"Mahon has written a first-rate book on Maxwell's science and legacy."—New ScientistThis is the first biography in twenty years of James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest scientists of our time and yet a man relatively unknown to the wider public. Approaching science with a freshness unbound by convention or previous expectations, he produced some of the most original scientific thinking of the nineteenth century — and his discoveries went on to sh...

The story of two brilliant nineteenth-century scientists who discovered the electromagnetic field, laying the groundwork for the amazing technological and theoretical breakthroughs of the twentieth centuryTwo of the boldest and most creative scientists of all time were Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). This is the story of how these two men - separated in age by forty years - discovered the existence of the electromagnetic field and devised a radically new th...

FINALIST! 2019 IEEE William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History AwardThis biography of Oliver Heaviside profiles the life of an underappreciated genius and describes his many contributions to electrical science, which proved to be essential to the future of mass communications. Oliver Heaviside (1850 -1925) may not be a household name but he was one of the great pioneers of electrical science: his work led to huge advances in communications and became the bedrock of the subj...

James Clerk Maxwell is one of history's most influential scientists — in Einstein's words, the man with whom "one scientific epoch ended and another began" — yet he remains far less known to the public than contemporaries like Faraday, Newton, or Einstein himself. In this biography, engineer-turned-writer Basil Mahon traces Maxwell's life from his boyhood on a Scottish country estate through Edinburgh, Cambridge, and professorships at Aberdeen, London, and Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory....

Two of the boldest and most creative scientists of all time were Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). This is the story of how these two men—separated in age by forty years—discovered the existence of the electromagnetic field and devised a radically new theory which overturned the strictly mechanical view of the world that had prevailed since Newton's time.The authors, veteran science writers with special expertise in physics and engineering, have creat...

**Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeThe definitive biography of Paul Dirac, the brilliant—and enigmatic—physicist whose foundational work in quantum mechanics revolutionized modern science.“This biography is a gift.… A thought-provoking meditation on human achievement, limitations, and the relations between the two.” —New York Times Book Review**Paul Dirac was among the great scientific geniuses of the modern age. An admired colleague of Al...

"A worthy addition to the Feynman shelf and a welcome follow-up to the standard-bearer, James Gleick's Genius." —Kirkus ReviewsPerhaps the greatest physicist of the second half of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman changed the way we think about quantum mechanics, the most perplexing of all physical theories. Here Lawrence M. Krauss, himself a theoretical physicist and a best-selling author, offers a unique scientific biography: a rollicking narrative coupled ...

Celebrated for his brilliantly quirky insights into the physical world, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman also possessed an extraordinary talent for explaining difficult concepts to the general public. Here Feynman provides a classic and definitive introduction to QED (namely quantum electrodynamics), that part of quantum field theory describing the interactions of light with charged particles. Using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations, and his renowned "Feynman diagrams" inst...

Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, the dangerous romantic poet whose name became a byword for scandal. Over the past decades, she herself has become a surprising underground star for digital pioneers all over the world, starting with Alan Turing. Embraced by programmers and women in technology, Ada even has her own day that is commemorated every year on Google's search engine. Ada's Algorithm, tells the exceptional story of Ada Lovelace's life and achievement, and tr...

Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect. During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave them names—mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes for granted. Inspired...

"[A] highly readable, accessible look at particle physics today and…a passionate defense and celebration of the scientific worldview" (Discovery News).One of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world and the bestselling author of Warped Passages, Lisa Randall is an expert in both particle physics (the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology (the study of the largest). In this book, Randall takes us on an amazing tour ...

“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean thi...