Beyond Coincidence (eBook)

Brian King

Martin Plimmer

UPDATED EDITION WITH OVER FIFTY NEW STORIES

'A FIRST-RATE BOOK' - THE OBSERVER

Laura Buxton, aged ten, releases a balloon from her garden. It lands 140 miles away in the garden of another Laura Buxton, aged ten. Coincidence? Or something beyond coincidence?

Is someone playing snap with our lives? Could it be the hand of God? Or are we, as some scientists have suggested, being granted an insight into a hyper-connected universe whose ubiquitous web-like workings we can only dimly discern?

Beyond Coincidence is a celebration of the universe’s most beguiling phenomenon, containing more than 250 amazing stories of coincidence. From sympathetic magic to the science of probability, from the vicissitudes of gamblers to the mysterious communions of subatomic particles, this book chases coincidence in all its many guises, analysing how it affects every aspect of our lives and why it means so much to even the most sceptical of us.

Martin Plimmer is a journalist and broadcaster and author of the fictionalised memoir King of the Castle. Once, while in the waiting room of a hospital after banging his head, Martin found a two-year-old magazine open at an article he had written on the subject of headaches. 

Brian King is an award-winning pioneer of radio fly-on-the-wall documentaries and producer of hundreds of BBC radio features, dramas and comedy programmes including, coincidentally, a Radio 4 series about coincidence, presented by Martin Plimmer. As well as Beyond Coincidence, he’s the author of books about lying (The Lying Ape) and embarrassment (Walking in on Mum and Dad). When he’s not making radio programmes or writing books, he can be found fighting slugs on his allotment, strumming his guitar or organising folk festivals.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy (eBook)

The Hidden 95% of the Universe

Brian Clegg

'Clear and compact … It's hard to fault as a brief, easily digestible introduction to some of the biggest questions in the Universe' Giles Sparrow, BBC Four's The Sky at Night, Best astronomy and space books of 2019: 5/5

All the matter and light we can see in the universe makes up a trivial 5 per cent of everything. The rest is hidden. This could be the biggest puzzle that science has ever faced.

Since the 1970s, astronomers have been aware that galaxies have far too little matter in them to account for the way they spin around: they should fly apart, but something concealed holds them together. That 'something' is dark matter – invisible material in five times the quantity of the familiar stuff of stars and planets.

By the 1990s we also knew that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Something, named dark energy, is pushing it to expand faster and faster. Across the universe, this requires enough energy that the equivalent mass would be nearly fourteen times greater than all the visible material in existence.

Brian Clegg explains this major conundrum in modern science and looks at how scientists are beginning to find solutions to it.

Brian Clegg is a popular science writer whose Dice World and A Brief History of Infinity were both longlisted for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. He has written for publications including Nature, The Times and BBC Focus.

Astrobiology (eBook)

The Search for Life Elsewhere in the Universe

Andrew May

Extraterrestrial life is a common theme in
science fiction, but is it a serious prospect in the real world? Astrobiology
is the emerging field of science that seeks to answer this question.

The possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos
is one of the most profound subjects that human beings can ponder. Astrophysicist
Andrew May gives an expert overview of our current state of knowledge, looking
at how life started on Earth, the tell-tale ‘signatures’ it produces, and how
such signatures might be detected elsewhere in the Solar System or on the many ‘exoplanets’
now being discovered by the Kepler and TESS missions.

Along the way the book addresses key questions such as the riddle of Fermi’s
paradox (‘Where is everybody?’) and the crucial role of DNA and water – they’re
essential to ‘life as we know it’, but is the same true of alien life? And the really
big question: when we eventually find extraterrestrials, will they be friendly
or hostile?

Andrew May is a freelance writer and former scientist, with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written five books in Icon's Hot Science series: Destination Mars, Cosmic Impact, Astrobiology, The Space Business and The Science of Music. He lives in Somerset.