Audiobooks by Richard Panek

Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos

The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming the universe right before our eyes-and here, for the first time, is the inside account of how the mission originated, how it performs its miracles of science, and what its revolutionary images are revealing. Pillars of Creation tells the story of one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of civilization, a $10 billion instrument with a staggeringly ambitious goal: unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. Award-winning science writer Richard Panek stands us shoulder to shoulder with senior scientists as they conceive the mission, meet decades-long challenges to bring it to fruition, and, now, use its unprecedented technology to yield new discoveries about the origins of our solar system, to search for life on planets around other suns, and to trace the growth of hundreds of billions of galaxies all the way back to the birth of the first stars. The Webb telescope has captured the world's imagination, and Pillars of Creation shows how and why-including through sixteen pages of awe-inspiring, full-color photos. At once a testament to human ingenuity and a celebration of mankind's biggest leap yet into the cosmos, Panek's eye-opening book reveals our universe as we've never seen it before-through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope, a marvel that is itself a pillar of creation.

Richard Panek (Author), Ray Porter, TBD (Narrator)

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The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

THE AUTISTIC BRAIN is the first book by Temple Grandin that will be neither a memoir nor a book on animals. As always, Temple's ability to cut through the jungle of information and make the science clear is evident on every page; her skills as a scientist and her original thinking offer some significant new insights into the understanding of autism. Temple Grandin teaches readers the science of the autistic brain, and with it the history and sociology of autism. By being autistic--by being able to look from the inside out and from the outside in--the author's insights are not just unique, they're groundbreaking. According to Temple, our understanding of autism has been perhaps fundamentally wrong for the past 70 years.

Richard Panek, Temple Speaker Grandin (Author), Andrea Gallo (Narrator)

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The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

Over the past few decades, a handful of scientists have been racing to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only four percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown. Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of the quest to find this "dark" matter and an even more bizarre substance called "dark energy." This is perhaps the greatest mystery in all of science, and solving it will bring fame, funding, and certainly a Nobel Prize. Based on in-depth reporting and interviews with the major players-from Berkeley's feisty, excitable Saul Perlmutter and Harvard's witty but exacting Robert Kirshner to the doyenne of astronomy, Vera Rubin-the book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fueled their search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe. The stakes couldn't be higher. Our view of the cosmos is profoundly wrong, and Copernicus was only the beginning: not just Earth, but all common matter is a marginal part of existence. Panek's fast-paced narrative, filled with original reporting and behind-the-scenes details, brings this epic story to life for the very first time. "Richard Panek has made this cosmic quest exciting and understandable."-Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Einstein: His Life and Universe

Richard Panek (Author), Ray Porter (Narrator)

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