An original vision in a 'ground breaking' book.This book has been called '…a brilliant and profoundly erudite epic…a heroic intellectual tour de force…' (by David Lorimer, the Director of the Scientific and Medical Network) and both 'brave…and totally insightful (by Ervin Laszlo) but the book defies description; it breaks all the rules and is unlike any other. It is so comprehensive in its sweep, original in its writing, ground-breaking in its synthesis, that to isolate any aspect ...

A New York Times Notable Book.The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now it threatens the foundations of modern physics. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything.In Zero, Science Journalist Charles Sei...

Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman, but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a 'beautiful and important book' by 'a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discu...

The epic tale of an ancient, unsolved puzzle and how it relates to all scientific attempts to explain the basic structure of the universeAt the dawn of science the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno formulated his paradox of motion, and amazingly, it is still on the cutting edge of all investigations into the fabric of reality.Zeno used logic to argue that motion is impossible, and at the heart of his maddening puzzle is the nature of space and time. Is space-t...

"A complete introduction to the geometric code of nature, written and illustrated by the most perceptive of its modern investigators." —John Michell, from the PrefaceYou need not be a philosopher or a botanist, and certainly not a mathematician, to enjoy the bounty of the world around us. But is there some sort of order, a pattern, to the things that we see in the sky, on the ground, at the beach? In A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, Michael...

One sun, two parents, three meals a day, four seasons, five fingers … every child soon discovers that lots of things in life have an inherent number attached to them. Just as five individual fingers become something much more important and powerful when combined together in a hand, these numbers are often much more than a simple addition of their parts: they are intrinsically connected to the object, expressing a particular quality. In this readable little book, Wolfgang Held explores the ...

In the grand tradition of the scholar-adventurer, acclaimed author Richard Cohen takes us around the world to illuminate our relationship with the star that gives us life. Drawing on more than seven years of research, he reports from locations in eighteen different countries. As he soon discovers, the Sun is present everywhere—in mythology, language, religion, politics, sciences, art, literature, and medicine, even in the ocean’s depths. For some ancient worshippers, our star was a man aba...

In this scientific 'Credo', Peter Atkins considers the universal questions of origins, endings, birth, and death to which religions have claimed answers. With his usual economy, wit, and elegance, unswerving before awkward realities, Atkins presents what science has to say. While acknowledging the comfort some find in belief, he declares his own faith in science's capacity to reveal the deepest truths.

Charles Darwin has now taken his place as one of the great scientific innovators of all time and has changed for ever the way we see ourselves, and our place in the universe. Even those who hold to the biblical account of creation and see Darwin's theory as a profound error can no longer take for granted that their beliefs are beyond question. Yet, the debate between the Creationists and the neo-Darwinians continues in full fury. One outcome of this has been to see Darwin's theory become e...

What conceptual blind spot kept the ancient Greeks (unlike the Indians and Maya) from developing a concept of zero? Why did St. Augustine equate nothingness with the Devil? What tortuous means did 17th-century scientists employ in their attempts to create a vacuum? And why do contemporary quantum physicists believe that the void is actually seething with subatomic activity? You’ll find the answers in this dizzyingly erudite and elegantly explained book by the English cosmologist John D. Ba...

Jacob Bronowski was, with Kenneth Clarke, the greatest popularizer of serious ideas in Britain between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. Trained as a mathematician, he was equally at home with painting and physics, and wrote a series of brilliant books that tried to break down the barriers between 'the two cultures'. He denounced 'the destructive modern prejudice that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests'. He wrote a fine book on William Blake while running the...

On 24th November 1859, Charles Darwin published 'On the Origin of Species'. His master-work laid down the theory of evolution by natural selection. In the century and half since publication, this theory has become firmly entwined with our instinctive view of how the planet's species came to be. It has also caused huge debates about the nature of its interpretation and its relationship to religious faith.This Guardian Short gathers together the newspaper's most significant contributions to the...