A compelling history of science from 1900 to the present day, this is the first book to survey modern developments in science during a century of unprecedented change, conflict and uncertainty. The scope is global.Science's claim to access universal truths about the natural world made it an irresistible resource for industrial empires, ideological programs, and environmental campaigners during this period. Science has been at the heart of twentieth century history - from Einstein's...

The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality. The fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in. In this book, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows that science is being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun. According to the dogmas of science, all reality is material or phy...

Science: A Four Thousand Year History rewrites science's past. Instead of focussing on difficult experiments and abstract theories, Patricia Fara shows how science has always belonged to the practical world of war, politics, and business. Rather than glorifying scientists as idealized heroes, she tells true stories about real people - men (and some women) who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, and who trampled down their rivals in their quest for success. Fara sweeps ...

Generations have grown up knowing that the equation E=mc2 changed the shape of our world, but never understanding what it actually means, why it was so significant, and how it informs our daily lives today--governing, as it does, everything from the atomic bomb to a television's cathode ray tube to the carbon dating of prehistoric paintings. In this book, David Bodanis writes the "biography" of one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history--that the realms of energy and matter are ...

'Breathtakingly entertaining, endlessly instructive, irresistibly enjoyable' THE TIMES'A tour de force ... breathtaking' SPECTATOR'A magnificent achievement' LITERARY REVIEWTERRIBLE BEAUTY presents a unique narrative of the twentieth century. Unlike more conventional histories, where the focus is on political events and personalities, on wars, treaties and elections, this book concentrates on the ideas that made the...

"A damning history of the Chernobyl affair, from its origins in the plant's primitive design and careless management to the economic and political crisis the accident precipitated." —Clenn Garelik, New York Times Book ReviewOn the morning of April 26, 1986, a Soviet nuclear plant at Chernobyl (near Kiev) exploded, pouring radioactivity into the environment and setting off the worst disaster in the history of nuclear energy. Now a former Soviet scientist gives a comprehensi...

A fascinating look at the perils and promise of geoengineering and our potential future on a warming planetThe risks of global warming are pressing and potentially vast. The difficulty of doing without fossil fuels is daunting, possibly even insurmountable. So there is an urgent need to rethink our responses to the crisis. To meet that need, a small but increasingly influential group of scientists is exploring proposals for planned human intervention in the climate...

A philosopher of science examines the biggest ethical and moral issues in science today, and explains why they matter for all of us -- scientist and layman alikeScience has produced explanations for everything from the mechanisms of insect navigation to the formation of black holes and the workings of black markets. But how much can we trust science, and can we actually know the world through it? How does science work and how does it fail? And how can the work of s...

The general public has a glorified view of the pursuit of scientific research. However, the idealized perception of science as a rule-based, methodical system for accumulating facts could not be further from the truth. Modern science involves the idiosyncratic, often bumbling search for understanding in uncharted territories, full of wrong turns, false findings, and the occasional remarkable success. In his sequel to Ignorance (Oxford University Press, 2012), Stuart Firestein show...

As Chaos explained the science of disorder, Nexus reveals the new science of connection and the odd logic of six degrees of separation."If you ever wanted to know how many links connect you and the Pope, or why when the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank sneezes the global economy catches cold, read this book," writes John L. Casti (Santa Fe Institute). This "cogent and engaging" (Nature) work presents the fundamental principles of the emerging fi...

It's lucky you're here. But for a series of choices, accidents and coincidences - any of which could have gone otherwise - your life would have been very different.The same goes for reality. We live in just one of many possible worlds - but we can imagine parallel universes in which dinosaurs still rule the Earth, the Russians got to the moon first, everyone's a vegetarian or time itself flows backwards. And that's just for starters.What if the laws of physics were di...

To ordinary people, science used to seem infallible. Scientists were heroes, selflessly pursuing knowledge for the common good. More recently, a series of scientific scandals, frauds and failures have led us to question science’s pre-eminence. Revelations such as Climategate, or debates about the safety of the MMR vaccine, have dented our confidence in science.In this provocative new book Harry Collins seeks to redeem scientific expertise, and reasserts science’s special status. De...