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Today marks the 100th anniversary of The Tunguska Event, a huge explosion in Sibera that has puzzled scientist and pseudo-scientists for years. To mark the occasion, we’re releasing Doctor Jack’s Soapbox Seminars, a series of lectures proffered to explain and discuss the event:

What if the cataclysmic Tunguska explosion of 1908 was caused, not by a meteor or a comet, but by a microscopic black hole?

… Well, like as not, you already know that story — the one told by Bill DeSmedt in his award-winning novel/podcast Singularity. What you may not know, though, is the story behind the story: the science behind Singularity.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), you can learn a lot about primordial black holes and the Tunguska Event and black hole radiation and the Big Bang on the pages of Singularity. And you don’t have to take our word for it: some world-class physicists think so too:

“Bill got the vast majority of the physics right, which is highly unusual — especially in a book that is such a good read.”
– Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology and author of Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy

“Singularity is an uncommonly good science thriller, quite free of the poetic license some writers take with the laws of nature in order to put together the yarn.”
– Jacob D. Bekenstein, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem and discoverer of black-hole entropy

“As a specialist in black hole astrophysics, I would have to say that this is one of the most creative uses of primordial black-hole theory in science fiction.”
– Scott A. Hughes, Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Now, for the first time, the real-life counterpart of Singularity’s resident cosmologist, Doctor Jack Adler, steps up to explain what it is all these scientists are raving about, in his “Soapbox Seminars” — an informal look at the hard-core science behind the novel.

 

 Doctor Jack’s Soapbox Seminars promo [1:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This entry was posted by Evo on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 6:39 am and is filed under New Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.