Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
    Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
    Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
    Audiobook14 hours

    Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

    Written by Lisa Randall

    Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven's Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science.

    There could be no better guide than Lisa Randall. The bestselling author of Warped Passages is an expert in both particle physics (the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology (the study of the largest). In Knocking on Heaven's Door, she explores how we decide which scientific questions to study and how we go about answering them. She examines the role of risk, creativity, uncertainty, beauty, and truth in scientific thinking through provocative conversations with leading figures in other fields (such as the chef David Chang, the forecaster Nate Silver, and the screenwriter Scott Derrickson), and she explains with wit and clarity the latest ideas in physics and cosmology. Randall describes the nature and goals of the largest machine ever built: the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator below the border of France and Switzerland-as well as recent ideas underlying cosmology and current dark matter experiments.

    The most sweeping and exciting science book in years, Knocking on Heaven's Door makes clear the biggest scientific questions we face and reveals how answering them could ultimately tell us who we are and where we came from.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 27, 2011
    ISBN9781452674391
    Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
    Author

    Lisa Randall

    Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University, where she is Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. Professor Randall was included in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" of 2007 and was among Esquire magazine's "75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century." Professor Randall's two books, Warped Passages (2005) and Knocking on Heaven's Door (2011) were New York Times bestsellers and 100 Notable Books. Her stand-alone e-book, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space, was published in 2012.

    More audiobooks from Lisa Randall

    Related to Knocking on Heaven's Door

    Related audiobooks

    Science & Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Theory of Consciousness Can Help Build a Theory of Everything

      May 4, 2017

      For an empirical science, physics can be remarkably dismissive of some of our most basic observations. We see objects existing in definite locations, but the wave nature of matter washes that away. We perceive time to flow, but how could it, really?

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Self Is Other People

      Apr 3, 2018

      The Self Is Other People
      3 min read

    • Article

      Why Physics Can’t Tell Us What Life Is

      Oct 21, 2020

      There is just something obviously reasonable about the following notion: If all life is built from atoms that obey precise equations we know—which seems to be true—then the existence of life might just be some downstream consequence of these laws tha

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble with Counting Alien Civilizations

      Jun 24, 2020

      You might imagine that in the midst of a global pandemic and all of its social and economic fallout that our minds would be laser-focused on immediate, Earthly woes. But apparently not entirely. A case in point is the recent virus-like spread of news

      5 min read

    • Article

      From Particles To Parsecs

      Apr 21, 2022

      From Particles To Parsecs
      6 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 19, 2023

      Shohini Ghose MIT Press £27 • HB How many women scientists can you name? A 2017 US study showed that less than one per cent of people surveyed could name a living woman scientist. Have you sat in a lecture and been greeted with ‘good morning, gentlem

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Universe Has Made Almost All the Stars It Will Ever Make

      Aug 19, 2020

      Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing here from the outer envelope of a natural giant thermonuclear reactor we

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Universe Has Already Made Almost All the Stars It Will Ever Make: Black holes are cosmic dimmers.

      Sep 1, 2021

      Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing here from the outer envelope of a natural giant thermonuclear reactor we

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Alien-Haunted World

      Feb 15, 2021

      The Alien-Haunted World
      6 min read

    • Article

      An Eye On The Sky

      Oct 29, 2018

      An Eye On The Sky
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Big Bang Theory

      Jan 27, 2022

      The Big Bang Theory
      8 min read

    • Article

      ‘New Force Of Nature’: Scientists ‘Cautiously Excited’ As Experiment Points Towards New Era In Our Understanding Of The Universe

      Mar 23, 2021

      Scientists studying the fundamental forces which govern the universe and everything in it are “cautiously excited” recent experiments could lead to a “new era” in our understanding of physics. While much scientific experimentation confirms existing h

      4 min read

    • Article

      Search For Life

      May 18, 2023

      Search For Life
      6 min read

    • Article

      Quark Of Habit

      Dec 1, 2022

      A round 400 BC, the Greek philosopher Democritus proffered the idea that all matter was composed of indivisible, featureless constituents. He described them using the Greek word for “uncuttable”: atomos. Two thousand years later, scientists found tha

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Knocking on Heaven's Door

    3.5/5

    65 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      A theoretical physicist explains the Higgs, the LHC, and various other aspects of the Standard Model, supersymmetry, strings, and so forth. The author writes well, but this book directed at lay people is going to be tough going for most lay people. It isn't full of equations, which is a plus for popularized science, but the technical descriptions are still more than most people are likely to want to slog through unless they have a very deepseated love of physics. Discussions of probability and other statistical analyses are good, but again, not likelly to be accessible to many readers. In short, this is a good book for a very limited audience.
    • 3/5
      As the subtitle indicates, this book covers some fairly broad scientific topics, including some discussion about the history of science and the importance of scientific thinking. A lot of it, however, is more specifically about particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider. It was written in 2011, though, so the discussions here about attempts to find the Higgs Boson (which did happen pretty much as predicted) and the possibility that LHC data could overturn or amend the currently reigning Standard Model of particle physics (which so far hasn't happened) are inevitably somewhat dated now.Honestly, this book feels kind of all over the place. Sometimes it outlines things on what's intended to be a layman's level, although I think having a little bit of physics knowledge going in does help. In other places, it gets very technical, and, in my experience, going in with a little bit of physics knowledge helps very little in understanding concepts like the Higgs field. At least, it's certainly never helped me. I think no matter how clearly anyone tries to explain some of these things, it's just really not possible to entirely understand it without knowing the right kind of mathematics. I can't say that this is the best stab I've seen anyone take at it, either, or that Randall's prose is especially lucid. She's not bad or anything, but definitely not someone I'm going to hold up as a paragon of good, clear science writing.She does have a few insightful things to say, and anyone who's especially interested in the specifics of how the LHC works is likely to find her detailed descriptions of its technology and operation useful. But, overall, this volume is kind of dense and unfocused and often not particularly good at getting the author's points across. I feel like there are much better books on these topics out there.
    • 4/5
      A good explanation of current (as of the time of the book writing) particle physics and its relation to cosmology. I thought I understood this before reading the book, and I did at one level, but there was much new here. The book does move a bit quick at times, not glossing over concepts or details, but perhaps not providing quite as much time as the intended audience might require. A few more illustrations would have helped also.
    • 4/5
      An excellent book on scientific thinking in general and particle physics in particular. Much of it is about the LHC, what it is and what it does. The book was published about a year before the LHC announced the discover of the Higgs boson.
    • 4/5
      A theoretical physicist explains the Higgs, the LHC, and various other aspects of the Standard Model, supersymmetry, strings, and so forth. The author writes well, but this book directed at lay people is going to be tough going for most lay people. It isn't full of equations, which is a plus for popularized science, but the technical descriptions are still more than most people are likely to want to slog through unless they have a very deepseated love of physics. Discussions of probability and other statistical analyses are good, but again, not likelly to be accessible to many readers. In short, this is a good book for a very limited audience.
    • 3/5
      Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Lisa Randall may be a fine physicist, but the writing style of this left me unable to finish the book. I tried, off and on, for two months or more, to get through it. Life is finite, and I moved on. The writing style is both turgid and self-satisfied.I'm still not sure of the author's point, but that's okay. There were plenty of Amazon reviews filled with praise. Apparently they had a different book.
    • 3/5
      Interesting book largely on particle physics. The author is knowledgeable in this field and explains this area with reasonable clarity. She starts off with some rather basic physics and steps off in the area of forecasting. The discussion of forecasting is largely applied to the area of economics, which seems inappropriate for her to speak on. She largely does and should stick to the physics since this is her special expertise. Descriptions of the large hadron collider are fascinating.
    • 4/5
      A nice summary of recent happenings at the LHC and, through that, a survey of contemporary physics. Randall's got an interesting perspective on the intersection of particle physics and cosmology, two topics which have fascinated me since I was a teenager, and this is a good overview of where those fields stand.

      Randall intersperses the book with her thoughts on creativity and science-thinking, which I appreciated as she touches on the disparity between theory and data that underlies so many public misconceptions about science as a concept.

      There were parts which tended to drag and which I didn't find all that interesting. I glossed over them without losing anything. Beyond those infrequent rough parts, I don't have any complaints.
    • 5/5
      One of the best "popular science" books I have ever read. Perfectly accessible to anyone of average intelligence, no science or math background needed. Much good info on what particle physics is all about, how it connects up with cosmology, and updates on recent discoveries and progress, with emphasis on CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The importance of scale in both science and other fields is also a key concept in this book -- quite eye opening. The author has a real gift for connecting up ideas that one would not have thought could be connected.