration, few books offer more." (Booklist) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] |
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One of the great untold stories of science: how we discovered the origin of atoms and found, to everyone's astonishment, that we are far more intimately connected to the stars than anyone ever guessed - literally, stardust made flesh. The Magic Furnace brings cosmology down to earth, connecting the very small and close to home - the atoms in our bodies - to the very big and far away - the Universe with its galaxies and stars. "The work of a literary alchemist who transmutes the iron of complexity into the gold of lucidity" (The Tennessean) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] |
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The very human story of the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, the fading afterglow of the Big Bang in which the Universe was born 12 to 14 billion years ago. Incredibly, it still permeates all of space, the oldest fossil in Creation, carrying with it a unique snapshot of the Universe as it was a mere 300,000 years after its fiery birth. "A wonderful story, brilliantly told" (The Science Teacher) [More reviews] [Contents] [Foreword] [Sample chapter] |
COOL COSMOLOGY
COOL WEBSITES
*** One of my proudest claims to fame is that I am a spaceship in the novel
Echoes of Earth by Sean Williams
and Shane Dix. Don't ask me why! I was also in bed with Sheila Hancock and Timothy West in
the BBC comedy-drama Bedtime, written by Andy Hamilton, creator of Have I Got
News for You? When I say, in bed, I mean my book, The Universe Next Door,
was in bed. Hancock's character was a reader of popular science books. The Universe
Next Door is even being promoted in the future! In a story in the September 2005
issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, a character from the year 2032
gets out his battered old copy of the book and calls me “The best science writer there
ever was.” - which is very nice! (Generations by Fred Pohl).
*** Fancy listening out for extraterestrial signals from your back garden? Why not join the
SETI League , an international band of radio and radio
astronomy enthusiasts, dreaming of the day when one of them will catch ET phoning Earth.
*** One of the most imaginative and brilliant mathematicains in the world is IBM's
Gregory Chaitin . He started an entire field
of mathematics at 15 and discovered Omega, a number which would take an infinitely long
computer program to generate.
*** Omega may be uncomputable but one man has computed the uncomputable. His name is
Cristian Calude , and he has
calculated the first 64 bits of Omega. Omega is like a sacred text. Its first few thousand
bits contain the answers to more mathematical questions than can be written down in the
entire universe.
Marcus Chown last updated this on 21 January 2010.
