Showing titles in Physics

The latest volume in the bestselling series from Edge.org dubbed the world s smartest website by The Guardian brings together 175 of the world s most innovative and brilliant thinkers to discuss recent scientific breakthroughs that will shape the future. Scientific developments radically...

A leading astronomer and gifted teacher takes readers on a wondrous tour of how science confronts the big questions—about the universe’s origins, destiny, and fundamental nature—and how it contends with the limits of our knowledge Humans have learned a lot about the world around us and the...

Utterly beautiful. Profoundly disconcerting. Quantum theory is quite simply the most successful account of the physical universe ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the 21st-century technology that we now take for granted. But at the same time it has completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at its most fundamental level.

We all make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. Not even some of the greatest geniuses in history, as Mario Livio tells us in this marvelous story of scientific error and breakthrough. Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein were all brilliant scientists. Each made groundbreaking contributions to his field - but each also stumbled badly. These five scientists expanded our knowledge of life on Earth, the evolution of the Earth itself, and the evolution of the universe, despite and because of their errors. As Mario Livio luminously explains, the scientific process advances through error.

Short Biographies of some of the most influential engineers who developed the modern manufacturing methods behind the Industrial Revolution. Engineers and designers tend to be fairly anonymous figures in history – content to make things rather than write about them. At the time Smiles wrote “Industrial Biography” the whole of British society was undergoing massive changes driven by developments in the High Technology of the day – Mechanical Engineering. Much of the knowledge we have of the brilliant mechanical engineers who developed the iron and machine tools of the nineteenth century...

Interesting, witty, and unusual epitaphs found in graveyards in England, Wales, Scotland, and more. Feast on this gem: Dr. I. Letsome wrote the following for his own tombstone: "When people's ill, they comes to I, I physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em; Sometimes they live, sometimes they die; What's that to I? I. Letsome." - Summary by MamaPhish and Dr. I. Letsome

В мире науки есть множество явлений, которые кажутся невероятными, но мы вынуждены в них верить. Такие концепции, как корпускулярно-волновой дуализм света, бросают вызов привычному для нас пониманию реальности. Мы не можем увидеть темную материю, хотя она, по утверждению ученых, составляет 90% массы Вселенной. Большой взрыв—еще один пример: никто не был его свидетелем, но наука полагается на его следы как на основу современной космологии.

This is an engaging biography of the renowned aviator. In his introduction, Briand says, " Amelia Earhart was one of America’s great heroines; her life was in many ways unique. She was one of a kind, and the fabric of her life was woven of strands that are rarely produced: she had an insatiable curiosity about everything in life—ideas, books, people, places, mechanical things; she loved all kinds of sports and games, especially those “only for boys”; she fidgeted with an implacable unrest to experiment, to try new things; she teemed with a zest for living, paradoxically entwined with a...

In The Edge of Space-Time, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein takes listeners to the boundaries of the universe, inviting us to spend time at the edge of what we know about space-time – and about ourselves. Guided by her conviction that science is for everybody, Prescod-Weinstein renders accessible some of the most abstract concepts of theoretical physics and draws on poetry and popular culture – from Queen Latifah to Lewis Carroll to Big K.R.I.T. to Sun Ra and Star Trek – to tell fascinating stories about the fundamental quantum nature of space-time and everything inside of it.

It's the ultimate technology: nanotechnology - the attempt to build ordinary objects from the atoms up, molecule by molecule. So named because its building blocks are the smallest pieces of matter, nanotechnology will give us complete control over the structure of matter, allowing us to build any substance or structure permitted by the Laws of Nature. Placing atoms as if they were bricks, nano-machines could turn grass clippings into prime sirloins - directly, without cows.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, long-suppressed information has emerged on Heisenberg’s role in the Nazi atomic bomb project. In Beyond Uncertainty, Cassidy interprets this and other previously unknown material within the context of his vast research and tackles the vexing questions of a scientist’s personal responsibility and guilt when serving an abhorrent military regime.

Brought to you by Penguin. For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths - via ever more mind-boggling numbers - led to strange new understandings of reality. But what are these mysterious numbers...

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and...

Apollo is the behind-the-scenes story of an epic achievement. Based on exhaustive research that included many exclusive interviews, Apollo tells how America went from a standing start to a landing on the moon at a speed that now seems impossible. It describes the unprecedented engineering challenges that had to be overcome to create the mammoth Saturn V and the facilities to launch it. It takes you into the tragedy of the fire on Apollo 1, the first descent to the lunar surface, and the rescue of Apollo 13.

The United States, Russia, China, and other countries around the world have experienced contact with the phenomenon, as we will discover in War. Americans demand that their leaders reveal what they know. They demand disclosure. But what do our allies, and our enemies, know about the phenomenon and why have they not already disclosed? Why is this an international issue, and not just an American one? And what does that tell us about the phenomenon?

The possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos is one of the most profound subjects that human beings can ponder. Astrophysicist Andrew May gives an expert overview of our current state of knowledge, looking at how life started on Earth, the tell-tale ‘signatures’ it produces and how such signatures might be detected elsewhere in the solar system or on the many ‘exoplanets’ now being discovered by the Kepler and TESS missions.

Flatland, first published in 1884, is classic work of satire. The full title, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, reveals the story's most compelling characteristic, its discussion of multiple dimensions. It is this fascinating examination which has contributed to Flatland's enduring popularity.

1961. Hidden deep within the forests of central Soviet Russia is a place that doesn’t appear on any map: a city called Arzamas-16. Here a community of dedicated scientists, technicians and engineers are building the most powerful nuclear device the world will ever see - 3,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. But 10 days before the bomb is to be tested, a young physicist is found dead. His body contains enough radioactive poison to kill thousands. The Arzamas authorities believe it is suicide - they want the corpse disposed of and the incident forgotten.

How does Einstein’s description of space and time compare with Doctor Who? Can James Bond really escape from an armor-plated railroad car by cutting through the floor with a laser concealed in a wristwatch? What would it take to create a fully intelligent android, such as Star Trek’s Commander Data? Exploring Science Through Science Fiction addresses these and other intriguing questions, using science fiction as a springboard for discussing fundamental science concepts and cutting-edge science research.

In this Very Short Introduction, John Heilbron draws on sources never before presented in English to cover the life and work of one of the most creative physicists of the 20th century. In addition to his role as a scientist, Heilbron considers Bohr as a statesman and Danish cultural icon, who built scientific institutions and pushed for the extension of international cooperation in science to all nation states. As a humanist he was concerned with the cultivation of all sides of the individual, and with the complementary contributions of all peoples to the sum of human culture.