Author : Anil Ananthaswamy
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 459 pages
File Size : 19,11 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Science
ISBN : 0547394527
The story of modern cosmology told through a tour of the most extraordinary detectors and telescopes in the world.
Author : Thom Powell
Publisher :
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 49,29 MB
Release : 2015-06-17
Category :
ISBN : 9780692458075
Watch Thom Powell make every mistake possible in his journey through paranormal investigation except one: at least he remembered to write it all down. Eventually, he figures things out. What begins as a clumsy two-step becomes a graceful ballet. Read his thoughts and learn from his experiences along the way. Benefit from the years Thom invested in figuring out in what is really going on at the Edges of Science.
Author : Max Brockman
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 10,42 MB
Release : 2011-10-13
Category : Science
ISBN : 0191628182
The next wave of science writing is here. Editor Max Brockman has talent-spotted 19 young scientists, working on leading-edge research across a wide range of fields. Nearly half of them are women, and all of them are great communicators: their passion and excitement makes this collection a wonderfully invigorating read. We hear from an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the solar system (and the universe); from the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory about why we keep making the same mistakes; from a Cambridge lab about DNA synthesis; from the Tanzanian savannah about what lies behind attractiveness; we hear about how to breed plants to withstand disease, about ways to extract significance from the Interne's enormous datasets, about oceanography, neuroscience, microbiology, and evolutionary psychology.
Author : Beverly Rubik
Publisher : Inst for Frontier Science
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 42,30 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Alternative medicine
ISBN : 9780965240109
Author : M. Mitchell Waldrop
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 492 pages
File Size : 26,52 MB
Release : 2019-10-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 150405914X
“If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly
Author : Jonathon Keats
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 40,54 MB
Release : 2010-10-14
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0199752907
The technological realm provides an unusually active laboratory not only for new ideas and products but also for the remarkable linguistic innovations that accompany and describe them. How else would words like qubit (a unit of quantum information), crowdsourcing (outsourcing to the masses), or in vitro meat (chicken and beef grown in an industrial vat) enter our language? In Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology, Jonathon Keats, author of Wired Magazine's monthly Jargon Watch column, investigates the interplay between words and ideas in our fast-paced tech-driven use-it-or-lose-it society. In 28 illuminating short essays, Keats examines how such words get coined, what relationship they have to their subject matter, and why some, like blog, succeed while others, like flog, fail. Divided into broad categories--such as commentary, promotion, and slang, in addition to scientific and technological neologisms--chapters each consider one exemplary word, its definition, origin, context, and significance. Examples range from microbiome (the collective genome of all microbes hosted by the human body) and unparticle (a form of matter lacking definite mass) to gene foundry (a laboratory where artificial life forms are assembled) and singularity (a hypothetical future moment when technology transforms the whole universe into a sentient supercomputer). Together these words provide not only a survey of technological invention and its consequences, but also a fascinating glimpse of novel language as it comes into being. No one knows this emerging lexical terrain better than Jonathon Keats. In writing that is as inventive and engaging as the language it describes, Virtual Words offers endless delights for word-lovers, technophiles, and anyone intrigued by the essential human obsession with naming.
Author : Roberto Trotta
Publisher : Basic Books (AZ)
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 27,72 MB
Release : 2014-09-23
Category : Science
ISBN : 0465044719
From the big bang to black holes, from dark matter to dark energy, from the origins of the universe to its ultimate destiny, The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the most important discoveries and mysteries in modern cosmology—with a twist. The book’s lexicon is limited to the thousand most common words in the English language, excluding physics, energy, galaxy, or even universe. Through the eyes of a fictional scientist (Student-People) hunting for dark matter with one of the biggest telescopes (Big-Seers) on Earth (Home-World), cosmologist Roberto Trotta explores the most important ideas about our universe (All-there-is) in language simple enough for anyone to understand. A unique blend of literary experimentation and science popularization, this delightful book is a perfect gift for any aspiring astronomer. The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the universe on a human scale, and the result is out of this world.
Author : Michael Brooks
Publisher : Abrams
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 14,64 MB
Release : 2015-02-10
Category : Science
ISBN : 146831159X
“Engaging . . . touches on advanced computing, essential differences between men and women, the power of the will to live, mysteries of the cosmos and more.” —The Washington Post The atom. The Big Bang. DNA. Natural selection. All are ideas that revolutionized science—and all were dismissed out of hand when they first appeared. The surprises haven’t stopped in recent years, and in At the Edge of Uncertainty, bestselling author Michael Brooks investigates the new wave of radical insights that are shaping the future of scientific discovery. Brooks takes us to the extreme frontiers of what we understand about the world. He journeys from the observations that might rewrite our story of how the cosmos came to be, through the novel biology behind our will to live, and on to the physiological root of consciousness. Along the way, he examines the gender imbalance in clinical trials, explores how merging humans with other species might provide a solution to the shortage of organ donors, and finds out whether the universe really is like a computer or if the flow of time is a mere illusion. “Absorbing . . . scintillating . . . the edgy edge of scientific investigation presented with verve.” —Kirkus Reviews “Mind-bending . . . Brooks handily works his way through these thorny problems, highlighting current research and researchers along the way.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Author : Dan Hooper
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 48,97 MB
Release : 2019-11-05
Category : Science
ISBN : 0691197008
A new look at the first few seconds after the Big Bang—and how research into these moments continues to revolutionize our understanding of our universe Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: we still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history. Delving into the remarkable science of cosmology, Dan Hooper describes many of the extraordinary and perplexing questions that scientists are asking about the origin and nature of our world. Hooper examines how we are using the Large Hadron Collider and other experiments to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang and test promising theories for how and why our universe came to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. We may be poised to finally discover how dark matter was formed during our universe’s first moments, and, with new telescopes, we are also lifting the veil on the era of cosmic inflation, which led to the creation of our world as we know it. Wrestling with the mysteries surrounding the initial moments that followed the Big Bang, At the Edge of Time presents an accessible investigation of our universe and its origin.
Author : Jayant V Narlikar
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 24,5 MB
Release : 2003-08-04
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9351189287
India has a rich history of scientific accomplishments. In the fifth century, nearly one millennium before Copernicus, the Indian astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata theorized that the earth spins on its axis. Likewise, in the twentieth century physicist Meghnad Saha’s ionization equation opened the door to stellar astrophysics. But India’s scientific achievements have occurred as flashes of brilliance rather than as a clear trajectory of progress. So how did India, with its historic university system and excellent observatories, lose its scientific edge? Cosmologist, founder director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and science fiction author Jayant V. Narlikar tracks the highs and lows of Indian science across the millennia, distinguishing fact from fiction. Through a lively narrative of breakthroughs and failures, he explores the glories of India’s scientific advances and questions the more fanciful so-called discoveries. His essays are invigorated by his excitement for new findings, and he argues passionately for preserving the true scientific temperament instead of granting legitimacy to such pseudosciences as astrology. Above all, Narlikar raises issues that both the layperson and the scientist need to consider as India seeks to lead the world in information technology and biotechnology.
