A Nobel Prize–winning physicist's "funny, clever, entertaining" account of the history of particle physics and the hunt for a Higgs boson ( Library Journal).In this extraordinarily accessible and witty book, Leon Lederman—"the most engaging physicist since the late, much-missed Richard Feynman" ( San Francisco Examiner)—offers a fascinating tour that takes us from the Greeks' earliest scientific observations through Einstein and beyond in an inspi...

Important and provocative, The Undead examines why even with the tools of advanced technology, what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear and how this problem has been further complicated by the business of organ harvesting.Dick Teresi, a science writer with a dark sense of humor, manages to make this story entertaining, informative, and accessible as he shows how death determination has become more complicated than ever. T...

Lost Discoveries, Dick Teresi's innovative history of science, explores the unheralded scientific breakthroughs from peoples of the ancient world -- Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Africans, New World and Oceanic tribes, among others -- and the non-European medieval world. They left an enormous heritage in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, chemistry, and technology.The mathematical foundation of Western science is a gift from the Indians, ...

The hunt for the Higgs particle has involved the biggest, most expensive experiment ever. So exactly what is this particle? Why does it matter so much? What does it tell us about the Universe? Has the discovery announced on 4 July 2012 finished the search? And was finding it really worth all the effort?The short answer is yes. The Higgs field is proposed as the way in which particles gain mass - a fundamental property of matter. It's the strongest indicator yet that the Standard Model of p...

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...

On July 4, 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva madehistory when they discovered an entirely new type of subatomic particle that many scientists believe is the Higgs boson. For forty years, physicists searched for this capstone to the Standard Model of particle physics—the theory that describes both the most elementary components that are known in matter and the forces through which they interact. This particle points to the Higgs field, which provides the key to underst...

The best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"—funny, poignant, instructive.One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and an unparalleled ability to tell the stories of his life. "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" is Feynman’s last literary legacy, which he prepared as he struggled with cancer. Among its many tales—some funny, others intensely moving—we meet Fey...

"A marvelously clear and engaging account of . . . the deepest mysteries of the quantum world and [converting] them into a useful technology." —Gregory Chaitin, author of Meta Math! The Quest for OmegaWhat is entanglement? It's a connection between quantum particles, the building blocks of the universe. Once two particles are entangled, a change to one of them is reflected—instantly—in the other, be they in the same lab or light-years apart. So counterintui...

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-FictionWinner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-FictionOne of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late...

A New York Times science bestseller from "America's funniest science writer" ( Washington Post ), this "quirky, funny read offers perspective and insight about life, death and the medical profession" ( Wall Street Journal ). With a New Epilogue by the Author."Delightful—though never disrespectful" ( Time Out New York), science ...

The first book in Iain M. Banks's seminal science fiction series, The Culture. Consider Phlebas introduces readers to the utopian conglomeration of human and alien races that explores the nature of war, morality, and the limitless bounds of mankind's imagination.The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fou...

A soldier experiences the toll of interstellar war against a deadly alien foe in this Hugo and Nebula Award–winning science fiction masterpiece.In this novel, a landmark of science fiction that began as an MFA thesis for the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to become an award-winning classic—inspiring a play, a graphic novel, and most recently an in-development film—man has taken to the stars, and soldiers fighting the wars of the future return to Earth forever a...