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Books > Biography > Science, technology & engineering
Like a third of the UK population, Julia has a chronic pain
condition. According to her doctors, it can't be cured. She doesn't
believe them. She does believe in miracles, though. It's just a
question of tracking one down. Julia's search for a cure takes her
on a global quest, exploring the boundaries between science,
psychology and faith with practitioners on the fringes of
conventional, traditional and alternative medicine. Raising vital
questions about the modern medical system, Heal Me is also a story
about identity in a system skewed against female patients, and the
struggle to retain a sense of self under the medical gaze.
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 Using Everett's unpublished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.
![Watching Over Angels (Paperback): Jayne Ann Osborne](//media.loot.co.za/images/x80/6797147124847179215.jpg) |
Watching Over Angels
(Paperback)
Jayne Ann Osborne; Edited by Holly Young Kolb; Foreword by Janie Wilson
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R387
Discovery Miles 3 870
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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THE GALANTHOPHILES is the first book to focus on the lives of
snowdrop devotees during the years 1854 to 2014 when snowdrops came
of horticultural age. It tells the stories of the most important
individuals whose fascination with every aspect of the genus
Galanthus ensured the survival of so many of the snowdrops we grow
today. The stories are interwoven with accounts of the introduction
of new snowdrop species and new snowdrop variants and provide a
history of Galanthus cultivation in Britain.
'[This] crisply succinct, beautifully synthesized study brings to
life Tesla, his achievements and failures...and the hopeful thrum
of an era before world wars.' - Nature Nikola Tesla is one of the
most enigmatic, curious and controversial figures in the history of
science. An electrical pioneer as influential in his own way as
Thomas Edison, he embodied the aspirations and paradoxes of an age
of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp.
In an era that saw the spread of power networks and wireless
telegraphy, the discovery of X-rays, and the birth of powered
flight, Tesla made himself synonymous with the electrical future
under construction but opinion was often divided as to whether he
was a visionary, a charlatan, or a fool. Iwan Rhys Morus examines
Tesla's life in the context of the extraordinary times in which he
lived and worked, colourfully evoking an age in which anything
seemed possible, from capturing the full energy of Niagara to
communicating with Mars. Shattering the myth of the 'man out of
time', Morus demonstrates that Tesla was in all ways a product of
his era, and shows how the popular image of the
inventor-as-maverick-outsider was deliberately crafted by Tesla -
establishing an archetype that still resonates today.
'Lucid, calm, informed, directly helpful in trying to think about
where we are now... The literature of the time after begins here'
Evening Standard 'Taking a breather from bewildering statistics and
terrible tales of contagion to read Giordano's book was a jolt of
brevity and simplicity... It takes concepts that have been dancing
away in our minds, just out of reach, and lines them up neatly' The
Times 'Potent and original' Sunday Times 'In one short hour, in the
midst of this difficult moment, Giordano reinforced my sense of
hope in humanity, in the one and the many' Philippe Sands, author
of East West Street and The Rat Line The Covid-19 pandemic is the
most significant health emergency of our time. Writing from Italy
in lockdown, physicist and novelist Paolo Giordano explains how
disease spreads in our interconnected world: why it matters how it
impacts us how we must react Expanding his focus to include other
forms of contagion - from the environmental crisis to fake news and
xenophobia - Giordano shows us not just how the coronavirus crisis
got so bad so quickly, but also how we can work together to create
change. Paolo Giordano is a physicist and the author of four
bestselling novels. His article 'The Mathematics of Contagion' -
published in Italy at the beginning of the coronavirus emergency -
was shared more than 4 million times and helped shift public
opinion in the early stages of the epidemic.
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