The Eerie Silence: Searching for Ourselves in the Universe - Softcover

Davies, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141037784 ISBN 13: 9780141037783

Publisher: Penguin, 2011

Synopsis

Paul Davies' The Eerie Silence: Searching For Ourselves in the Universe is an engaging and lucid guide to the 'Fermi Paradox' - why isn't the universe teeming with alien life?

If aliens ever contact us, it will be the single most significant event in human history. And Paul Davies will be responsible for saying something back.

For fifty years the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence has been scanning the skies. Now Davies, head of SETI's Post-Detection Task Group, with 'a rare talent for making physics mind-bogglingly vivid and exciting' (Times Higher Education), explores what the mysterious silence it has encountered could mean.

Here he looks at exciting new ways to make contact with extra-terrestrial life. He considers what form advanced alien intelligence is likely to take if it exists. And more importantly, what exactly it would mean if it didn't ­- how extraordinary it would be if we were alone, to be human and here in this staggering, eerie silence...

'A magnificent cosmic tour of what might be out there in space'
  Sunday Times

'Rather wonderful'
  New Scientist

'Conveys excellently the fascination of the quest'
  The Times

'An authoritatively written, immensely clear, lay person's guide to the many things we don't know about the rest of the universe'
  Guardian

Paul Davies is Director of the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative, both at Arizona State University. An internationally-acclaimed physicist, writer and broadcaster, Davies is the author of some twenty award-winning books, including The Eerie Silence: Searching for Ourselves in the Universe, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? and The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning.

About this title

Review:

In an area more given to fabulation than fact, [Paul Davies'] level-headedness is positively refreshing. If you ever start worrying about why no one is talking to us, this is the book to calm you down (David Papineau Observer)

Davies is the most engaging of writers (Clive Cookson FT)

An immensely readable investigation of the SETI enterprise (Michael Hanlon New Scientist)

A magnificent cosmic tour d'horizon of what we know, and what we might yet encounter out there, in the apparent emptiness of deep space (Christoper Hart Sunday Times)

From the Back Cover:

“Refreshing . . . A penetrating analysis of the assumptions that underlie SETI and the entire enterprise of searching for life beyond Earth.”—Chris McKay, Nature

Fifty years ago, Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at nearby stars in the hope of picking up a signal from an alien civilization. Thus began one of the boldest scientific projects in history, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). However, astronomers have little to report but an eerie silence—eerie because many scientists are convinced that the universe is teeming with life. Could it be, wonders the physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies, that we’ve been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong way?

Closely involved with SETI for three decades, Davies now chairs the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup, charged with deciding what to do if we’re confronted with evidence of alien intelligence. He believes the search so far has fallen into an anthropocentric trap—assuming an alien species will look, think, and behave like us. In this mind-expanding and provocative book, he refocuses the search, challenging existing ideas of what form an alien intelligence might take, how it might try to communicate with us, and how we should respond if it does.

“An immensely readable investigation of the SETI enterprise . . . [A] wonderful book.”—New Scientist

PAUL DAVIES is an internationally acclaimed physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Mind of God, About Time, How to Build a Time Machine, and The Goldilocks Enigma.

 

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0141037784
• ISBN 13: 9780141037783
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272