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 ...

In The Accidental Universe, physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores the emotional and philosophical questions raised by discoveries in science, focusing most intently on the human condition and the needs of humankind.Here, in a collection of exhilarating essays, Lightman shows us our own universe from a series of fascinating and diverse perspectives. He takes on the difficult dialogue between science and religion; the conflict between our human desire for permanence ...

This is the book that Daniel Tammet, bestselling author and mathematical savant, was born to write. In Tammet's world, numbers are beautiful and mathematics illuminates our lives and minds. Using anecdotes and everyday examples, Tammet allows us to share his unique insights and delight in the way numbers, fractions and equations underpin all our lives.Inspired by the complexity of snowflakes, Anne Boleyn's sixth finger or his mother's unpredictable behaviour, Tammet explores questio...

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...

'An obvious candidate to take to a desert island, along with Shakespeare and the Bible' Daily TelegraphDon't know your isosceles from your equilateral? Forgotten what actually happened in 1066? Any idea why the sky is blue? This bestselling bible of old-school knowledge for grown-ups has all the answers.With fun lessons in mathematics and algebra, English language and literature, chemistry and the sciences, geography, history, Lati...

"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 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.

‘A delight. Popular science doesn’t come much better than this’ IndependentEverything you might want to know about infinity - in history and all the way to today's cutting-edge science.Infinity is surely the strangest idea that humans have ever had. Where did it come from and what is it telling us about our Universe? Can there actually be infinities? Can you do an infinite number of things in a finite amount of time? Is the Univers...

A startling investigation of what it means to be human.Human beings know how to make machines. But what kind of machine is a human being? And could we ever make one?In order to answer these questions, other questions get in the way:What is it like to be a human being?What is it like to be some other kind of animal?What is reality?What is consciousness?Is there a God?What is love?Why live?The questions proliferate.

Timothy Ferris, bestselling author of Coming of Age in the Milky Way, brilliantly synthesizes inner and outer space with a penetrating examination into the nature of the universe and the human brain that perceives it. Through the lenses of two innovative fields of scientific research - neuroscience and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI - Ferris brings into focus a startling new vision of the relationship between mind and universe.Whether he is contempla...