Author: John Langone
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 9780792239123
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Provides behind-the-scenes accounts of some of history's greatest science discoveries.

Author: John D. Barrow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019954817X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Cosmology & the universe.

Author: Ellis Potter
Publisher: Ellis Potter
ISBN: 9780983276852
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
In this simple volume, international lecturer Potter explores three major world views that propose radically different answers to eternal questions. In clear and compelling language, he shows that the three world views and the unique hope that each offers to humanity have profoundly different consequences for how people see everyday reality and the ultimate purpose of their lives.

Author: John Brockman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062230182
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Drawn from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, This Explains Everything will revolutionize your understanding of the world. What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ("The world's smartest website"—The Guardian), posed to the world's most influential minds. Flowing from the horizons of physics, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and more, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most surprising and brilliant theories of the way of our minds, societies, and universe work. Jared Diamond on biological electricity • Nassim Nicholas Taleb on positive stress • Steven Pinker on the deep genetic roots of human conflict • Richard Dawkins on pattern recognition • Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on simplicity • Lisa Randall on the Higgs mechanism • BRIAN Eno on the limits of intuition • Richard Thaler on the power of commitment • V. S. Ramachandran on the "neural code" of consciousness • Nobel Prize winner ERIC KANDEL on the power of psychotherapy • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on "Lord Acton's Dictum" • Lawrence M. Krauss on the unification of electricity and magnetism • plus contributions by Martin J. Rees • Kevin Kelly • Clay Shirky • Daniel C. Dennett • Sherry Turkle • Philip Zimbardo • Lee Smolin • Rebecca Newberger Goldstein • Seth Lloyd • Stewart Brand • George Dyson • Matt Ridley

Author: Frank Close
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782833099
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Physicist Frank Close takes the reader to the frontiers of science in a vividly told investigation of revolutionary science and enterprise from the seventeenth century to the present. He looks at what has been meant by theories of everything, explores the scientific breakthroughs they have allowed, and shows the far-reaching effects they have had on crucial aspects of life and belief. Theories of everything, he argues, can be described as those which draw on all relevant branches of knowledge to explain everything known about the universe. Such accounts may reign supreme for centuries. Then, often as a result of the advances they themselves have enabled, a new discovery is made which the current theory cannot explain. A new theory is needed which inspiration, sometimes, supplies. Moving from Isaac Newton's work on gravity and motion in the seventeenth century to thermodynamics and James Clerk Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism in the nineteenth to Max Planck's and Paul Dirac's quantum physics in the twentieth, Professor Close turns finally to contemporary physics and the power and limitations of the current theory of everything. The cycle in which one theory of everything is first challenged and then replaced by another is continuing right now.

Author: Roz Chast
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 158234423X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
The comprehensive book of cartoons from the beloved New Yorker cartoonist.--From publisher description.

Author: Margaret Wertheim
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802778739
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
For the past fifteen years, acclaimed science writer Margaret Wertheim has been collecting the works of "outsider physicists," many without formal training and all convinced that they have found true alternative theories of the universe. Jim Carter, the Einstein of outsiders, has developed his own complete theory of matter and energy and gravity that he demonstrates with experiments in his backyard,-with garbage cans and a disco fog machine he makes smoke rings to test his ideas about atoms. Captivated by the imaginative power of his theories and his resolutely DIY attitude, Wertheim has been following Carter's progress for the past decade. Centuries ago, natural philosophers puzzled out the laws of nature using the tools of observation and experimentation. Today, theoretical physics has become mathematically inscrutable, accessible only to an elite few. In rejecting this abstraction, outsider theorists insist that nature speaks a language we can all understand. Through a profoundly human profile of Jim Carter, Wertheim's exploration of the bizarre world of fringe physics challenges our conception of what science is, how it works, and who it is for.

Author: Helen Pluckrose
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA)
ISBN: 1634312031
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! Times, Sunday Times, and Financial Times Book-of-the-Year Selection! Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.

Author: Peter Woit
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446443019
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Not Even Wrong is a fascinating exploration of our attempts to come to grips with perhaps the most intellectually demanding puzzle of all: how does the universe work at its most fundamnetal level? The book begins with an historical survey of the experimental and theoretical developments that led to the creation of the phenomenally successful 'Standard Model' of particle physics around 1975. Despite its successes, the Standard Model does not answer all the key questions and physicists continuing search for answers led to the development of superstring theory. However, after twenty years, superstring theory has failed to advance beyond the Standard Model. The absence of experimental evidence is at the core of this controversial situation which means that it is impossible to prove that superstring theory is either right or wrong. To date, only the arguments of the theory's advocates have received much publicity. Not Even Wrong provides readers with another side of the story.

Author: Jeroen Lutters
Publisher: Valiz/Vis-A-VIS
ISBN: 9789492095749
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Creativity has been hailed as the driving force and most important skill of the 21st century? a power to be taught, understood, and deployed on all levels of society. In the humanities, however, truly understanding creativity has all but disappeared. Instead, insights into creativity emerge from fields such as neurology and theoretical physics, psychology and educational sciences. Using other perspectives has allowed us to deepen our understanding of the concept of creativity. This volume brings together the ideas of Spinoza, Goethe, Emerson, Benjamin, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Wittgenstein, and many others to open up new perspectives on enforcing creativity in society today.