Interplanetary travel? No one ever thought it would be this hard, especially the folks that are not literally 'rocket scientists' Why is it that 50 years after the official start of the Space Age we do not have colonies on the moon and Mars already? Why are we still plodding along in Earth orbit? There are a million of these kinds of questions you can ask, but when you dig into their answers you uncover something very odd indeed. In my previous book 'Interstellar Travel: An Astronomer's Guide' I laid out all of the astronomical challenges to interstellar travel and colonization. The bottom...

This is a companion guide to Odenwald's previous book, The 23rd Cycle: Learning to live with a stormy star. It is a fast-paced chronicle of over 2000 years of solar storms that have caused not only panic and fear, but have impacted virtually every technology that has been developed during the last 200 years including telegraphs, telephones, radio communications, satellite operations, the electrical power grid and human operations in space. Culled from thousands of newspaper headlines and stories since the early-1800s, this book gives a personal, human insight to the most dramatic 150 'space...

For thousands of years humans have flirted with understanding space. But now it seems there are so many loose ends in 20th century physics that we are forced to have a closer look at this thing we call space. What we do know from where we stand today, is that virtually everything we thought we knew about space because of our 'common sense' actually turns out to be mostly wrong when you look at the details. This book is a guide to how this search is moving forward, from our common sense ideas to the frontiers of quantum gravity and black hole research.