Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely at home he can’t contain his curiosity about the world around him. “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilisation – how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. The ultimate eye-opening journey through time and space, revealing the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.
Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.
What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.
But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.
A landmark volume in science writing by one of the great minds of our time, Stephen Hawking’s book explores such profound questions as: How did the universe begin—and what made its start possible? Does time always flow forward? Is the universe unending—or are there boundaries? Are there other dimensions in space? What will happen when it all ends?
Told in language we all can understand, A Brief History of Time plunges into the exotic realms of black holes and quarks, of antimatter and “arrows of time,” of the big bang and a bigger God—where the possibilities are wondrous and unexpected. With exciting images and profound imagination, Stephen Hawking brings us closer to the ultimate secrets at the very heart of creation.
This visually stunning book with over 250 full-color illustrations, many of them never before published, is based on Carl Sagan’s thirteen-part television series. Told with Sagan’s remarkable ability to make scientific ideas both comprehensible and exciting, Cosmos is about science in its broadest human context, how science and civilization grew up together.
The book also explores spacecraft missions of discovery of the nearby planets, the research in the Library of ancient Alexandria, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the origin of life, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies and the origins of matter, suns and worlds.
Sagan retraces the fifteen billion years of cos-mic evolution that have transformed matter into life and consciousness, enabling the Cosmos to wonder about itself. He considers the latest findings on life elsewhere and how we might communicate with the beings of other worlds.
Cosmos is the story of our long journey of discovery and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science, including Democritus, Hypatia, Kepler, Newton, Huy-gens, Champollion, Lowell and Humason. Sagan looks at our planet from an extra-terrestrial vantage point and sees a blue jewel-like world, inhabited by a lifeform that is just beginning to discover its own unity and to ven-ture into the vast ocean of space.
Come nei Racconti di Canterbury un eterogeneo gruppo di pellegrini diretti a un santuario narra, su invito dell’oste di una locanda, alcune storie, ognuna delle quali è espressione di un codice culturale e di un itinerario spirituale, così nel Racconto dell’Antenato altri “pellegrini” – non solo esseri umani ma anche animali, funghi, piante, batteri – compiono oggi, su invito di Richard Dawkins, un viaggio ugualmente rivelatore nel nostro passato. In ciascuno dei trentanove “rendez-vous” del percorso a ritroso che ci conduce fino a quattro miliardi di anni fa, i viandanti incontrano nuovi gruppi con cui hanno un antenato in comune, e la folla diventa sempre più imponente a mano a mano che ci si avvicina alla meta. Alla fine il pellegrinaggio giunge alla sua Canterbury, ossia all’evento cruciale della vita sulla terra: l’unione di un organismo unicellulare – il futuro protozoo – con un batterio per formare la cellula nucleata. Da quel momento, tutti gli esseri viventi percorrono insieme l’ultimo tratto verso la comune origine biologica. La cronaca del viaggio, però, è solo il contenitore dei singoli racconti. Se i pellegrini di Geoffrey Chaucer narravano le vicende del loro ambiente sociale, i protagonisti di questa straordinaria avventura illustrano i processi biologici legati allo sviluppo della vita sulla terra. Uniche per ricchezza e varietà, tali storie non solo tracciano l’autoritratto filogenetico del narratore, ma descrivono anche le più recenti acquisizioni della biologia molecolare, che hanno consentito di gettare nuova luce sul processo evolutivo e di riformulare stimolanti interrogativi. In che modo i nostri progenitori si sono propagati dall’Africa negli altri continenti? La stazione eretta venne adottata per liberare le mani e trasportare il cibo? A indurre l’aumento delle dimensioni del cervello fu forse l’acquisita abilità manuale? Quanto differiscono geneticamente le razze umane? E poi, esiste davvero la “razza”? A queste e molte altre domande Dawkins risponde con sapienza scientifica e finezza letteraria, invitandoci a riflettere sull’intima relazione esistente fra tutti gli esseri viventi e sullo stretto legame fra le varie e mirabili espressioni della realtà biologica, unificate da un solo “eroe”, quel “tema musicale ricorrente, quasi un leitmotiv wagneriano” che ha nome dna.
A New York Times bestseller—the outrageous exploits of one of this century's greatest scientific minds and a legendary American original.
Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. Here he recounts in his inimitable voice his experience trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and Bohr and ideas on gambling with Nick the Greek; cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets; accompanying a ballet on his bongo drums; painting a naked female toreador. In short, here is Feynman's life in all its eccentric—a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah.
"The Selfish Gene" caused a wave of excitement among biologists and the general public when it was first published in 1976. Its vivid rendering of a gene's eye view of life, in lucid prose, gathered together the strands of thought about the nature of natural selection into a conceptual framework with far-reaching implications for our understanding of evolution. Time has confirmed its significance. Intellectually rigorous, yet written in non-technical language, "The Selfish Gene" is widely regarded as a masterpiece of science writing, and its insights remain as relevant today as on the day it was published.
Chapters: 1. Why are people? 2. The replicators 3. Immortal coils 4. The gene machine 5. Aggression stability and the selfish machine 6. Genesmanship 7. Family planning 8. Battle of the generations 9. Battle of the sexes 10. You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours 11. Memes: the new replicators 12. Nice guys finish first 13. The long reach of the gene
The highly anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing.
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis.
Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.
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