Product Description

Turn Right at Orion is the account of an epic astronomical journey, discovered sixty million years in Earth's future-the product of one man's amazing, revelatory, and occasionally perilous space odyssey. Astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman takes the reader to far distant shores, across a vast ocean of time, in a narrative style that zips along at just below light speed. We travel to the center of the Milky Way, witness the births and deaths of stars and of planets, and almost perish in the crushing forces at the perimeter of a black hole-and all the while Begelman explains in clear and vibrant prose how things work the way they do in the cosmos. Turn Right at Orion is a serious science book that reads like fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1112934 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The original "Rocinante" bore Don Quixote in his errant adventures across medieval Spain; its namesake carried John Steinbeck and his poodle across America. "Rocinante"'s latest incarnation is a wondrous spacecraft that, in the understated words of its pilot, "is perhaps not quite so sturdy as I should have liked"--but that nevertheless has transported him across space to the centre of the Milky Way.

Structured as something of a picaresque novel, Turn Right at Orion is a textbook in disguise. In its pages, the noted astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman guides readers across 60 million years of time and immense galactic distances, discussing the formation of the Milky Way as a great sooty disk full of graphite, hydrocarbons, and silicon-based minerals, "pollution from supernova explosions, lesser stellar explosions called novae, and the evaporating outer envelopes of giant stars." Along the way Begelman's narrator offers lessons in the workings of gravity, motion, and time, explaining, for instance, why it is that the Earth does not cave in on itself (it resists gravitational collapse, he notes, because it is made of highly resilient materials), why light bends, and why planets and black holes form. The result is a charming, fluent introduction to basic space science, just right for the novice. --Gregory McNamee