Text
The book was written by the instructor
based on many year's worth of teaching this class. It is titled
Cosmic Catastrophes: Supernovae, Gamma-Ray Bursts, and Adventures
in Hyperspace and published by Cambridge University Press.
Other material will be added as needed.
Supplemental Texts
The Elegant Universe (Vintage, Random House, 1999) - Brian Greene.
Pulitzer prize-winning book on
string theory and "extra" dimensions.
The Hole in The Universe (Harcourt, 2001) - K. C. Cole.
Discussion of the physics of the vacuum by the science reporter
for the Los Angeles Times.
Dreams of a Final Theory (Vintage, 1994) - Steven Weinberg.
Discussion of grand unification
and the "theory of everything" by UT Nobel Prize winner.
This book was selected to be one of the 100 best popular science
books of the 20th century by a recent millenial poll.
The God Particle
(Delta, 1994) - Leon Lederman.
Discussion of the particle that gives mass mass by Nobel Prize
winner and ex-director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's
Outrageous Legacy (Norton,
1994) - Kip Thorne.
Treatise on the curved space and
time of Einstein by one of the preeminent researchers on the
topic. Thorne provided the outlines for the "worm hole"
featured in Carl Sagan's Contact and tells the story of the research
into time machines that flowed from the fictional beginning.
The River of Time
(Cambridge, 1998) - Igor Novikov.
One of the giants of Russian astrophysics give his view of his
and Thorne's work on worm holes and time machines.
Before the Beginning, Our Universe
and Others (Addison Wesley,
1997) - Martin Rees.
Discussion of other universes that
might arise in black holes and be connected through Big Bangs
by the Astronomer Royal of Great Britain.
Unveiling the Edge of Time: Black Holes,
White Holes, Wormholes (Crown,
1992) - John Gribbon.
Discussion of the worm hole time machine developments of Thorne
and Novikov by well-known popularizer of science.
The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam, 2002) - Stephen Hawking.
Latest popular contribution by the famous Star Trek actor.
The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos
(Princeton University Press, 2002) - Robert P. Kirshner.
A personal report by one of the insiders on the use of supernovae to discover the accelerating Universe.
The Biggest Bangs: The Mystery of Gamma-ray Bursts, the Most Violent Explosions in the Universe
(Oxford, 2002) - Jonathan Katz
Historical summary by one of the long-time active theorists in the field.
