Lucy Hawking - George and the Secrets of the Universe. The Large Hadron Collider

Annotation

The third book about George's space adventures.

One of the greatest science experiments of all time is about to begin - and of course, George and Annie are counting on front row seats! Annie's dad, scientist Eric, is going to the Large Hadron Collider to find out what happened in the very first moments of the existence of the Universe - the moment of the Big Bang. With him is his trusty supercomputer Cosmos. It would seem that everything is fine...

...But then George and Annie accidentally learn about the criminal plan of the enemies of science, who are ready to do anything to prevent the experiment from taking place.

And then the heroes embark on a dangerous and exciting journey - to a distant galaxy and even to the quantum world - in order to outwit and stop the villains who intend to throw science back to the Middle Ages.

A huge amount of information about the universe is told to us in this book by Lucy Hawking and Stephen Hawking - the most famous living scientists!

An exciting adventure story... for all young explorers of the Universe.

"The Guardian"

Whoever misses this book is to blame.

"Carousel"

THE NEWEST SCIENTIFIC THEORIES!

INDEX OF SCIENTIFIC SECTIONS

Chapter first

Chapter two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

ILLUSTRATIONS

Our Solar System

Dangers facing our planet

Theory of everything

Emergence of the Universe

Big Bang - lecture

Expansion of the Universe

Spacetime and relativity

Andromeda Galaxy

Homogeneity of space

Particle collisions

The Dark Side of the Universe

The Large Hadron Collider

How much use does mathematics have in unraveling the mysteries of the Universe?

Singularities

Quantum world

“Wormholes” (aka “wormholes”) and time travel

M-theory: 11 dimensions!

Photo on the flyleaf:

The Rosette Nebula, according to the results of a study by the Spitzer Space Telescope (NASA), contains several young, very hot stars of spectral class O. These are blue stars inside drawn spheres. These stars have very powerful radiation, and they emit strong winds, so that around each of them a “danger zone” is formed that extends up to 1.6 light years - or fifteen trillion kilometers. Any young star entering the danger zone will most likely lose its emerging planetary system. The Rosette Nebula is more than five thousand light years away.

Willa, Lola and George,

Rose, George, William and Charlotte -

this book is dedicated to you

THE NEWEST SCIENTIFIC THEORIES!

The book's plot is intertwined with exciting scientific essays that introduce the reader to the latest scientific theories.

These essays were written by outstanding scientists of our time.

Emergence of the Universe

Stephen Hawking,

University of Cambridge, UK

The Dark Side of the Universe

Michael S. Turner

University of Chicago, USA

How much use does mathematics have in unraveling the mysteries of the Universe?

Paul Davis

Arizona State University, USA

“Wormholes” (aka “wormholes”) and time travel

Kip S. Thorne

California Institute of Technology, USA

INDEX OF SCIENTIFIC SECTIONS

This book contains a wide variety of scientific information. Some of them are allocated to special sections. You may want to return to these sections more than once or twice. To make it more convenient for you, we have made a pointer.

Our Solar System

Dangers facing our planet

Theory of everything

Moon

Big Bang - lecture

Expansion of the Universe

Vacuums

Spacetime and relativity

Andromeda Galaxy

Homogeneity of space

Particle collisions

The Large Hadron Collider

Singularities

Quantum world

M-theory: 11 dimensions!

Chapter first

“Where is the best place in our Universe for a pig?” - Annie tapped the keys of a supercomputer named Cosmos.

Space will find it! - she announced. “He’ll find a better place than this unfortunate farm!”

The farm where Freddie now lived - a former piglet, and now a hefty boar - was in fact not at all unhappy, but very nice, and all the animals there looked happy. Everyone except Freddy.

“I just can’t find a place for myself,” George complained, watching as Cosmos, the greatest computer in the world, sorted through billions of its files in search of an answer. - Freddie was so sad, so offended... He didn’t even look at me.

But he still looked at me,” Annie answered, without looking up from the screen. - He was just staring with his piggy eyes! As if he wanted to say: “Save me! Get me out of here!

The farm was near Foxbridge, the university town where George and Annie lived. Annie's mother, Susan, took them to see Freddie in the morning, and when she returned for them in the afternoon, she was surprised to find that George's face was red and angry, and Annie was about to cry.

Annie! George! What's wrong with you?

Not with us, but with Freddie! - Annie climbed into the back seat and finally gave vent to her tears. - He feels bad on this stupid farm!

Freddie, George's pet and friend, was a gift from his grandmother. She gave it to her grandson for Christmas, when this same Freddie was still a pig. George's parents fought to save the Earth from pollution, and this, among other things, meant that they were against gifts for children. They were outraged that abandoned, broken, disliked toys turn into giant piles of plastic and metal that pollute not only the land, but also the seas, where whales and seagulls choke on them. So Grandma knew that George’s parents would simply send the usual gift back, which would cause everyone to quarrel and be offended. This means, she realized, that in order for George to keep the gift, it must be a gift that will bring benefit to the planet, and not harm.

That's why, one fine and very cold day before Christmas, George discovered a cardboard box on the porch. The box contained a tiny pink pig, accompanied by a note from his grandmother: “This boy needs a roof over his head. Take him with you!” George was delighted. The parents will certainly allow him to keep such a gift, and most importantly, he, George, now has his own piglet.

Stephen Hawking, Lucy Hawking, Christophe Galfard

George and the Secrets of the Universe

1st edition in English, 2007

* * *

To William and George - with love.

Flyleaf photograph © NASA, EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY, N. SMITH (UC Berkeley), HUBBLE LEGACY GROUP (Space Telescope Science Institute, Association of Space Research Institutions), SCIENTIFIC PHOTO LIBRARY.

The photograph shows an image of the η Carina Nebula, covering an area measuring 50 light years. Compiled from 48 photographs taken in 2005 by the Hubble Space Telescope. The η Carina Nebula is a huge cloud of gas and dust, in the depths of which there are regions of star formation, young hot stars, and already dying stars. The radiation of some chemical elements is highlighted in color: sulfur (red), hydrogen (green) and oxygen (blue).

Chapter first

“He couldn’t just evaporate? - George thought, looking around in confusion. “Piglets don’t just melt into thin air!”

The pig pen was empty—clearly and hopelessly empty. Maybe this is an optical illusion? George closed his eyes as tight as he could and slowly opened his eyes again. Nothing changed. The huge, pink, ugly thing rolled in the mud seemed to have fallen through the ground. To make matters worse, George noticed that the side door of the pigsty was wide open. So someone didn't lock it properly. More precisely, not someone, but George himself.

- Yes mom! – he responded in a falsely cheerful voice.

- How's your little pig doing?

- Wonderful! – George grunted for convincing. Let mom think that everything here is going on as usual - here, in the garden behind the house, where there are full of beds with vegetables and only one, but very large pig... which, however, mysteriously disappeared. He thought and grunted a couple more times just to be sure: it’s very important that mom doesn’t think of looking in here until he, George, has developed a plan of action. He had no idea how to find the pig, place it in the pigsty, lock the door and not be late for dinner. However, he was working on this problem - and the last thing he wanted was for one of the parents to show up here until it was solved.

George knew very well that his parents were not happy with his piglet. Mom and Dad, even in their worst nightmares, would never have dreamed that a pig would ever live behind their house. Dad was especially dissatisfied: he simply gnashed his teeth, remembering who had settled behind the vegetable beds.

The pig - then just a pig - was a Christmas present. A few years ago, on Christmas Eve, a box was delivered to the front door with something snoring and squealing inside. Opening it, George found an extremely dissatisfied pink pig inside. He carefully took it out of the box and spent the whole evening watching in admiration as his new friend clattered his tiny hooves around the tree. There was a note stuck to the box: “Dear everyone! Merry Christmas! This kid needs a roof over his head. Take him with you! Kisses, grandma."

Dad was not pleased with this addition to the family. Yes, he is a vegetarian, but this does not mean that he adores animals. On the contrary, he prefers to deal with plants: they do not turn everything in the house upside down, do not leave dirty marks in the kitchen and do not eat up to the last crumb the cookies forgotten on the table. But George was happy that he now had his own, personal pig. Christmas gifts from my parents that year were terrible, as always. The sleeves of the sweater Mom had knitted, orange with purple stripes, hung to the floor; the pipe was also not one of those things that George had dreamed of all his life; and when he unwrapped the young angler’s “Do It Yourself: Worm Tank” kit, it was with great difficulty that he managed to feign delight.

In fact, George dreamed of receiving a computer as a gift. He wanted him more than anything in the world. But he knew that they would never buy him a computer. Parents did not like newfangled inventions and sought to lead a “simple and clean life”, doing without household appliances. They didn’t have a car, they washed their clothes by hand, and they lit the house with candles so as not to have to deal with electricity.

Everything was arranged so that George was raised as close to nature as possible and as far as possible from toxic substances, artificial food additives, radiation and other harmful phenomena. But here’s the problem: having gotten rid of everything that could harm George, his parents at the same time removed a lot of pleasant and interesting things from his life. Mum and Dad might have enjoyed dancing around the maypole, taking part in anti-pollution marches and baking their own bread from their own flour, but none of this pleased George one bit. He would rather go on a ride in the park, play a computer game, or even fly on a plane somewhere far, far away. But there was nothing to even dream about. The only thing he had was a pig.

It was a nice beast. George named him Freddie. In the back garden, Dad built him a covered paddock, and George spent hours hanging over the fence, admiring Freddie's nose in the straw or rolling in the mud. Summer gave way to autumn, winter to spring, and the piglet grew and grew and grew. The word “pig” no longer really suited him - in the twilight he could easily be mistaken for a medium-sized elephant calf. And the bigger Freddie got, the cramped it was for him in the pigsty. Therefore, he did not miss the opportunity to break free and run through the beds - to stomp on carrots, feast on young cabbage, chew his mother’s flowers. And although Mom often said that you need to love all living things, George suspected that when Freddie frolicked in her beds, Mom didn’t feel much love for him. She was a vegetarian, like dad, but George heard with his own ears how mom, eliminating the consequences of Freddy's destructive raids, muttered something about sausage...

Today, however, the matter is not limited to the poisoning of vegetables. Freddie didn't just dance around in the garden beds - he did something worse. In the fence that separated their garden from the neighbor's, George saw a suspicious hole. A hole the size of a pig. Moreover, George knew for sure that this hole was not there yesterday. But Freddie was safely locked in his pen yesterday. And now he's not there. There is only one conclusion: this adventurer ran away somewhere where no one was waiting for him.

The house next door was surrounded by mystery. It had been empty since George could remember. In all the other houses on their street, doors slammed, letting owners and guests in and out, the windows were lit in the evenings, the gardens were well-groomed. And this house, although it was located in a row of others, similar, stood as if by itself - it was so dark, silent and sad. In the mornings there was no joyful children's squealing; in the evenings no one was invited to dinner; on weekends there was no sound of a hammer and no smell of fresh paint - no one repaired the sagging window frames or cleaned the gutters. The garden, which had not been maintained for years, grew so wildly that it resembled the Amazon jungle.

But the area behind George's house was in perfect order. His impeccable appearance was depressing. Even rows of beans tightly tied to pegs, spreading lettuce, dark green foam of carrot tails, neat potato tops. There is not even a place to play with a ball - you will certainly hit your mother’s favorite raspberry, and all the berries will turn into puree!

George and his parents were given a strip of land. They hoped that he would become interested in gardening and, perhaps, eventually become a farmer - growing organic products. But George was not too interested in what was happening under his feet. He loved to look at the sky. Therefore, the piece of planet Earth that belonged to him remained bare and rocky, and only weeds grew there, while George, meanwhile, fixed his gaze on the starry sky, trying to count the stars - every single one.

The neighbor's plot looked completely different. George often climbed onto the roof of the enclosure where his only friend lived and peered over the fence into the impassable neighboring jungle. The spreading bushes were full of hidden places for hiding places, and the gnarled branches of the trees were ideal for climbing. Long, thorny blackberry branches twisted and crossed like train tracks in a train station. In the summer, bindweed entwined the entire garden with a green web, yellow dandelions bloomed everywhere, giant weeds seemed like alien plants, and here and there modest forget-me-nots bloomed blue in the lush greenery.

1st edition in English, 2011

An exciting adventure story... for all young explorers of the Universe.

"The Guardian"

Anyone who misses this book is to blame.

"Carousel"

The Rosette Nebula, according to the results of a study by the Spitzer Space Telescope (NASA), contains several young, very hot stars of spectral class O. These are blue stars inside drawn spheres. These stars have very powerful radiation and emit strong winds, so that around each of them a “danger zone” is formed that extends up to 1.6 light years - or fifteen trillion kilometers. Any young star entering the danger zone will most likely lose its emerging planetary system. The Rosette Nebula is more than five thousand light years away.

Willa, Lola and George, Rose, George, William and Charlotte - this book is dedicated to you

The latest scientific theories!

Intertwined with the book's plot are fascinating scientific essays that introduce the reader to the latest scientific theories. These essays were written by outstanding scientists of our time.

Stephen Hawking, University of Cambridge, UK

Michael S. Turner, University of Chicago, USA

Paul Davis, Arizona State University, USA

Kip S. Thorne, California Institute of Technology, USA

Index of scientific sections

Chapter first

“Where is the best place in our Universe for a pig?” – Annie tapped the keys of a supercomputer named Cosmos.

- Space will find it! – she announced. “He’ll find a better place than this unfortunate farm!”

The farm where Freddie now lived - a former piglet, and now a hefty boar - was in fact not at all unhappy, but very nice, and all the animals there looked happy. Everyone except Freddy.

“I just can’t find a place for myself,” George complained, watching as Cosmos, the greatest computer in the world, sorted through billions of its files in search of an answer. – Freddie was so sad, so offended... He didn’t even look at me.

“But he still looked at me,” Annie answered, without looking up from the screen. - He was just staring at me with his piggy eyes! As if he wanted to say: “Save me! Get me out of here!

- Annie! George! What's wrong with you?

– Not with us, but with Freddie! – Annie climbed into the back seat and finally gave vent to her tears. “He’s having a bad time on this stupid farm!”

However, here's the problem: tiny pink piglets tend to grow. They grow and grow until they become cramped in the garden behind the house, where there is only a strip of land with a couple of shabby vegetable beds. But George's parents still had good hearts, so Freddie - that's what George called the pig - lived in his pen until he grew to an impressive size and began to look more like a baby elephant than a pig. This did not upset George at all - he adored Freddie and spent hours sitting with him in the garden: sometimes he told him something, and sometimes he simply settled down in his vast shadow and read books about the wonders of the Universe.

Hawking Stephen, Hawking Lucy. George and the Secrets of the Universe. George and the Treasures of the Universe. George and the Big Bang. - M.: Pink Giraffe, 2013.

Hawking Stephen and Lucy
Authors:
Even those who have never been interested in astrophysics, cosmology and black holes are probably familiar with the name Stephen Hawking. Hawking is one of the most famous cosmologists and theoretical physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, who devoted his entire life to the study of the Universe and its secrets. Winner of twelve honorary scientific titles, a large number of prizes, medals and prizes, a member of the Royal Scientific Society of England and the US National Academy of Sciences, Hawking is known to millions of readers around the world as a wonderful writer and popularizer of science. Stephen Hawking was born in Oxford in 1942, where his family evacuated from London to escape German bombing. Like many famous scientists before him, Stephen did not stand out in any way at school or at the institute... until the exams came. The first round was not passed well enough, and the teachers decided to give Stephen an oral exam. Much later, one of the members of the examination committee will say: “Fortunately, the examiners immediately realized that they were talking to a student who was far superior to themselves in intellectual development.” So Stephen Hawking remained to teach at the world-famous University of Cambridge. Very soon Stephen got married, had a son and daughter, and became a member of the Royal Scientific Society. Everything went well, but very early, from the very beginning of his independent, adult life, the young scientist was struck by an illness, which subsequently led him to almost complete paralysis. And yet, this disease is, first of all, a victory of a scientist and writer over very difficult life circumstances. Confined to a wheelchair, Hawking did not give up: he continued to teach, do science, make globally important discoveries and write books. When the disease deprived him of the ability to speak, his friends gave him a speech synthesizer, with the help of which he was able to communicate with friends, students and colleagues (among them is the scientific editor of the Russian translation of “George and the Secrets of the Universe”, Muscovite astrophysicist Vladimir Surdin). In January 2007, Stephen Hawking flew in zero gravity on a special plane, and his flight into space is planned for 2009 - few healthy people today decide to do this. And finally, Hawking won the love of millions of adult readers thanks to his popular science activities - speeches, lectures and books for adults and children: “The World in a Nutshell”, “A Brief History of Time” and “George and the Secrets of the Universe”. Our publishing house has so far only published the first book in Russian. But Stephen Hawking promised to please us with two more books about George.

Lucy Hawking, daughter of Stephen Hawking, co-authored her famous father's book for the first time. A journalist by profession, Lucy Hawking is the author of two novels for adults. He is often published in British newspapers and magazines "Daily Mail", "Telegraph", "Times", and appears on the radio. Website of the publishing house "Pink Giraffe": http://www.pgbooks.ru/books/authors/278/

Annotation for the first book: "George and the Secrets of the Universe"
According to the Universe on an asteroid - it cannot be! Maybe! - the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, his daughter Lucy and former graduate student and now popularizer of science Christophe Galfar have no doubt, who in September 2007 presented their first book for children about the adventures of George and his friends in the Universe. In this lively and fun book, they told children about fantastically interesting objects - black holes, quasars, asteroids, galaxies and parallel universes. The authors emphasize that they wanted to “present a modern view of cosmology from the Big Bang to the present, without any magic.” The only magical hero in the book is a supercomputer that opens the door to the Universe for George and his friends. This is a story about space adventures that friends go on to learn more about the world in which we live. It is also a story about the laws of physics that govern this world. But above all, this is the story of a lonely boy named George and how his life has changed since the day he met his new neighbors Annie and Eric. Annie loves ballet more than anything in the world, and her father Eric, a cosmologist, loves space more than anything else. Eric is helped by a supercomputer named... "Cosmos". This computer is so powerful and so smart that it can draw doors through which you can get to any point in the Universe (of course, while wearing a spacesuit - after all, it’s terribly cold there, in outer space!). And while George and his friends explore outer space, “Cosmos” controls the flight... if it is in place, of course. But in any book, even in a scientific adventure book, there are evil forces that... However, we will not tell the plot in advance, because very soon you will find out for yourself. The European premiere of the book took place in September 2007 in France and the UK. Readers of the Central City Children's Library named after. A.P. Gaidar's book "George and the Secrets of the Universe" was chosen as the best book of 2009.
"George and the Big Bang" ISBN: 978-5-4370-0021-2

"George and the Treasures of the Universe" ISBN: 978-5-4370-0024-3
Annie urgently needs help from her best friend George. The robot that Annie's father, cosmologist Eric, sent to Mars is behaving very strangely; In addition, Annie discovered a highly mysterious letter in her father's supercomputer... Could this really be a message from aliens? Is there anyone in the universe besides us? How to find a planet suitable for life in space? It's not easy to make sense of all this. But George, Annie and their new friend Emmett do not lose hope of finding answers to their questions. The new book by Stephen and Lucy Hawking is not just an exciting story of space adventures. It is full of amazing facts and the latest data about our Universe. You will also find scientific essays written by the best scientists of our time!

Abstract to the third book "George and the Big Bang" ISBN: 978-5-4370-0021-2
Three, two, one, GO! The third book about George, Annie, scientist Eric Bellis, the supercomputer Cosmos and the world full of mysteries around us is starting!
Professor Eric is working on a massive "theory of everything" and riding on a lunar rover. Computer Cosmos is looking for a home for Freddy the pig, which his grandmother gave to George for his birthday. Annie makes a new friend, the son of a director and a skateboarder... and at the same time, in one of the dark basements of Foxbridge University, a conspiracy is brewing against Eric's research, intrigue is being woven and a destructive bomb is being prepared!
George and Annie have to save the absent-minded scientist and his colleagues, and at the same time find out how our Universe came into being, what connects vacuum and vacuum cleaners, whether there are other solar systems in space similar to ours, what Newton’s laws and the theory of relativity are, and much, much more. . The captivating plot and the simplicity with which Stephen and Lucy Hawking talk about complex things can awaken interest in science even in a stone statue. And curious children and adults are guaranteed complete scientific and entertainment delight.

View illustrations.

Stephen Hawking(born 1942 in Oxford) is one of the most famous cosmologists and theoretical physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, who devoted his entire life to the study of the Universe and its secrets. Winner of twelve honorary academic titles, a large number of awards, medals and prizes, member of the Royal Scientific Society of England and the US National Academy of Sciences. Stephen Hawking is known to millions of readers around the world as a wonderful writer and popularizer of science.

Lucy Hawking, daughter of Stephen Hawking, first co-authored her famous father's book "George and the Secrets of the Universe." A journalist by profession, Lucy Hawking is the author of two novels for adults. He often publishes in British newspapers and magazines, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and the Times, and appears on the radio.

Download books by Stephen and Lucy Hawking

Like many famous scientists before him, Stephen Hawking did not stand out in any way at school or at the institute until exams came. The first round of exams was not passed very well, so the teachers decided to give Stephen an oral exam. Much later, one of the members of the examination committee will say: “Fortunately, the examiners immediately realized that they were talking to a student who was intellectually superior to themselves.” So Stephen Hawking remained to teach at the world-famous University of Cambridge.

Very soon Stephen got married, had a son and daughter, and became a member of the Royal Scientific Society. Unfortunately, the young scientist was struck by an illness that subsequently led him to almost complete paralysis.

Despite his illness, Stephen Hawking won the love of millions of adult readers thanks to his popular science activities - speeches, lectures and books for adults and children: “The World in a Nutshell”, “A Brief History of Time” and “George and the Secrets of the Universe”.