To study astronomy is to consider the most wondrous phenomena on the grandest of scales - the universe and all it contains. Beginning with our earliest explorations of the night sky, William Waller takes us on an enthralling journey through the Milky Way and far, far beyond. He combines science and history to show how our understanding of everything from black holes to the structure of the universe has evolved over time, illuminating past discoveries and offering contemporary insights into the cosmic histories of stars, planets and galaxies. Whether object of study or curiosity, the universe - and all it contains - is tantalisingly introduced here.

This visual guide is packed with amazing diagrams and infographics to answer all your burning scientific head-scratchers - from gravity and black holes to earthquakes and gene therapy. In How Science Works you will find the most fascinating phenomena in the Universe visually explained, from pulleys to string theory, light to lasers, and chemical reactions to artificial intelligence. If you have ever wondered why the sky is blue, how a black hole works, or what happens in a tsunami, this indispensable guide is for you. Rather than long columns of text, How Science Works is filled with diagrams and infographics, to make even the most difficult concept fun and easy to grasp. Turn the pages to understand dark matter, radioactivity and so much more, and find answers to the really big questions including how life began, will the Universe end, and are we really alone? With hours of enthralling reading, How Science Works is the book you wished you'd had at school and it's the one you'll want for your family.

On the night of March 26, 1938, nuclear physicist Ettore Majorana boarded a ship, cash and passport in hand. He was never seen again. In "A Brilliant Darkness," theoretical physicist Joao Magueijo tells the story of Majorana and his research group, "the Via Panisperna Boys," who discovered atomic fission in 1934. As Majorana, the most brilliant of the group, began to realize the implications of what they had found, he became increasingly unstable. Did he commit suicide that night in Palermo? Was he kidnapped? Did he stage his own death?

"A Brilliant Darkness" chronicles Majorana's invaluable contributions to science--including his major discovery, the Majorana neutrino--while revealing the truth behind his fascinating and tragic life.

A gripping investigation that opens fresh perspectives on biology and anthropology 'At the cutting edge of contemporary thought' GUARDIAN 'A thoroughly enjoyable read' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH While living among Peruvian Indians, anthropologist Jeremy Narby became intrigued by their claim that their phenomenal knowledge of plants and biochemistry was communicated to them directly while under the influence of hallucinogens. Despite his initial scepticism, Narby found himself engaged in an increasingly obsessive personal quest. The evidence he collected - on subjects as diverse as molecular biology, shamanism, neurology and ancient mythology - led inexorably to the conclusion that the Indians' claims were literally true: to a consciousness prepared with drugs, specific biochemical knowledge could indeed be directly transmitted through DNA itself. A gripping investigation that opens fresh perspectives on biology, anthropology and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent is new science of the most exhilarating kind.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Almost everything we know about the Universe has come from studying the messages carried by light from outer space. Until only a handful of decades ago, this meant observing optical photons in the narrow visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, recent technological developments have now enabled us to extend this range and explore the Universe at radio, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray wavelengths. The observations reveal a plethora of exotic phenomena such as young galaxies at the edge of the visible Universe, quasars, pulsars, colliding galaxies, and exploding stars, often at great distances. We have discovered that the Universe is expanding and that the expansion itself is accelerating. Closer to our home planet, we track killer asteroids and comets. Working closely together, observational astronomy and astrophysics have shown us how stars produce their energy, where the chemical elements come from, how black holes form, and how the giant supermassive black holes lurking in the hearts of galaxies spew immensely powerful jets of particles and energy thousands of light years out into space. And we now have new ways beyond light to probe the mysteries of the Universe. This Very Short Introduction describes how neutrinos and gravitational waves are revolutionizing our knowledge. How do we know all this? Advances in telescope technologies offer a partial explanation, but technology alone is not enough. Unlocking the secrets of the Universe also involves the critical application of the laws of physics to the observations. Cottrell describes how we are turning observations into knowledge and how theory, in turn, is inspiring new observations. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Time travel is a familiar theme of science fiction, but is it really possible? Surprisingly, time travel is not forbidden by the laws of physics - and John Gribbin argues that if it is not impossible then it must be possible. Gribbin brilliantly illustrates the possibilities of time travel by comparing familiar themes from science fiction with their real-world scientific counterparts, including Einstein's theories of relativity, black holes, quantum physics, and the multiverse, illuminated by examples from the fictional tales of Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Carl Sagan and others. The result is an entertaining guide to some deep mysteries of the Universe which may leave you wondering whether time actually passes at all, and if it does, whether we are moving forwards or backwards. A must-read for science fiction fans and anyone intrigued by deep science.

For many years, de Waal has observed chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors and bonobos share their food. Now he delivers fascinating fresh evidence for the seeds of ethical behavior in primate societies that further cements the case for the biological origins of human fairness. Interweaving vivid tales from the animal kingdom with thoughtful philosophical analysis, de Waal seeks a bottom-up explanation of morality that emphasizes our connection with animals. In doing so, de Waal explores for the first time the implications of his work for our understanding of modern religion. Whatever the role of religious moral imperatives, he sees it as a Johnny-come-lately role that emerged only as an addition to our natural instincts for cooperation and empathy.

But unlike the dogmatic neo-atheist of his book s title, de Waal does not scorn religion per se. Instead, he draws on the long tradition of humanism exemplified by the painter Hieronymus Bosch and asks reflective readers to consider these issues from a positive perspective: What role, if any, does religion play for a well-functioning society today? And where can believers and nonbelievers alike find the inspiration to lead a good life?

Rich with cultural references and anecdotes of primate behavior, The Bonobo and the Atheist engagingly builds a unique argument grounded in evolutionary biology and moral philosophy. Ever a pioneering thinker, de Waal delivers a heartening and inclusive new perspective on human nature and our struggle to find purpose in our lives."

John Holland is one of the few scientists, who all by themselves and by their pursuits, helped change the course of science and the wealth of human knowledge. There is hardly a field of science or problems, that is not affected by John's work on complexity and in particular, complex adaptive systems. On the occasion of his 85th birthday, many of his friends wrote about John, about facets of this remarkable man that only people close to him can know and tell.This book collects those stories highlighting aspects of the creation of complexity science that will most likely not be found in the books on John's works.The stories and anecdotes about his quests, his collaborators, and his friends, show his incredible mind, his boyish curiosity and explorative energy, his philosophy of life, his enormous hospitality and natural inclination to make friends.Published in collaboration with Institute Para Limes.

Sally Coulthard explores the miraculous world of the earthworm, the modest little creature without whom life as we know it would not be possible. For Charles Darwin - who estimated every acre of land contained 53,000 earthworms - the humble earthworm was the most important creature on the planet. And yet, most people know almost nothing about these little engineers of the earth. We take them for granted but, without the earthworm, the world's soil would be barren, and our gardens, fields and farms wouldn't be able to grow the food and support the animals we need to survive. Sally Coulthard provides a complete profile of the earthworm by answering fifty questions about these wiggling creatures, from 'What happens if I chop a worm in half?' to 'Would humans survive if worms went extinct?' Fascinating and beautifully illustrated, The Book of the Earthworm offers a feast of quirky facts and practical advice about the world's most industrious - but least understood - invertebrate.

Wisdom of the Martians of Science refers to five scientists whose brilliance contributed to shaping the modern world. John von Neumann was a pioneer of the modern computer; Theodore von Karman was the scientist behind the US Air Force; Leo Szilard initiated the development of nuclear weapons; the Nobel laureate Eugene P Wigner was the world's first nuclear engineer; and Edward Teller was the father of the hydrogen bomb. They were born and raised in Budapest, were forced out of Hungary and then from Germany, they became Americans, and devoted themselves to the defense of the United States and the Free World.They contributed significant discoveries to fundamental science ranging from the properties of materials to the application of the symmetry principle in physics, to creating information theory, to game theory. The areas in which we can learn about their wisdom include applications of science to past, present and future real-world needs; defense; education; environment; human nature; humor; politics; religion; weather modification, and others.This book shows the wisdom of the Martians by presenting their thoughts and ideas in their own words and placing them into context. Their wisdom is intriguing, witty, provocative and thought provoking. It extended over many aspects of life and culture that impinge on our existence. While we cannot always agree with what they say, they are never boring. The power of their words and their philosophies will inspire the readers to pursue their own dreams.

Do you know silica, the tetrahedra of silicon and oxygen constituting the crystals of New Agers and the desiccant in a box of new shoes? It's no mere mundane mineral. As chemically reacting silicate rocks, silica set off the chain of events known as the origin of life. As biomineralized opal, it is the cell wall, skeleton, spicules, and scales of organisms ornamenting numerous lobes of the tree of life. Cryptocrystalline silica made into stone tools helped drive the evolution of our hands and our capability for complex grammar, music, and mathematics. As quartz crystals, silica is impressively electric and ubiquitous in modern technology (think sonar, radios, telephones, ultrasound, and cheap but precise watches). Silica is inescapable when we take a drink or mow the lawn and it has already started to save the Earth from the carbon dioxide we're spewing into the atmosphere. This book tells these scientific tales and more, to give dear, modest silica its due.

This book is an essay collection, along with short stories, which attempts to explain some scientific ideas.Jeremy Bernstein was a long time staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine as well as a theoretical physicist. He has received several awards for his writing.

Why do twins look alike? How are we similar to our parents? What is the genetic code? Professor Lin He, an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, shares his childhood stories and knowledge of genetics in this vividly illustrated popular science book.

You've heard about Alice's adventures through the looking glass. Well, Alice is about to embark on another amazing journey. She's going to shrink again - to the size of a nuclear particle - but she's not going down the rabbit hole. She's headed for Quantumland. And what is Quantumland? Think of it as an intellectual amusement park smaller than an atom, where every ride, game, and attraction demonstrates a different aspect of quantum mechanics - the often baffling, always intriguing theoretical framework that seems to provide the most accurate explanations of the way things are in the physical world. In this masterful blend of fantasy and science, Robert Gilmore uses the allegory of Alice's travels to make the uncertainty principle, Pauli's principle, high-energy particle physics, and other crucial parts of quantum theory accessible and exciting.

Why is life the way it is? Bacteria evolved into complex life just once in four billion years of life on earth-and all complex life shares many strange properties, from sex to ageing and death. If life evolved on other planets, would it be the same or completely different? In The Vital Question, Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a cogent solution to conundrums that have troubled scientists for decades. The answer, he argues, lies in energy: how all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a bolt of lightning. In unravelling these scientific enigmas, making sense of life's quirks, Lane's explanation provides a solution to life's vital questions: why are we as we are, and why are we here at all? This is ground-breaking science in an accessible form, in the tradition of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

This book is an essay collection, along with short stories, which attempts to explain some scientific ideas.Jeremy Bernstein was a long time staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine as well as a theoretical physicist. He has received several awards for his writing.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Elephant's on Acid comes a collection of the wackiest theories from science and history.

What if we’re living inside a black hole? What if we’ve already found extraterrestrial life? What if the dinosaurs died in a nuclear war? What if Jesus Christ was actually a mushroom?

In Psychedelic Apes, bestselling author Alex Boese will delve into the curious scientific subculture of weird theories. Thoroughly bizarre and contrary to the established norm, these ideas are often vehemently rejected by the intellectual community.

From the creation of the universe to the evolution of humans, the birth of civilization right through to our more recent past, Psychedelic Apes explores some of the craziest ideas from science and history and shows that, sometimes, even the weirdest theories may be proved true . . .

Quantum mechanics is one of mankind's most remarkable intellectual achievements. Stunningly successful and elegant, it challenges our deepest intuitions about the world. In this book, seventeen physicists and philosophers, all deeply concerned with understanding quantum mechanics, reply to Schlosshauer's penetrating questions about the central issues. They grant us an intimate look at their radically different ways of making sense of the theory's strangeness. What is quantum mechanics about? What is it telling us about nature? Can quantum information or new experiments help lift the fog? And where are we headed next? Everyone interested in the contemporary but often longstanding conundrums of quantum theory, whether lay reader or expert, will find much food for thought in these pages. A wealth of personal reflections and anecdotes guarantee an engaging read. Participants: Guido Bacciagaluppi, Caslav Brukner, Jeffrey Bub, Arthur Fine, Christopher Fuchs, GianCarlo Ghirardi, Shelly Goldstein, Daniel Greenberger, Lucien Hardy, Anthony Leggett, Tim Maudlin, David Mermin, Lee Smolin, Antony Valentini, David Wallace, Anton Zeilinger, and Wojciech Zurek.

Solutions to the 25th & 26th International Young Physicists' Tournament provides original, quantitative solutions in fulfilling seemingly impossible tasks. The book expands on the solutions required by the problems. Many of the articles include modification, extension to existing models in references, or derivation and computation based on fundamental physics, and are not confined to the models and methods in present literatures.The International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) is one of the most prestigious international physics contests among high school students. This book is based on the solutions of 2012 and 2013 IYPT problems. The young authors provide quantitative solutions to practical problems in everyday life, such as the 2013 problem "Bouncing ball" that shows "how the nature of the collision changes if the ball contains liquid", "Colored plastic" (2013 problem 6) and "Helmholtz carousel" (2013 problem 12) etc.This book is intended as a college-level solutions guide to the challenging open-ended problems. It is a good reference book for undergraduates, advanced high-school students, physics educators and the curious public interested in the intriguing phenomenon encountered in daily life.

The ?rst and foremost goal of this lecture series was to show the beauty, depth and usefulness of the key ideas in computer science. While working on the lecture notes, we came to understand that one can recognize the true spirit of a scienti?c discipline only by viewing its contributions in the framework of science as a whole. We present computer science here as a fundamental science that, interacting with other scienti?c disciplines, changed and changes our view on the world, that contributes to our understanding of the fundamental concepts of science and that sheds new light on and brings new meaning to several of these concepts. We show that computer science is a discipline that discovers spectacular, unexpected facts, that ?nds ways out in seemingly unsolvable s- uations, and that can do true wonders. The message of this book is that computer science is a fascinating research area with a big impact on the real world, full of spectacular ideas and great ch- lenges. It is an integral part of science and engineering with an above-average dynamic over the last 30 years and a high degree of interdisciplinarity. The goal of this book is not typical for popular science writing, whichoftenrestrictsitselftooutliningtheimportanceofaresearch area. Whenever possible we strive to bring full understanding of the concepts and results presented.

The ultimate guide to understanding biology Have you ever wondered how the food you eat becomes the energy your body needs to keep going? The theory of evolution says that humans and chimps descended from a common ancestor, but does it tell us how and why? We humans are insatiably curious creatures who can't help wondering how things work starting with our own bodies. Wouldn't it be great to have a single source of quick answers to all our questions about how living things work? Now there is. From molecules to animals, cells to ecosystems, Biology For Dummies answers all your questions about how living things work. Written in plain English and packed with dozens of enlightening illustrations, this reference guide covers the most recent developments and discoveries in evolutionary, reproductive, and ecological biology. It's also complemented with lots of practical, up-to-date examples to bring the information to life. * Discover how living things work * Think like a biologist and use scientific methods * Understand lifecycle processes Whether you're enrolled in a biology class or just want to know more about this fascinating and ever-evolving field of study, Biology For Dummies will help you unlock the mysteries of how life works.

The book is expressly written for the young minds because they are our best hope for a safer tomorrow. The book is profusely illustrated, as it offers a joyride to the world of the whole range of hazards through simplified teaching-learning process, with less of teaching and more of learning. This is because most readers would love to learn without actually being taught. The book is designed to take advantage of distilled wisdom of centuries to inspire and enlighten the common man to turn them into prime movers of safer societies. Senior citizens, community leaders, self-trained disaster managers, social workers, media personnel, bureaucrats and those averse to the very thought of reading will also find the book useful as it is illustrative and inviting.

'What I like best about this fascinating book is the detail. Brian Butterworth doesn't just tell us stories of animals with numerical abilities: he tells us about the underlying science. Elegantly written and a joy to read' - Professor Ian Stewart, author of What's the Use? and Taming the Infinite 'Full of thought-provoking studies and animal observations' - Booklist 'Enlightening and entertaining' - Publishers Weekly The Hidden Genius of Animals: Every pet owner thinks their own dog, cat, fish or hamster is a genius. What makes CAN FISH COUNT? so exciting is the way it unveils just how widespread intelligence is in nature. Pioneering psychologist Brian Butterworth describes the extraordinary numerical feats of all manner of species ranging from primates and mammals to birds, reptiles, fish and insects. Whether it's lions deciding to fight or flee, frogs competing for mates, bees navigating their way to food sources, fish assessing which shoal to join, or jackdaws counting friends when joining a mob - every species shares an ability to count. Homo Sapiens may think maths is our exclusive domain, but this book shows that every creature shares a deep-seated Darwinian ability to understand the intrinsic language of our universe: mathematics CAN FISH COUNT? is that special sort of science book - a global authority in his field writing an anecdotally-rich and revelatory narrative which changes the way you perceive something we take for granted.

Which mathematician elaborated a crucial concept the night before he died in a duel? Who funded his maths and medical career through gambling and chess? Who learned maths from her wallpaper?

Ian Stewart presents the extraordinary lives and amazing discoveries of twenty-five of history's greatest mathematicians from Archimedes and Liu Hui to Benoit Mandelbrot and William Thurston. His subjects are the inspiring individuals from all over the world who have made crucial contributions to mathematics. They include the rediscovered geniuses Srinivasa Ramanujan and Emmy Noether, alongside the towering figures of Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (inventor of the algorithm), Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Bernhard Reimann (precursor to Einstein), Henri Poincaré, Ada Lovelace (arguably the first computer programmer), Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

Ian Stewart's vivid accounts are fascinating in themselves and, taken together, cohere into a riveting history of key steps in the development of mathematics.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Science in the Soul is a kaleidoscopic argument for the power and glory of science: the wonder of scientific discovery; the practical necessity of scientific endeavour to society; and the importance of the scientific way of thinking - particularly in today's `post-truth' world. With an introduction and new commentary by the author in dialogue with himself across the years, the essays, journalism, lectures and letters gathered here range over subjects from evolution and Darwinian natural selection to the role of scientist as prophet, whether science is itself a religion, the probability of alien life in other worlds, and the beauties, cruelties and oddities of earthly life in this one. A sparkling showcase for his rapier wit, the clarity, precision and vigour he brings to an argument, the beauty of his prose, the depth of his feeling and his capacity for joy, Science in the Soul is further evidence of Richard Dawkins' status as one of science's all-time great communicators.