From the New York Times bestselling creator of Lost in Translation, A Small Illustrated Guide to the Universe is a delicately existential and welcoming exploration of the cosmos - one that examines and marvels at the astonishing principles, laws, and phenomena that we exist alongside, that surround us. Have you ever found yourself wondering what we might have in common with stars or why the Moon never leaves us? Thinking about the precise dancing of planets, the passing of time or the nature of natural things? Our world is full of unshakeable mystery, and although we live in a civilisation more complicated than ever, there is beauty and reassurance to be found in knowing how and why.

In About Science, Myself and Others, Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, co-recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics and Editor of the review journal Physics-Uspekhi, provides an insight into modern physics, the lives and works of other prominent physicists he has known, and insight into his own life and views on physics and beyond. Divided into three parts, the book starts with a review of the key problems in contemporary physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, examining their historical development and why they pose such a challenge to today's physicists and for society. Part One also includes details of some of Professor Ginzburg's work, including superconductivity and superfluidity. Part Two encompasses several articles on the lives and works of several prominent physicists, including the author. The third part is a collection of articles that provide a personal view of the author, describing his personal views and recollections on a range of wider topics. Taken together, this collection of articles creates an enjoyable review of physics, its philosophy, and key players in its modern development in the 20th Century. Undoubtedly, it will be an enjoyable read for professional physicists and non-scientists alike.

Yet over the past few decades, physicists have discovered a phenomenon that operates outside the confines of space and time: nonlocality - the ability of two particles to act in harmony no matter how far apart they may be. If space isn't what we thought it was, then what is it? In Spooky Action at a Distance, the award-winning journalist George Musser sets out to answer that question. He guides us on an epic journey into the lives of experimental physicists observing particles acting in tandem, astronomers finding galaxies that look statistically identical, and cosmologists hoping to unravel the paradoxes surrounding the big bang. He traces the contentious debates over nonlocality through major discoveries and disruptions of the twentieth century and shows how scientists faced with the same undisputed experimental evidence develop wildly different explanations for that evidence. Their conclusions challenge our understanding of the origins of the universe - and they suggest a new grand unified theory of physics.

The spellbinding stories of the scientists whose eureka! breakthroughs in modern physics reveal science's astonishing predictive power.

How does it feel to know something about the universe that no one has ever known before? And why is mathematics so good at revealing nature's secrets?

This is the story of the scientists who, using mathematics, predicted the existence of unknown planets, black holes, invisible force fields, ripples in the fabric of space-time, unsuspected subatomic particles, and even antimatter.

The journey from prediction to proof transports us from seats of learning in Paris and Cambridge to the war-torn Russian front, to bunkers beneath nuclear reactors, observatories in Berlin and California, and huge tunnels under the Swiss-French border. From electromagnetism to Einstein's gravitational waves to Wolfgang Pauli's elusive neutrino, acclaimed science writer Marcus Chown takes us on a breathtaking, mind-altering tour of the major breakthroughs of modern physics and highlights science's central mystery: its astonishing predictive power.

The paperback of the critically-acclaimed popular science book by a writer who is fast becoming a celebrity mathematician. Prime numbers are the very atoms of arithmetic. They also embody one of the most tantalising enigmas in the pursuit of human knowledge. How can one predict when the next prime number will occur? Is there a formula which could generate primes? These apparently simple questions have confounded mathematicians ever since the Ancient Greeks. In 1859, the brilliant German mathematician Bernard Riemann put forward an idea which finally seemed to reveal a magical harmony at work in the numerical landscape. The promise that these eternal, unchanging numbers would finally reveal their secret thrilled mathematicians around the world. Yet Riemann, a hypochondriac and a troubled perfectionist, never publicly provided a proof for his hypothesis and his housekeeper burnt all his personal papers on his death. Whoever cracks Riemann's hypothesis will go down in history, for it has implications far beyond mathematics. In business, it is the lynchpin for security and e-commerce. In science, it has critical ramifications in Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, and the future of comput

Our sun drives the weather, forms the landscape, feeds and fuels - but sometimes destroys - the creatures that live upon it, controls their patterns of activity, makes chemicals in the skin that cheer up those who bask in its rays, and for the ancients was the seat of divine authority. In Here Comes the Sun, Steve Jones shows how life on Earth is ruled by our nearest star. It is filled with unexpected connections; between the need to stay cool and man's ability to stand upright, between the power of memory and the onset of darkness, between the flow of solar energy through the plants and animals and of wealth through society, and between Joseph Goebbel's 1938 scheme to make Edinburgh the summer capital of a defeated Britain and the widening gap in the life expectancy of Scottish men compared to that of other European men brought on by thnat nation's cloudy climate. Its author charts some of his own research in places hot and cold across the globe on the genetic and evolutionary effects of sunlight on snails, fruit-flies and people and shows how what was once no more an eccentric specialism has grown to become a subject of wide scientific, social and political significance. Stunningly evocative, beautifully written and packed full of insight, Here Comes the Sun is Steve Jones's most personal book to date.

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.

Sitting still in a quiet room, you might just be able to convince yourself that nothing is moving. But air currents swirl about you. Blood rushes through your veins. The atoms in your chair jiggle furiously. And the planet you are on is whizzing through space 35 times faster than the speed of sound. In Zoom, Bob Berman takes a thrilling tour around the wondrous and myriad motions that shape every aspect of the universe. Spanning astronomy, geology, biology, meteorology and history, he explains how clouds stay aloft, how the earth's rotation curves a ball's flight, how a mosquito's familiar whine is tuned to a perfect A sharp, how the day gets longer every century, and much more.

Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species – but there’s a catch.  Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these ‘sleeping beauties’ crop up everywhere. But why? Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed. We have found prehistoric bacteria that harbour the remarkable ability to fight off 21st-century antibiotics. And human history fits the pattern too, as life-changing technologies are invented only to be forgotten, languishing in the shadows before they finally take off. In probing the mysteries of these sleeping beauties, Wagner reveals a crucial part of nature’s rich and strange tapestry.

For fans of Oliver Sacks and Henry Marsh, a glimpse into the fascinating world of modern neurology by a leading expert in the field. As a trainee doctor, Andrew Lees was enthralled by his mentors: esteemed neurologists who combined the precision of mathematicians, the scrupulosity of entomologists and the solemnity of undertakers in their diagnoses and treatments. For them, there was no such thing as an unexplained symptom or psychosomatic problem-no difficult cases, only interesting ones-and it was only a matter of time before all disorders of the brain would be understood in terms of anatomical, electrical, and chemical connections. Today, this kind of "holistic neurology" is on the brink of extinction as a slavish adherence to protocols and algorithms-plus a worship of machines-runs the risk of destroying the key foundational clinical skills of listening, observation and imagination that have been at the heart of the discipline for over 150 years. In this series of brilliant, insightful, and autobiographical essays, Andrew Lees takes us on a kind of Sherlock Holmes tour of neurology, giving the reader insight into-and a defense of-the deep analytical tools that the best neurologists still rely on to diagnose patients: to heal minds and to fix brains.

Ten years ago, Darwin's Black Box launched the Intelligent Design movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design, beyond Darwinian randomness. Today the movement is stronger than ever, and the book is a classic and an international bestseller. At last, Michael Behe has updated the book with a major new afterword on the state of the debate. The Intelligent Design movement was born when a handful of scientists realized that nature exhibits characteristics that could not have evolved by random mutation. Prominent among them was Michael Behe, a microbiologist working in a field that Darwin could not even have imagined existing. Microbiology has discovered staggering complexity at the cellular level of life and during his research Behe made a stunning discovery: Some parts of life are irreducibly complex. They cannot function without all of their parts. Yet step-by-step genetic mutations would never produce all of those parts together at once. Some parts of the biological world must have been designed. From one end of the spectrum to the other, DARWIN'S BLACK BOX has established itself as the key text in the intelligent design movement, the one argument that must be addressed in order to determine whether Darwinian evolution is sufficient to explain life as we know it, or not.

"A NATURAL STORYTELLER" Mary Roach "BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING" Matthew Gavin Frank "CAPTIVATING ... WILL ALTER THE WAY YOU SEE AND MOVE THROUGH THE WORLD" M. R. O'Connor "AS ENTERTAINING AS IT IS ENLIGHTENING" Geographical Magazine, Book of the Month Within our heads, we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have - older even than language - and in Dark and Magical Places, Christopher Kemp embarks on a journey to discover the remarkable extent of what our minds can do. From the secrets of supernavigators to the strange, dreamlike environments inhabited by people with 'place blindness', he will explore the myriad ways in which we find our way. Kemp explains the cutting-edge neuroscience that is transforming our understanding of it - and tries to answer why, for a species with a highly-sophisticated internal navigation system that evolved over millions of years, do humans get lost such a lot? "I WAS THRILLED TO DISCOVER THIS BOOK" Robert Moor

Learn about quantum physics, cloning, exoplanets, the number 137 and all of modern science's biggest questions through the crazy adventures of Rick and Morty, the international Netflix success, now airing on Channel 4. What is concentrated Dark Matter? Can we hack memory? Are you living in a simulation operating at 5% capacity? Rick and Morty may seem like the most idiotic show on TV today, but a lot of its crazy adventures are actually based on real-life scientific theories and cutting-edge academic research. Using the biology, chemistry and physics of the series, expert science writer Matt Brady explains the biggest questions occupying the greatest minds today, including: can we have cool cybernetic implants, will we ever be able to alter our basic intelligence, how far will we be able to go with cloning, could we travel to parallel universes, what energy could you get from a microverse battery and can you control a cockroach's nervous system with your tongue? So, become more Rick and less Morty with this wander through the portal of modern-day science. Or just go back to laughing at the stupid jokes.

A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Full of delightful nuggets' Guardian online 'Entertaining, informative and philosphical ... An essential read' All About History 'Extraordinary range ... All the world and more is here' Evening Standard 165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm. 66 million years ago came the first melody. 40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument. Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet it is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages - from Bach to BTS and back - to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, world-leading musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a global history of music on the widest possible canvas, from global history to our everyday lives, from insects to apes, humans to artificial intelligence. 'Michael Spitzer has pulled off the impossible: a Guns, Germs and Steel for music' Daniel Levitin 'A thrilling exploration of what music has meant and means to humankind' Ian Bostridge

Uncover the mind-blowing complexities of the brain and how it affects our personalities, behaviours and more. Written by Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, Sophie Scott, and composed of ten mind-blowing yet accessible essays, The Brain guides you through the astounding complexities of the organ that makes you, you. From diving into the networks of neurons that are vital to our functioning, to the way our brains differ from one another and how neuroscience is shaping up for the future; this book is a guide to our most powerful and awe-inspiring body part. If you have ever wondered what's going on inside your head (or someone else's), this book will be a fascinating and enthralling read.

'Kindness and co-operation have played a crucial role in raising humans to the top of the evolutionary tree ... We have thrived on the milk of human kindness.' Observer BY THE AUTHOR OF ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE? 'There is a widely-held assumption that humans are hard-wired for relentless and ruthless competition ... Frans de Waal sees nature differently - as a biological legacy in which empathy, not mere self-interest, is shared by humans, bonobos and animals.' Ben Macintyre, The Times Empathy holds us together. That we are hardwired to be altruistic is the result of thousands of years of evolutionary biology which has kept society from slipping into anarchy. But we are not alone: primates, elephants, even rodents are empathetic creatures too. Social behaviours such as the herding instinct, bonding rituals, expressions of consolation and even conflict resolution demonstrate that animals are designed to feel for each other. From chimpanzees caring for mates that have been wounded by leopards, elephants reassuring youngsters in distress and dolphins preventing sick companions from drowning, with a wealth of anecdotes, scientific observations, wry humour and incisive intelligence, The Age of Empathy is essential reading for all who believe in the power of our connections to each other.

Darwin's greatest accomplishment was to show how life might be explained as the result of natural selection. But does Darwin's theory mean that life was unintended? William A. Dembski argues that it does not. In this book Dembski extends his theory of intelligent design. Building on his earlier work in The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998), he defends that life must be the product of intelligent design. Critics of Dembski's work have argued that evolutionary algorithms show that life can be explained apart from intelligence. But by employing powerful recent results from the No Free Lunch Theory, Dembski addresses and decisively refutes such claims. As the leading proponent of intelligent design, Dembski reveals a designer capable of originating the complexity and specificity found throughout the cosmos. Scientists and theologians alike will find this book of interest as it brings the question of creation firmly into the realm of scientific debate.

Big History, the field that integrates traditional historical scholarship with scientific insights to study the full sweep of our universe, has so far been the domain of historians. Famed geologist Walter Alvarez-best known for the "Impact Theory" explaining dinosaur extinction-has instead championed a science-first approach to Big History. Here he wields his unique expertise to give us a new appreciation for the incredible occurrences-from the Big Bang to the formation of supercontinents, the dawn of the Bronze Age, and beyond-that have led to our improbable place in the universe.

We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in mud huts rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than play football or did we? Are our bodies and brains truly at odds with modern life? Although it may seem as though we have barely had time to shed our hunter-gatherer legacy, biologist Marlene Zuk reveals that the story is not so simple. Popular theories about how our ancestors lived and why we should emulate them are often based on speculation, not scientific evidence.

Armed with a razor-sharp wit and brilliant, eye-opening research, Zuk takes us to the cutting edge of biology to show that evolution can work much faster than was previously realized, meaning that we are not biologically the same as our caveman ancestors. Contrary to what the glossy magazines would have us believe, we do not enjoy potato chips because they crunch just like the insects our forebears snacked on. And women don t go into shoe-shopping frenzies because their prehistoric foremothers gathered resources for their clans. As Zuk compellingly argues, such beliefs incorrectly assume that we re stuck finished evolving and have been for tens of thousands of years. She draws on fascinating evidence that examines everything from adults ability to drink milk to the texture of our ear wax to show that we ve actually never stopped evolving. Our nostalgic visions of an ideal evolutionary past in which we ate, lived, and reproduced as we were meant to fail to recognize that we were never perfectly suited to our environment. Evolution is about change, and every organism is full of trade-offs.

From debunking the caveman diet to unraveling gender stereotypes, Zuk delivers an engrossing analysis of widespread paleofantasies and the scientific evidence that undermines them, all the while broadening our understanding of our origins and what they can really tell us about our present and our future."

"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, was actually a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus. Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.

Although vital to our well-being and even to our success as a species, the physical sense of balance has never attained the same recognition as sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste. Now, with an epidemic of debilitating falls sweeping America's aging population, the time is ripe for a lively and illuminating tour of the human body's most exquisitely intricate and least understood faculty.

BALANCE is the first book written for a general audience that examines the mysteries of the human balance system--the astonishingly complicated mechanisms that allow our bodies to counteract the force of gravity as we move through space. A scientific, historical, and practical exploration of how balance works, BALANCE also provides the keys to remaining upright for as long as humanly possible. From simple motion sickness to astronauts'"space stupids," and from fetal somersaults to the Flying Wallendas, McCredie guides readers on a delightful quest to elevate balance to its rightful place in the pantheon of the senses.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's exploration of the extraordinary creative genius of the mind's eye "has many virtues, of which sheer intellectual excitement is the foremost" (Nature). Hoffman explains that far from being a passive recorder of a preexisting world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual experience. In an informal style replete with illustrations, Hoffman presents the compelling scientific evidence for vision's constructive powers, unveiling a grammar of vision - a set of rules that govern our perception of line, color, form, depth, and motion. Hoffman also describes the loss of these constructive powers in patients such as an artist who can no longer see or dream in color and a man who sees his father as an impostor. Finally, Hoffman explores the spinoffs of visual intelligence in the arts and technology, from film special effects to virtual reality. This is, in sum, "an outstanding example of creative popular science" (Publishers Weekly).

'Funny, wise and absolutely fascinating.' Adam Kay, author of This Is Going to Hurt

Do you want to be happy?

If so – read on.

This book has all the answers*

In The Happy Brain, neuroscientist Dean Burnett delves deep into the inner workings of our minds to explore some fundamental questions about happiness. What does it actually mean to be happy? Where does it come from? And what, really, is the point of it? Forget searching for the secret of happiness through lifestyle fads or cod philosophy ― Burnett reveals the often surprising truth behind what make us tick. From whether happiness really begins at home (spoiler alert: yes – sort of) to what love, sex, friendship, wealth, laughter and success actually do to our brains, this book offers a uniquely entertaining insight into what it means to be human.

*Not really. Sorry. But it does have some very interesting questions, and at least the occasional answer.

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

"I loved the book! This book is not just interesting, it is exciting. I have probably read every significant book in the field, and this is the strongest and most convincing one yet. It is also one of the most comprehensive in its explanations. I shall most certainly recommend the book to colleagues." -Richard G. Petty, MD "a very good introduction to the basic theory of quantum systems.... Dr. Georgiev's book aptly prepares the reader to confront whatever might be in store later." -from the Foreword by Prof. James F. Glazebrook, Eastern Illinois University This book addresses the fascinating cross-disciplinary field of quantum information theory applied to the study of brain function. It offers a self-study guide to probe the problems of consciousness, including a concise but rigorous introduction to classical and quantum information theory, theoretical neuroscience, and philosophy of the mind. It aims to address long-standing problems related to consciousness within the framework of modern theoretical physics in a comprehensible manner that elucidates the nature of the mind-body relationship. The reader also gains an overview of methods for constructing and testing quantum informational theories of consciousness.