Everybody knows that mathematics is indispensable to physics--imagine where we'd be today if Einstein and Newton didn't have the math to back up their ideas. But how many people realize that physics can be used to produce many astonishing and strikingly elegant solutions in mathematics? Mark Levi shows how in this delightful book, treating readers to a host of entertaining problems and mind-bending puzzlers that will amuse and inspire their inner physicist.

Levi turns math and physics upside down, revealing how physics can simplify proofs and lead to quicker solutions and new theorems, and how physical solutions can illustrate why results are true in ways lengthy mathematical calculations never can. Did you know it's possible to derive the Pythagorean theorem by spinning a fish tank filled with water? Or that soap film holds the key to determining the cheapest container for a given volume? Or that the line of best fit for a data set can be found using a mechanical contraption made from a rod and springs? Levi demonstrates how to use physical intuition to solve these and other fascinating math problems. More than half the problems can be tackled by anyone with precalculus and basic geometry, while the more challenging problems require some calculus. This one-of-a-kind book explains physics and math concepts where needed, and includes an informative appendix of physical principles.

"The Mathematical Mechanic" will appeal to anyone interested in the little-known connections between mathematics and physics and how both endeavors relate to the world around us.

'Real science can be far stranger than science fiction, and much more satisfying' Will artificial intelligence outsmart us? Is there other intelligent life in the universe? Throughout his extraordinary career, Stephen Hawking expanded our understanding of the universe and unravelled some of its greatest mysteries. Will Artificial Intelligence Outsmart Us? considers the threat of artificial super-intelligence - as well as the likelihood of intelligent life beyond our planet. 'Modest, profound and sometimes very funny' Sunday Times Brief Answers, Big Questions: this stunning paperback series offers electrifying essays from one of the greatest minds of our age, taken from the original text of the No. 1 bestselling Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

Can we give Grandma a Viking funeral? Why don't animals dig up all the graves? Will my hair keep growing in my coffin after I'm buried? Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. Here she offers her factual, hilarious and candid answers to thirty-five of the most interesting, sharing the lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn strange colours during decomposition? and why do hair and nails appear longer after death? The answers are all within . . .

This book shows how our new-found ability to observe the Earth from "the necessary distance" has wide and profound cultural and ethical implications. First of all, it is the outcome of speculations and investigations of human beings in relation to their home planet carried out over millennia. In particular, it reveals a split between the ancient idea of the Earth as nurturing mother and the more recent conception of the Earth as a neutral resource able to be infinitely exploited by humankind. The 1968 Earthrise photograph, showing the beauty and fragility of the Earth, helped spark a worldwide environmental movement; now the comprehensive coverage of global change provided by satellites has the potential to convince us beyond reasonable doubt of the huge alterations being wrought upon the Earth and its climate system as a result of human actions, and of the need to act more responsibly.

'Endlessly fascinating and full of surprises. Easily one of my books of the year' BILL BRYSON The myth-busting science behind our modern attitudes to exercise: what our bodies really need, why it matters, and its effects on health and wellbeing. In industrialized nations, our sedentary lifestyles have contributed to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases like diabetes. A key remedy, we are told, is exercise - voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. However, most of us struggle to stay fit, and our attitudes to exercise are plagued by misconceptions, finger-pointing and anxiety. But, as Daniel Lieberman shows in Exercised, the first book of its kind by a leading scientific expert, we never evolved to exercise. We are hardwired for moderate exertion throughout each day, not triathlons or treadmills. Drawing on over a decade of high-level scientific research and eye-opening insights from evolutionary biology and anthropology, Lieberman explains precisely how exercise can promote health; debunks persistent myths about sitting, speed, strength and endurance; and points the way towards more enjoyable and physically active living in the modern world. 'Myth-busting, illuminating, brilliant - Lieberman will completely change the way you think about your body' Professor ALICE ROBERTS, presenter of Our Incredible Human Journey

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.

From breakfast toast to evening wine, yeast is the microscopic thing that we cannot live without. We knew what yeast did as an invisible brewer and baker long before we had a clue about the existence of microorganisms. Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors abandoned bush meat and wild fruit in favor of farming animals and cultivating grain. Leaving the forests and grasslands, our desire for beer and wine produced by the fungus was a major stimulus for agricultural settlement. It takes a village to run a brewery or tend a vineyard. We domesticated wild yeast and yeast domesticated us. With the inevitable escape of the fungus from beer vats into bread dough, our marriage with yeast was secured by an appetite for fresh loaves of leavened bread. Over the millennia, we have adapted the technologies of brewing, winemaking, and baking and have come to rely on yeast more and more. Yeast produces corn ethanol and other biofuels and has become the genetically-modified darling of the pharmaceutical business as a source of human insulin and a range of life-saving medicines. These practical uses of yeast have been made possible by advances in our understanding of its biology, and the power of genetic engineering has been used to modify the fungus to do just about anything we wish. We know more about yeast than any other organism built from complex cells like our own. To understand yeast is to understand life. In this book Nicholas P. Money offers a celebration of our favorite microorganism.

Why do we give a damn about strangers? Altruism is unique to the human species. It is also one of the great evolutionary puzzles, and we may be on the brink of solving it. It turns out that, over the last 12,000 years, we have become more and more altruistic. This is despite the fact that, the majority of the time, our minds are still breathtakingly indifferent to the welfare of others. In solving the enigma of generosity in a world of strangers, McCullough takes us on a sweeping history of society and science to warn that, if we are not careful, our instincts and sympathies have as much potential for harm as for good. The bad news is that we are not designed to be kind. The good news is that we can push ourselves to be kind anyway, together.

In Close Encounters with Humankind, paleoanthropologist Sang-Hee Lee explores some of our biggest evolutionary questions from unexpected new angles. Amongst other questions, she looks at what fossilised teeth tell us about our ancient life expectancy, what big data on fossils reveals about farming's problematic role in human evolution and how simple geometric comparisons of skull and pelvic fossils can suggest the origin of our social nature. Through a series of entertaining, bite-sized chapters, we gain new perspectives into our first hominin ancestors, our first steps on two feet, our first forays into toolmaking and hunting, and our continuing evolution. Lee's curious nature and surprising conclusions make Close Encounters with Humankind a delight to read.

Prions are an entirely new class of pathogens, and scientists are just beginning to understand them. This book tells the strange story of their discovery, and the medical controversies that swirl around them.

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.

'Game-changing. Katy Milkman shows in this book that we can all be a super human' Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit How to Change is a powerful, groundbreaking blueprint to help you - and anyone you manage, teach or coach - to achieve personal and professional goals, from the master of human nature and behaviour change and Choiceology podcast host Professor Katy Milkman. Award-winning Wharton Professor Katy Milkman has devoted her career to the study of behaviour change. An engineer by training, she approaches all challenges as problems to be solved and, with this mind-set, has drilled into the roadblocks that prevent us from achieving our goals and breaking unwanted behaviours. The key to lasting change, she argues, is not to set ever more audacious goals or to foster good habits but to get your strategy right. In How to Change Milkman identifies seven human impulses, or 'problems', that commonly sabotage our attempts to make positive personal and professional change. Then, crucially, instead of getting you to do battle with these impulses she shows you how to harness them and use these as driving forces to help instil new, positive behaviours - better, faster and more efficiently than you could imagine. Drawing her own original research, countless engaging case studies and practical tools throughout to help you put her ideas into action, Milkman reveals a proven, inspiring path that can take you - once and for all - from where you are today to where you want to be.

THE CLASSIC GUIDE, NOW FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED Why do we need Statistics? What do terms like 'dispersion', 'correlation', 'normal distribution' and 'significance' actually mean? How can I learn how to think statistically? This bestselling introduction is for anyone who wants to know how statistics works and the powerful ideas behind it. Teaching through words and diagrams instead of requiring you to do complex calculations, it assumes no expert knowledge and makes the subject accessible even to readers who consider themselves non-mathematical. This clear and informative 'tutorial in print' includes questions for you to respond to in the light of what you have read so far, ensuring your developing ability to think statistically.

Mathematician and popular science author Eugenia Cheng is on a mission to show you that mathematics can be flexible, creative, and visual. This joyful journey through the world of abstract mathematics into category theory will demystify mathematical thought processes and help you develop your own thinking, with no formal mathematical background needed. The book brings abstract mathematical ideas down to earth using examples of social justice, current events, and everyday life - from privilege to COVID-19 to driving routes. The journey begins with the ideas and workings of abstract mathematics, after which you will gently climb toward more technical material, learning everything needed to understand category theory, and then key concepts in category theory like natural transformations, duality, and even a glimpse of ongoing research in higher-dimensional category theory. For fans of How to Bake Pi, this will help you dig deeper into mathematical concepts and build your mathematical background.

Through the infamous divorce of her parents, Ada Lovelace became the most talked-about child in Georgian Britain. This riveting biography tells the extraordinary yet little known story of her life and times-when mathematics was as fashionable as knitting among women and Ada became the world's first computer programmer. But for her era's view on gender, Ada would single-handedly have started the digital age more than two centuries ago.

The scientific story of first impressions--and why the snap character judgments we make from faces are irresistible but usually incorrect We make up our minds about others after seeing their faces for a fraction of a second--and these snap judgments predict all kinds of important decisions. For example, politicians who simply look more competent are more likely to win elections. Yet the character judgments we make from faces are as inaccurate as they are irresistible; in most situations, we would guess more accurately if we ignored faces. So why do we put so much stock in these widely shared impressions? What is their purpose if they are completely unreliable? In this book, Alexander Todorov, one of the world's leading researchers on the subject, answers these questions as he tells the story of the modern science of first impressions. Drawing on psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, and other fields, this accessible and richly illustrated book describes cutting-edge research and puts it in the context of the history of efforts to read personality from faces. Todorov describes how we have evolved the ability to read basic social signals and momentary emotional states from faces, using a network of brain regions dedicated to the processing of faces. Yet contrary to the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of physiognomy and even some of today's psychologists, faces don't provide us a map to the personalities of others. Rather, the impressions we draw from faces reveal a map of our own biases and stereotypes. A fascinating scientific account of first impressions, Face Value explains why we pay so much attention to faces, why they lead us astray, and what our judgments actually tell us.

Consider this - Robots will one day be able to write poetry and prose so touching that it will make men weep, compose symphonies that rival the work of Mozart, judge a court case with absolute impartiality and fairness and converse with the natural ease of your best friend. Robots will one day be so life-like that a human could fall in love and marry one. Is it thought provoking and controversial? Certainly. Is it far fetched? Not at all. In this popular approach to understanding Al, David Levy lays the factual foundations for his intriguing speculations by presenting the history of Al from its inception. He then considers recent advance and makes predictions for the future of Al.

FULLY UPDATED FOR 2019 We cannot live without water. But with 7.5 billion people competing for this single unevenly-distributed resource, the planet is drying up. In When the Rivers Run Dry, Fred Pearce explores the growing world water crisis, from Kent to Kenya. His powerful reportage takes us to places where waterways are turning to sand before they reach the ocean; where fields are parched and crops no longer grow; where once fertile ground has turned to desert; where wars are fought over access to water and cultures are dying out. But he offers us hope for the future - if we can radically revolutionise the way we treat water, and take personal responsibility for the water we use. This landmark work, from a respected and accomplished scientist, will transform the way we view the water in our reservoirs and rivers, and change the way we treat the water in our taps.

In Virus Hunt, renowned virologist Dorothy H. Crawford takes us inside one of the great research quests of our time--the search for the origin of AIDS. From hospital intensive care wards to research laboratories to the African rain forests, Crawford follows the trail of the virus back to its roots deep in Africa. We track wild monkeys and apes through the jungle--gathering their DNA via hair and feces samples--to discover from which primates HIV first jumped to our species, ultimately concluding that the most virulent strain, HIV-1, came from chimpanzees in Cameroon. We then time travel back to colonial Africa around the turn of the 20th century, when the virus first spread to humans. But even the rapidly mutating HIV could not survive in one person long enough to adapt to our immune system. Crawford shows that it may have been given the opportunity to adapt by being transmitted rapidly from one person to the next through unsterile syringes, ironically used during a campaign to wipe out disease by mass inoculation. The book then moves to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), where Crawford describes the unique series of social upheavals, starting in the 1920s, that sparked epidemic levels of sexually transmitted diseases, allowed HIV-1 to begin its exponential growth. And when in the 1960s chance took the virus abroad to Haiti, from where it jumped to the United States, its pandemic spread began. Crawford tells a gripping story of brilliant scientific sleuthing, breakthrough discoveries, tragic errors, stubborn intractable mysteries, generous collaborations, and bitter disputes. And along the way, she conveys, with a light and engaging touch, a wealth of interesting observations about viruses, DNA, disease, immune systems, the very latest research methods, and of course HIV.

Suppose you have five muffins that you want to divide and give to Alice, Bob, and Carol. You want each of them to get 5/3. You could cut each muffin into 1/3-1/3-1/3 and give each student five 1/3-sized pieces. But Alice objects! She has large hands! She wants everyone to have pieces larger than 1/3.Is there a way to divide five muffins for three students so that everyone gets 5/3, and all pieces are larger than 1/3? Spoiler alert: Yes! In fact, there is a division where the smallest piece is 5/12. Is there a better division? Spoiler alert: No.In this book we consider THE MUFFIN PROBLEM: what is the best way to divide up m muffins for s students so that everyone gets m/s muffins, with the smallest pieces maximized. We look at both procedures for the problem and proofs that these procedures are optimal.This problem takes us through much mathematics of interest, for example, combinatorics and optimization theory. However, the math is elementary enough for an advanced high school student.

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

'Bursts with gloriously geeky detail.' The Telegraph Have you ever made someone you love a mix-tape? Forty years ago, a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important compilation ever conceived. It wasn't from one person to another, it was from Earth to the Cosmos. In 1977 NASA sent Voyager 1 and 2 on a Grand Tour of the outer planets. During the design phase of the Voyager mission, it was realised that this pair of plucky probes would eventually leave our solar system to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space. With this gloomy-sounding outcome in mind, NASA decided to do something optimistic. They commissioned astronomer Carl Sagan to create a message to be fixed to the side of Voyager 1 and 2 - a plaque, a calling card, a handshake to any passing alien that might one day chance upon them. The result was the Voyager Golden Record, a genre-hopping multi-media metal LP. A 90-minute playlist of music from across the globe, a sound essay of life on Earth, spoken greetings in multiple languages and more than 100 photographs and diagrams, all painstakingly chosen by Sagan and his team to create an aliens' guide to Earthlings. The record included music by J.S. Bach and Chuck Berry, a message of peace from US president Jimmy Carter, facts, figures and dimensions, all encased in a golden box. The Vinyl Frontier tells the story of NASA's interstellar mix-tape, from first phone call to final launch, when Voyager 1 and 2 left our planet bearing their hopeful message from the Summer of '77 to a distant future.

'The physicist transforming how we see the universe' (Financial Times) 'An utter joy' (Adam Rutherford) 'A hugely engaging book... Rovelli is a charming, thought-provoking tour guide' (Manjit Kumar Prospect) Do space and time truly exist? What is reality made of? Can we understand its deep texture? Scientist Carlo Rovelli has spent his whole life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. In this mind-expanding book, he shows how our understanding of reality has changed throughout centuries, from Democritus to loop quantum gravity. Taking us on a wondrous journey, he invites us to imagine a whole new world where black holes are waiting to explode, spacetime is made up of grains, and infinity does not exist -- a vast universe still largely undiscovered. Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre

The brilliantly told and gripping story of the most familiar - yet, amazingly, still poorly understood - substance in the universe: Water. The extent to which water remains a scientific mystery is extraordinary, despite its prevalence and central importance on Earth. Whether one considers its role in biology, its place in the physical world (where it refuses to obey the usual rules of liquids) or its deceptively simple structure, there is still no complete answer to the question: what is water? Philip Ball's book explains what, exactly, we do and do not know about the strange character of this most essential and ubiquitous of substances. H20 begins by transporting its readers back to the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies to witness the birth of water's constituent elements: hydrogen and oxygen. It then explains how the primeval oceans were formed four billion years ago; where water is to be found on other planets; why ice floats when most solids sink; why, despite being highly corrosive, water is good for us; why there are at least fifteen kinds of ice and perhaps two kinds of liquid water; how scientists have consistently misunderstood water for centuries; and why wars have been waged over it. Philip Ball's gloriously offbeat and intelligent book conducts us on a journey through the history of science, folklore, the wilder scientific fringes, cutting-edge physics, biology and ecology, to give a fascinating new perspective on life and the substance that sustains it. After reading this book, drinking a glass of water will never be the same again.

Nobel Prize winner Heisenberg's classic account explains the central ideas of the quantum revolution and his celebrated Uncertainty Principle.