Hans Christian Orsted (1777-1851) is of great importance as a scientist and philosopher far beyond the borders of Denmark and his own time. At the centre of an international network of scholars, he was instrumental in founding the world picture of modern physics. Orsted was the physicist who brought Kant's metaphysics to fruition. In 1820 his discovery of electro-magnetism, a phenomenon that could not possibly exist according to his adversaries, changed the course of research in physics. It inspired Michael Faraday's experiments and discovery of the adverse effect, magneto-electric induction. The two physical phenomena were later described in mathematical equations by J.C. Maxwell. Together these discoveries constitute the prerequisites for the overwhelming development of modern technology. But Orsted was also one of the cultural leaders and organizers of the Danish Golden Age (together with Grundtvig, Kierkegaard, and Hans-Christian Andersen, his protege), and made significant contributions to aesthetics, philosophy, pedagogy, politics, and religion. Orsted remarkably bridged the gap between science, the humanities, and the arts.

This book provides a rounded biography of Franz (later Sir Francis) Simon, his early life in Germany, his move to Oxford in 1933, and his experimental contributions to low temperature physics approximating absolute zero. After 1939 he switched his research to nuclear physics, and is credited with solving the problem of uranium isotope separation by gaseous diffusion for the British nuclear programme Tube Alloys. The volume is distinctive for its inclusion of source materials not available to previous researchers, such as Simon's diary and his correspondence with his wife, and for a fresh, well-informed insider voice on the five-power nuclear rivalry of the war years. The work also draws on a relatively mature nuclear literature to attempt a comparison and evaluation of the five nuclear rivals in wider political and military context, and to identify the factors, or groups of factors, that can explain the results.

A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics

Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious.

In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president.

Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.

Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom is the first book that focuses in detail on the birth and development of Bohr's atomic theory and gives a comprehensive picture of it. At the same time it offers new insight into Bohr's peculiar way of thinking, what Einstein once called his 'unique instinct and tact'. Contrary to most other accounts of the Bohr atom, the book presents it in a broader perspective which includes the reception among other scientists and the criticism launched against it by scientists of a more conservative inclination. Moreover, it discusses the theory as Bohr originally conceived it, namely, as an ambitious theory covering the structure of atoms as well as molecules. By discussing the theory in its entirety it becomes possible to understand why it developed as it did and thereby to use it as an example of the dynamics of scientific theories.

When Walt Larimore, MD, moved his young family to Kissimmee, Florida, to start a small-town medical practice in 1985, he had no idea he was embarking on an enterprise that would change his life in ways both large and small. Dr. Larimore shared some of these heartwarming and heartbreaking tales in The Best Medicine. Now he offers up more charming stories of his time as a family physician in a rural, small-yet-growing town in The Best Gift. Ideal for anyone wrestling with the inevitable and difficult storms of life, as well as fans of Dr. Larimore's popular Bryson City series, The Best Gift is a tender and insightful collection of stories chronicling one young doctor's spiritual growth as a physician, husband, father, and community member. Filled with characters colorful and crusty, warmhearted and hotheaded, witty and winsome, these captivating stories glow with drama, heartbreak, warmth, love, and humor. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll learn some of life's greatest lessons. And you'll wish Dr. Larimore was your doctor.

Brown-Sequard: An Improbable Genius Who Transformed Medicine traces the strange career of an eccentric, restless, widely admired, nineteenth-century physician-scientist who eventually came to be scorned by antivivisectionists for his work on animals, by churchgoers who believed that he encouraged licentious behavior, and by other scientists for his unorthodox views and for claims that, in fact, he never made. An improbable genius whose colorful life was characterized by dramatic reversals of fortune, he was a founder-physician of England's premier neurological hospital and held important professorships in America and France.
Brown-Sequard identified the sensory pathways in the spinal cord and emphasized functional processes in the integrative actions of the nervous system, thereby anticipating modern concepts of how the brain operates. He also discovered the function of the nerves that supply the blood vessels and thereby control their caliber, and the associated reflexes that adjust the circulation to bodily needs. He was the first to show that the adrenal glands are essential to life and suggested that other organs have internal secretions. He injected himself with ground-up animal testicles, claiming an invigorating effect, and this approach led to the development of modern hormone replacement therapy.
Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard was reportedly "one of the greatest discover of facts that the world has ever seen." It has also been suggested that "if his reasoning power had equaled his power of observation he might have done for physiology what Newton did for physics." In fact, scientific advances in the years since his death have provided increasing support for many of his once-ridiculed beliefs."

Discovering the passions of Chris Woodhead Collected writings from a man who stimulated controversy and roused passions Best known as the Chief Inspector of Schools who demanded higher standards across the board, Woodhead was admired and condemned in equal measure for his determination to confront taboos and bring them into the national education debate. His final and greatest challenge was with Motor Neurone Disease, a condition he faced with strength and empathy until his death in 2015. While his education journalism stands at the core of this book, What Matters Most explores Woodhead's lesser known passions, literature and climbing, which he writes about with the precision and clarity that became his journalistic hallmark. In the final pages of the book Woodhead shares his personal views on assisted dying, advocating for individuals to be permitted to die with dignity at a time of their choosing. What Matters Most: A Collection of Pieces is a fascinating and poignant book which tracks the life and beliefs of a truly inspirational contemporary thinker.

Peter Byrne tells the story of Hugh Everett III (1930-1982), whose "many worlds" theory of multiple universes has had a profound impact on physics and philosophy. Using Everett's unpublished papers (recently discovered in his son's basement) and dozens of interviews with his friends, colleagues, and surviving family members, Byrne paints, for the general reader, a detailed portrait of the genius who invented an astonishing way of describing our complex universe from the inside. Everett's mathematical model (called the "universal wave function") treats all possible events as "equally real," and concludes that countless copies of every person and thing exist in all possible configurations spread over an infinity of universes: many worlds.
Afflicted by depression and addictions, Everett strove to bring rational order to the professional realms in which he played historically significant roles. In addition to his famous interpretation of quantum mechanics, Everett wrote a classic paper in game theory; created computer algorithms that revolutionized military operations research; and performed pioneering work in artificial intelligence for top secret government projects. He wrote the original software for targeting cities in a nuclear hot war; and he was one of the first scientists to recognize the danger of nuclear winter. As a Cold Warrior, he designed logical systems that modeled "rational" human and machine behaviors, and yet he was largely oblivious to the emotional damage his irrational personal behavior inflicted upon his family, lovers, and business partners.
He died young, but left behind a fascinating record of his life, including correspondence with such philosophically inclined physicists as Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener, and John Wheeler. These remarkable letters illuminate the long and often bitter struggle to explain the paradox of measurement at the heart of quantum physics. In recent years, Everett's solution to this mysterious problem-the existence of a universe of universes-has gained considerable traction in scientific circles, not as science fiction, but as an explanation of physical reality.

Few people have proved more influential in the field of differential and algebraic geometry, and in showing how this links with mathematical physics, than Nigel Hitchin. Oxford University's Savilian Professor of Geometry has made fundamental contributions in areas as diverse as: spin geometry, instanton and monopole equations, twistor theory, symplectic geometry of moduli spaces, integrables systems, Higgs bundles, Einstein metrics, hyperkahler geometry, Frobenius manifolds, Painleve equations, special Lagrangian geometry and mirror symmetry, theory of grebes, and many more.
He was previously Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, as well as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has been the President of the London Mathematical Society.
The chapters in this fascinating volume, written by some of the greats in their fields (including four Fields Medalists), show how Hitchin's ideas have impacted on a wide variety of subjects. The book grew out of the Geometry Conference in Honour of Nigel Hitchin, held in Madrid, with some additional contributions, and should be required reading for anyone seeking insights into the overlap between geometry and physics."

This biography of the famous Soviet physicist Leonid Isaakovich Mandelstam (1889-1944), who became a Professor at Moscow State University in 1925 and an Academician (the highest scientific title in the USSR) in 1929, describes his contributions to both physics and technology. It also discusses the scientific community that formed around him, commonly known as the Mandelstam School. By doing so, it places Mandelstam's life story in its cultural context: the context of German University (until 1914), the First World War, the Civil War, and the development of the Socialist Revolution (until 1925) and the young socialist country. The book considers various general issues, such as the impact of German scientific culture on Russian science; the problems and fates of Russian intellectuals during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years; the formation of the Soviet Academy of Science, the State Academy; and the transformation of the system of higher education in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s. Further, it reconstructs Mandelstam's philosophy of science and his approach to the social and ethical function of science and science education based on his fundamental writings and lecture notes. This reconstruction is enhanced by extensive use of previously unpublished archive material as well as the transcripts of personal interviews conducted by the author. The book also discusses the biographies of Mandelstam's friends and collaborators: German mathematician and philosopher Richard von Mises, Soviet Communist Party official and philosopher B.M.Hessen, Russian specialist in radio engineering N.D.Papalexy, the specialists in non-linear dynamics A.A.Andronov, S.E. Chaikin, A.A.Vitt and the plasma physicist M.A.Leontovich. This second, extended edition reconstructs the social and economic backgrounds of Mandelstam and his colleagues, describing their positions at the universities and the institutes belonging to the Academy of Science. Additionally, Mandelstam's philosophy of science is investigated in connection with the ideological attacks that occurred after Mandelstam's death, particularly the great mathematician A.D.Alexandrov's criticism of Mandelstam's operationalism.

ONE OF AMAZON'S TOP 100 BOOKS OF 2014 Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Paabo's mission to answer this question: what can we learn from the genomes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, Neanderthal Man describes the events, intrigues, failures, and triumphs of these scientifically rich years through the lens of the pioneer and inventor of the field of ancient DNA. We learn that Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominid relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. Paabo's findings have not only redrawn our family tree, but recast the fundamentals of human history,the biological beginnings of fully modern Homo sapiens , the direct ancestors of all people alive today.

This book is a complete biography of Camillo Golgi one of the most prominent European researcher between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth century, a period of dramatic scientific development. The life of Golgi was an extraordinary intellectual adventure in three major fields of biology and medicine, namely the neuroscience, the emerging cell biology and the new science of medical microbiology. In 1873 Golgi published the description of a revolutionary histological technique which allowed, for the first time, to visualize a single nerve cell with all its ramification which could be followed and analyzed even at a great distance from the cell bodies, the so called "black reaction" (later named the "Golgi method"). This invention provided the spark to a truly scientific revolution which allowed the morphology and the basic architecture of the cerebral tissue to be evidenced in all its complexity, thus contributing to the foundation of the modern neuroscience. It has been written that, in the same way Galileo Galilei was able to find new stars observing with his telescope any sky region, Golgi was able to find new nervous structures and nerve cells by applying his black reaction to any brain region. Finally, the details of the most complex structure in the known universe, the brain, could be characterized. Golgi also strongly contributed to the development of cell biology with the discovery of one of the major organelles of the cell, the "internal reticular apparatus" (later named the "Golgi apparatus" or the "Golgi complex" or simply "the Golgi") and to medical microbiology with his description of the human malaria parasitic development inside the red blood cells (Golgi cycle). He was also a prominent political figure who deeply influenced the Nineteenth century development of science in Italy.

"American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation-one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress.
He was the author of a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials-an idea that is still relevant today. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and criticized the Air Force's plans to fight an infinitely dangerous nuclear war. In the now almost-forgotten hysteria of the early 1950s, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup, and, in response, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, Superbomb advocate Edward Teller and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked behind the scenes to have a hearing board find that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America's nuclear secrets.
"American Prometheus sets forth Oppenheimer's life and times in revealing and unprecedented detail. Exhaustively researched, it is based on thousands of records and letters gathered from archives in America and abroad, on massive FBI files and on close to a hundred interviews with Oppenheimer's friends, relatives and colleagues.
We follow him from his earliest education at the turn of the twentieth century at New York City's Ethical Culture School, through personal crises at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Then to Germany, where he studied quantum physics with the world's mostaccomplished theorists; and to Berkeley, California, where he established, during the 1930s, the leading American school of theoretical physics, and where he became deeply involved with social justice causes and their advocates, many of whom were communists. Then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he transformed a bleak mesa into the world's most potent nuclear weapons laboratory-and where he himself was transformed. And finally, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which he directed from 1947 to 1966.
"American Prometheus is a rich evocation of America at midcentury, a new and compelling portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man profoundly connected to its major events-the Depression, World War II and the Cold War. It is at once biography and history, and essential to our understanding of our recent past-and of our choices for the future.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF 2022 BY THE GUARDIAN AND THE NEW STATESMAN 'A STAND OUT' SUNDAY TIMES 'STARTLINGLY HONEST AND DEVASTATINGLY GOOD' RACHEL CLARKE, GUARDIAN 'BRILLIANT' OBSERVER 'POWERFUL AND EVOCATIVE' ADAM KAY 'YOU EMERGE KNOWING HOW LUCKY YOU ARE TO HAVE READ IT' ALI SMITH, NEW STATESMAN From the frontlines of the NHS, the story of a junior doctor's love, loss and grief through the Covid-19 crisis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In early 2020, junior doctor Roopa Farooki lost her sister to cancer. But just weeks later, she found herself plunged into another kind of crisis, fighting on the frontline of the battle taking place in her hospital, and in hospitals across the country. Everything is True is the story of Roopa's first forty days of the Covid-19 crisis from the frontlines of A&E and the acute medical wards, as struggling through her grief, she battles for her patients' and colleagues' survival. Working thirteen-hour shifts, she returns home each evening to write through her exhaustion, chronicling the devastating losses and slowly eroding dehumanisation happening in real time on the ward.