We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

Jorge Cham · Daniel Whiteson

May 2017 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

Prepare to learn everything we still don’t know about our strange and mysterious universe 

Humanity's understanding of the physical world is full of gaps. Not tiny little gaps you can safely ignore —there are huge yawning voids in our basic notions of how the world works. PHD Comics creator Jorge Cham and particle physicist Daniel Whiteson have teamed up to explore everything we don't know about the universe: the enormous holes in our knowledge of the cosmos. Armed with their popular infographics, cartoons, and unusually entertaining and lucid explanations of science, they give us the best answers currently available for a lot of questions that are still perplexing scientists, including:

* Why does the universe have a speed limit?
* Why aren't we all made of antimatter?
* What (or who) is attacking Earth with tiny, superfast particles?
* What is dark matter, and why does it keep ignoring us?

It turns out the universe is full of weird things that don't make any sense. But Cham and Whiteson make a compelling case that the questions we can't answer are as interesting as the ones we can.

This fully illustrated introduction to the biggest mysteries in physics also helpfully demystifies many complicated things we do know about, from quarks and neutrinos to gravitational waves and exploding black holes. With equal doses of humor and delight, Cham and Whiteson invite us to see the universe as a possibly boundless expanse of uncharted territory that's still ours to explore.

Ratings and reviews

For a typical couch scientist, this book might look a bit boring in the first couple of chapters. The book gets interesting after the first third and ask interesting questions about our universe (with some questionable tongue-in-cheek humor XD ). But the most important thing about the book, I think, is that it reminds us to wonder about our finite (or infinite, we don't know) universe. Recommended!

The comic relief re: you have no idea just how much you have no idea about via calvin and hobbes-style comics with nerd-approved punchlines are top notch. Not going to lie, i didnt need to read much of the free sample to realize this wasnt a book worth purchasing.

What a brilliant humbling romp through our limits of all the mysteries we find in the universe. The authors take you through a multitude of scientific disciplines and shine the light on all the big questions yet unanswered. They also manage to get their point across without a lot of science based jargon, and they have a great sense of humor as well. Highly recommended.

About the author

Jorge Cham is the creator of the popular online comic Piled Higher and Deeper, also known as PHD Comics. He earned his PhD in robotics at Stanford.

Daniel Whiteson is a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of California, Irvine, and a fellow of the American Physical Society. He conducts research using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.