World Scientific Publishing Company Cooking Cosmos: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe

Review It gives a real sense of the status of modern cosmology, the nature of the problems, and prospects for the future. --CHOICEThe book is a pleasure to read, there is always something new and unexpected coming up, and this assures that it keeps the attention also of a working scientist. I don t know a similar book as suitable as this to introduce students (say of the last years in high school) to the field. If they follow the course suggested by this travel guide, they will arrive at the end of their voyage on a vast plateau of beautiful ideas, and they can then choose at which they want to look in more detail. --Helmut Satz Bielefeld, University, Germany Product Description Cooking Cosmos is an exciting book that traces the history of men's endeavor to understand the Universe, and answers the eternal questions: Who made this World? Where did it come from? How and why did it begin? Thousands of years of continual interaction with nature has brought mankind to the present stage when we have some inkling about the working of nature. We now know that the Earth, our habitat, is only one of the planets orbiting the Sun. The Sun itself is a star among billions of stars in the Universe. We know that our solar system came into existence some 4.5 billion years ago and it is but only a tiny component of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Our Universe contains some 100 billion of galaxies. We know that the Universe itself came into existence with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago and even now galaxies are receding from each other with ever increasing speed.This book takes you through the intellectual journey of mankind, unraveling the mysteries of the Cosmos. Starting from Aristotle's Earth-centered Universe, it will take you step by step to the Copernican Sun-centered Universe, to Hubble's expanding Universe, to the Big Bang, to the currently accepted accelerating Universe. In the process, the book explores the origin of space-time, black hole, black hole radiation, dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity, string theory, all in terms comprehensible to general audiences. About the Author Asis Kumar Chaudhuri is a theoretical physicist and presently leading the Nuclear Theory Group at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata; a premier research institute in India. He received his initial training at the prestigious Training School, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Calcutta. His primary research interest is high energy nuclear physics, in particular, physics of quark gluon plasma. He has a healthy interest in other areas of Physics, e.g. chaos, early universe, physics beyond the Standard Model etc. and occasionally contributed scientifically in those areas. He has authored approximately 100 research articles and an advanced textbook, A Short Course on Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions, published by the Institute of Physics, London. Presently, He lives in Kolkata with his wife and son.