Understanding the human mind and how it relates to the world that we experience has challenged philosophers for centuries. How then do we even begin to think about 'minds' that are not human? Science now has plenty to say about the properties of mind. In recent decades, the mind - both human and otherwise - has been explored by scientists in fields ranging from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where they might be found - including in plants, aliens, and God - Philip Ball pulls these multidisciplinary pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, arguing that in order to understand our own minds and imagine those of others, we need to move on from considering the human mind as a standard against which all others should be measured, and to think about the 'space of possible minds'. By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions. What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? The more we learn about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, and to imagine the potential minds of computers and alien intelligences, the greater the perspective we have on if and how our own is different. Ball's thrillingly ambitious The Book of Minds about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.

Featuring two hundred color plates, this history of the craft of scientific inquiry is as exquisite as the experiments whose stories it shares.   This illustrated history of experimental science is more than just a celebration of the ingenuity that scientists and natural philosophers have used throughout the ages to study—and to change—the world. Here we see in intricate detail experiments that have, in some way or another, exhibited elegance and beauty: in their design, their conception, and their execution. Celebrated science writer Philip Ball invites readers to marvel at and admire the craftsmanship of scientific instruments and apparatus on display, from the earliest microscopes to the giant particle colliders of today. With Ball as our expert guide, we are encouraged to think carefully about what experiments are, what they mean, and how they are used. Ranging across millennia and geographies, Beautiful Experiments demonstrates why “experiment� remains a contested notion in science, while also exploring how we came to understand the way the world functions, what it contains, and where the pursuit of that understanding has brought us today.

With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales. Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time-fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them-and still living them-today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called "modern myths." But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.

Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time-fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them-and still living them-today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called "modern myths." But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.

What if you had developed a machine that generated energy for free and no one believed you? That is the lot of Kurt Neder, once Einstein's accomplice and the brightest young physicist of his generation, now a lost soul wandering Europe in the hope that someone will pay him heed. Enter Lena - an intrepid young British journalist, hoping for a story to kick-start her stalled career, and driven by her own needs and beliefs, and her own need to believe. Her trail takes her from the cafes of Vienna via the castles of Transylvania and the labs of Princeton to the blasted borderlands of the old Soviet Union, in the search for truth and coherence, both scientific and personal. Here is a Geiger counter of a novel that crackles with ideas and offers the reader insights and emotions not often found in fiction.

Though at first glance the natural world may appear overwhelming in its diversity and complexity, there are regularities running through it, from the hexagons of a honeycomb to the spirals of a seashell and the branching veins of a leaf. Revealing the order at the foundation of the seemingly chaotic natural world, Patterns in Nature explores not only the math and science but also the beauty and artistry behind nature's awe-inspiring designs. Unlike the patterns we create in technology, architecture, and art, natural patterns are formed spontaneously from the forces that act in the physical world. Very often the same types of pattern and form spirals, stripes, branches, and fractals, say recur in places that seem to have nothing in common, as when the markings of a zebra mimic the ripples in windblown sand. That's because, as Patterns in Nature shows, at the most basic level these patterns can often be described using the same mathematical and physical principles: there is a surprising underlying unity in the kaleidoscope of the natural world.Richly illustrated with 250 color photographs and anchored by accessible and insightful chapters by esteemed science writer Philip Ball, Patterns in Nature reveals the organization at work in vast and ancient forests, powerful rivers, massing clouds, and coastlines carved out by the sea. By exploring similarities such as those between a snail shell and the swirling stars of a galaxy, or the branches of a tree and those of a river network, this spectacular visual tour conveys the wonder, beauty, and richness of natural pattern formation.

This book offers a largely chronological illustrated guide to how the chemical elements were discovered over the past three millennia. It provides a view not just of how we came to understand what everything is made of but also of how chemistry developed from a trial-and-error craft of making and transforming substances into a rational modern science that provides us with new materials, drugs, and much else. While other books have described the properties of the chemical elements and often delved into their histories, none has done so in this highly visual manner. The closest comparison is Theodore Gray's illustrated book The Elements - but this does not take a historical approach as this does here. The pictorial material for this subject is very rich, including some gorgeous alchemical documents as well as portraits, colour charts, woodcuts of mining, artefacts such as John Dalton's wooden balls, advertisements (for example, for radium 'cures') and postage stamps. The book contains separate short sections for each element or groups of related elements, which are gathered into several sections to order the sequence into several chronological eras of element discovery. Included are short 'interludes' (or 'feature spreads') presenting important intellectual milestones in how we think about elements. With 192 illustrations

Society is complicated. But this book argues that this does not place it beyond the reach of a science that can help to explain and perhaps even to predict social behaviour. As a system made up of many interacting agents people, groups, institutions and governments, as well as physical and technological structures such as roads and computer networks society can be regarded as a complex system. In recent years, scientists have made great progress in understanding how such complex systems operate, ranging from animal populations to earthquakes and weather. These systems show behaviours that cannot be predicted or intuited by focusing on the individual components, but which emerge spontaneously as a consequence of their interactions: they are said to be self-organized . Attempts to direct or manage such emergent properties generally reveal that top-down approaches, which try to dictate a particular outcome, are ineffectual, and that what is needed instead is a bottom-up approach that aims to guide self-organization towards desirable states.

This book shows how some of these ideas from the science of complexity can be applied to the study and management of social phenomena, including traffic flow, economic markets, opinion formation and the growth and structure of cities. Building on these successes, the book argues that the complex-systems view of the social sciences has now matured sufficiently for it to be possible, desirable and perhaps essential to attempt a grander objective: to integrate these efforts into a unified scheme for studying, understanding and ultimately predicting what happens in the world we have made. Such a scheme would require the mobilization and collaboration of many different research communities, and would allow society and its interactions with the physical environment to be explored through realistic models and large-scale data collection and analysis. It should enable us to find new and effective solutions to major global problems such as conflict, disease, financial instability, environmental despoliation and poverty, while avoiding unintended policy consequences. It could give us the foresight to anticipate and ameliorate crises, and to begin tackling some of the most intractable problems of the twenty-first century.

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Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is revered as one of the most beautiful and profound works of art in the Western canon. But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--and why was it built at such immense height and with such glorious play of light, in the soaring manner we now call Gothic?

In this eminently fascinating work, author Philip Ball makes sense of the visual and emotional power of Chartres and brilliantly explores how its construction--and the creation of other Gothic cathedrals--represented a profound and dramatic shift in the way medieval thinkers perceived their relationship with their world. Beautifully illustrated and written, filled with astonishing insight, "Universe of Stone" embeds the magnificent cathedral in the culture of the twelfth century--its schools of philosophy and science, its trades and technologies, its politics and religious debates--enabling us to view this ancient architectural marvel with fresh eyes.

Understanding the human mind and how it relates to the world of experience has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries. How do we even begin to think about 'minds' that are not human? That is the question explored in this ground-breaking book. Award-winning science writer Philip Ball argues that in order to understand our own minds and imagine those of others, we need to move on from considering the human mind as a standard against which all others should be measured. Science has begun to have something to say about the properties of mind; the more we learn about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, to imagine the potential minds of computers and alien intelligences, the more we can begin to see our own, and the more we can understand the diversity of the human mind, in the widest of contexts. By understanding how minds differ, we can also best understand our own.

"Made to Measure" introduces a general audience to one of today's most exciting areas of scientific research: materials science. Philip Ball describes how scientists are currently inventing thousands of new materials, ranging from synthetic skin, blood, and bone to substances that repair themselves and adapt to their environment, that swell and flex like muscles, that repel any ink or paint, and that capture and store the energy of the Sun. He shows how all this is being accomplished precisely because, for the first time in history, materials are being "made to measure": designed for particular applications, rather than discovered in nature or by haphazard experimentation. Now scientists literally put new materials together on the drawing board in the same way that a blueprint is specified for a house or an electronic circuit. But the designers are working not with skylights and alcoves, not with transistors and capacitors, but with molecules and atoms.

This book is written in the same engaging manner as Ball's popular book on chemistry, "Designing the Molecular World," and it links insights from chemistry, biology, and physics with those from engineering as it outlines the various areas in which new materials will transform our lives in the twenty-first century. The chapters provide vignettes from a broad range of selected areas of materials science and can be read as separate essays. The subjects include photonic materials, materials for information storage, smart materials, biomaterials, biomedical materials, materials for clean energy, porous materials, diamond and hard materials, new polymers, and surfaces and interfaces.

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.

Is there a 'physics of society'? Ranging from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, and across economics, sociology and psychology, Philip Ball shows how much we can understand of human behaviour when we cease to try to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions., whether in circumstances in which human beings co-operate or conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the new Harry Potter book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers.

A cutting-edge new vision of biology that will revise our concept of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).

With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.

Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

Thought the science of the future was all hoverboards and space travel? Think again.

Every day, scientists come up with the ingenious solutions and surprising discoveries that will define our future. So here, Jim Al-Khalili and his crack team of experts bin the crystal ball and use cutting-edge science to get a glimpse of what's in store.

From whether teleportation is really possible (spoiler: it is), to what we'll do if artificial intelligence takes over, What's Next? takes on the big questions. And along the way, it'll answer questions like: Will we find a cure to all diseases? An answer to climate change? Will bionics make us into superheroes?

Touching on everything from genetics to transport, and nanotechnology to teleportation, What's Next? is a fascinating, fun and informative look at what's in store for the human race.

Apart from the nursery rhyme 'The Grand Old Duke of York', Britain's war against Revolutionary France is today a largely forgotten prelude to the Napoleonic Wars. The campaign in Flanders was Britain's attempt to stem the power of the new republic as it threatened to engulf its neighbours, but it was to end in disaster. This is the first account of this intensive campaign written in modern times; chronicling the many battles as the varying fortunes of the combatants saw their armies march to and fro across the fields of Flanders. A weak and ill-equipped army led by the Duke of York struggled daily with the terrain and climate of the Low Countries as well as the competing aims of its allies and the unrealistic expectations of its government. This book details the numerous major battles of the campaign and the unravelling of the First Coalition using British, French and German sources.

With the recent landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, it seems safe to assume that the idea of being curious is alive and well in modern science--that it's not merely encouraged but is seen as an essential component of the scientific mission. Yet there was a time when curiosity was condemned. Neither Pandora nor Eve could resist the dangerous allure of unanswered questions, and all knowledge wasn't equal--for millennia it was believed that there were some things we should not try to know. In the late sixteenth century this attitude began to change dramatically, and in "Curiosity: ""How Science Became Interested in Everything, "Philip Ball investigates how curiosity first became sanctioned--when it changed from a vice to a virtue and how it became permissible to ask any and every question about the world. Looking closely at the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Ball vividly brings to life the age when modern science began, a time that spans the lives of Galileo and Isaac Newton. In this entertaining and illuminating account of the rise of science as we know it, Ball tells of scientists both legendary and lesser known, from Copernicus and Kepler to Robert Boyle, as well as the inventions and technologies that were inspired by curiosity itself, such as the telescope and the microscope. The so-called Scientific Revolution is often told as a story of great geniuses illuminating the world with flashes of inspiration. But "Curiosity" reveals a more complex story, in which the liberation--and subsequent taming--of curiosity was linked to magic, religion, literature, travel, trade, and empire. Ball also asks what has become of curiosity today: how it functions in science, how it is spun and packaged for consumption, how well it is being sustained, and how the changing shape of science influences the kinds of questions it may continue to ask. Though proverbial wisdom tell us that it was through curiosity that our innocence was lost, that has not deterred us. Instead, it has been completely the contrary: today we spend vast sums trying to reconstruct the first instants of creation in particle accelerators, out of a pure desire to "know." Ball refuses to let us take this desire for granted, and this book is a perfect homage to such an inquisitive attitude.

Selected as a Book of the Year by The Times and The Economist China's history is an epic tapestry of courtly philosophies, warring factions and imperial intrigue. Yet, over five thousand years, one ancient element has so dramatically shaped the country's fate that it remains the key to unlocking China's story. That element is water. In The Water Kingdom Philip Ball takes us on a grand tour of China's defining element, from the rice terraces and towering karts of its battle-worn waterways, to the vast engineering projects that have struggled to contain water's wrath. What surfaces is the secret history of a people and a nation, drawn from its deep reverence for nature's most dynamic force.

Are there "natural laws" that govern the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves, just as there are physical laws that govern the motions of atoms and planets? Unlikely as it may seem, such laws now seem to be emerging from attempts to bring the tools and concepts of physics into the social sciences. These new discoveries are part of an old tradition. In the seventeenth century the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, dismayed by the impending civil war in England, decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His solution sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society. Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. But these philosophers lacked the tools that modern physics can now bring to bear on the matter. Philip Ball shows how, by using these tools, we can understand many aspects of mass human behavior. Once we recognize that we do not make most of our decisions in isolation but are affected by what others decide, we can start to discern a surprising and perhaps even disturbing predictability in our laws, institutions, and customs. Lively and compelling, "Critical Mass "is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live. Philip Ball majored in chemistry at Oxford University and received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Bristol. He is now a writer and consulting editor for "Nature." He is the author of "Life's Matrix": " A Biography of Water"; "Bright Earth": " Art and the Invention of Color," which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and "The Devil's Doctor." He lives in London, England, with his wife. Winner of the Aventis Prize
"Critical Mass" asks the question, Why is society the way it is? How does it emerge from a morass of individual interactions? Are there laws of nature that guide human affairs? Is anything inevitable about the ways humans behave and organize themselves, or do we have complete freedom in creating our societies? In short, just how, in human affairs, does one thing lead to another?
In searching for answers, science writer Philip Ball argues that we can enlist help from a seemingly unlikely source: physics. The first person to think this way was the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His approach, described in "Leviathan," was based not on utopian wishful thinking, but rather on Galileo's mechanics; it was an attempt to construct a moral and political theory from scientific first principles. Although his solution--absolute monarchy--is unappealing today, Hobbes sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society. Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this same idea from different political perspectives.
Today the purpose of applying concepts from physics to the social, political, and economic sciences is no longer to prescribe how society ought to be; instead, it is to understand the way it is, and how it evolves. In "Critical Mass," Ball looks at what this "physics of society" has to say about how people move in open or enclosed spaces; how they make decisions and cast votes, form allegiances, join groups, establish companies and communities. He examines the behavior of financial markets and reveals the hidden structure in networks of social and business contacts, and he explores the politics of conflict and cooperation from a scientific point of view. If physics can help us explain and understand human interaction and social behavior, can it also be used to anticipate and thereby avoid problems? Can physics be harnessed to improve societies, to guide us toward better decisions, and to make a safer and fairer world? Or is that merely another dream destined for the graveyard of utopias past? "A wide-ranging and dazzlingly informed book about the science of interactions. I can promise you'll be amazed."--Bill Bryson, chair of the 2005 Aventis General Prize Judging Panel "Philip Ball makes physics sexy again in "Critical"" ""Mass.""--Elissa Schappel, "Vanity Fair" "A prolific and accomplished science journalist . . . ["Critical Mass" is] lively and wonderfully informative."--George Scialabba, "The ""Boston"" Globe""" "Fascinating . . . impressively clear and breathtaking in scope . . . substantial, impeccably researched . . . persuasive. For anyone who would like to learn about the intellectual ferment at the surprising junction of physics and social science, "Critical Mass" is the place to start."--Stephen Strogatz, "Nature""" ""Critical Mass" is an intellectual roller-coaster."--"The Economist" "A highly provocative work of popular science."--"Kirkus Reviews "(starred review) "In this wide-ranging investigation of pioneering attempts to explain social behavior by applying formulas borrowed from physics, Ball explains how maverick social theorists are now using discoveries about molecular motion and crystal formation to predict the behavior of various human groups, including crowds of soccer fans and clusters of pedestrians. Ball acknowledges that past 'political arithmeticians' have often dehumanized their subjects by adopting mechanistic assumptions about individual psychology and have sometimes legitimated totalitarian rulers by giving them a putatively scientific charter. But Ball's numerous detailed examples of the new social physics show how statistical models from physics can yield highly reliable predictions for large-group outcomes without abridging the unpredictable freedom of individual choice. These same examples teach that a consistent physics of society yields not an ideological straitjacket stipulating how people "should "act but rather a detailed portrait of how people "do "act. Because the new social physics can help managers and policy makers in dozens of fields, this accessibly written book will attract a very diverse audience."--Bryce Christensen, "Booklist" "What can physics have to say about how people behave in groups, how networks such as the Internet evolve, and why the stock market fluctuates, among other questions? According to Ball, a lot. The application of physical methods to social problems isn't particularly new, as the author demonstrates, beginning with Hobbes's attempt at a scientific explanation of politics. The development of statistical measurements of society paralleled the growth of statistical physics; as Ball puts it: 'physical science and social science were the twin siblings of a mechanistic philosophy and when it was not in the least disreputable to invoke the habits of people to explain the habits of insensate particles.' With that in mind, Ball explores recent applications of statistical physics toward a study of social physics. He draws on a wide body of contemporary literature that includes physical approaches to traffic, economics, group dynamics, and politics. While the physical application to the social sciences is not alien, as physics explains the behavior of particles and phase transitions, can it explain human behav

J. E. Gordon's classic introduction to the properties of materials used in engineering answers some fascinating and fundamental questions about how the structural world around us works. Gordon focuses on so-called strong materials--such as metals, wood, ceramics, glass, and bone--explaining in engaging and accessible terms the unique physical and chemical basis for their inherent structural qualities. He also shows how an in-depth understanding of these materials' intrinsic strengths--and weaknesses--guides our engineering choices, allowing us to build the structures that support our society. This work is an enduring example of first-rate scientific communication. Philip Ball's introduction describes Gordon's career and the impact of his innovations in materials research, while also discussing how the field has evolved since Gordon wrote this enduring example of first-rate scientific communication.

Timothy Leary's advice to "tune in, turn on and drop out" was a 1960s exhortation to experiment with LSD, but humans had been consuming ergot alkaloids related to lysergic acid diethylamide for at least a thousand years. Opium has been around even longer with its medicinal uses being known to the Ancient Sumerians as long ago as 3400 BC. This is the first book to cover all of the major psychoactive drugs (both natural and synthetic) in one volume, and the only one to cover all aspects of these drugs from their anthropological and sociological influences through to their chemistry and pharmacology. It covers a range of substances including LSD, opium, heroin, cocaine, cannabis, peyote, belladonna, mandrake, and absinthe. The book is highly readable and concentrates on the characters (e.g. authors, painters, pop stars, hippies, politicians and drug barons), both famous and infamous, who have ensured that psychoactive drugs hold an enduring fascination and interest for everyone. The basic chemistry and pharmacological activity covered together with a brief account of useful drugs that have emerged from a study of the psychoactive ones.

PHYSICS WORLD 2018 BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A clear and deeply researched account of what's known about the quantum laws of nature, and how to think about what they might really mean' Nature 'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.' Richard Feynman wrote this in 1965 - the year he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work on quantum mechanics. Over the past decade, the enigma of quantum mechanics has come into sharper focus. We now realise that quantum mechanics is less about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information: about what can be known and how. The quantum world isn't a different world: it is our world, and if anything deserves to be called 'weird', it's us. This exhilarating book is about what quantum maths really means - and what it doesn't mean. 'Gorgeously lucid...takes us to the edge of contemporary theorizing about the foundations of quantum mechanics... Easily the best book I've read on the subject' Washington Post

If you could be invisible, what would you do? The chances are that it would have something to do with power, wealth or sex. Perhaps all three. But there's no need to feel guilty. Impulses like these have always been at the heart of our fascination with invisibility: it points to realms beyond our senses, serves as a receptacle for fears and dreams, and hints at worlds where other rules apply. Invisibility is a mighty power and a terrible curse, a sexual promise, a spiritual condition. This is a history of humanity's turbulent relationship with the invisible. It takes on the myths and morals of Plato, the occult obsessions of the Middle Ages, the trickeries and illusions of stage magic, the auras and ethers of Victorian physics, military strategies to camouflage armies and ships and the discovery of invisibly small worlds. From the medieval to the cutting-edge, fairy tales to telecommunications, from beliefs about the supernatural to the discovery of dark energy, Philip Ball reveals the universe of the invisible.

A cutting-edge examination of what it means to be human and to have a 'self' in the face of new scientific developments in genetic editing, cloning and neural downloading. After seeing his own cells used to grow clumps of new neurons - essentially mini-brains - Philip Ball begins to examine the concepts of identity and consciousness. Delving into humanity's deep evolutionary past to look at how complex creatures like us emerged from single-celled life, he offers a new perspective on how humans think about ourselves. In an age when we are increasingly encouraged to regard the 'self' as an abstract sequence of genetic information, or as a pattern of neural activity that might be 'downloaded' to a computer, he return us to the body - to flesh and blood - and anchors a conception of personhood in this unique and ephemeral mortal coil. How to Build a Human brings us back to ourselves - but in doing so, it challenges old preconceptions and values. It asks us to rethink how we exist in the world.