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charon writes:

This interview with the authors describes a fascinating book that gives facts about cosmology in a combined education and the challenges to the people who can't quite believe in the conclusions scientists draw. Looks neat.

Despite having the world's knowledge at our fingertips, we live in a time of great scientific illiteracy. Disinformation is rampant about vaccines, climate change and even pandemics like Covid-19. But it gets even trickier when talking about the origins of life, the universe, and everything. Some of the facts we often hear about the cosmos are so absurd to imagine — they can almost feel like a religious dogma.

Of course, cosmic theories are based on mountains of data, not whimsical guesses. Yet, how do scientists really know a supermassive black hole is at the center of the Milky Way? How do scientists know distant nebulae are (sometimes) made of hydrogen clouds? How do scientists know 14 billion years ago there was a massive explosion of matter and energy that formed everything in our universe?

We hear these claims often, but most of us aren't able to examine the gritty details behind a scientific theory. Two astronomers get at this problem in the new book The Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook: Or, How To Beat The Big Bang (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[...] But Handbook goes one step further, explaining the scientific process in detail, so if you don't accept the mainstream Big Bang theory, you can create your own. Yes, [authors] Barnes and Lewis encourage you to take on the intellectual giants of cosmology — Einstein, Hawking, and all the rest — by taking this data and interpreting your own hypothesis.

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