Book picks similar to
The Eightfold Way by Murray Gell-Mann


physics
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Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics


George Johnson - 1999
    at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe.Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity, Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.

Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything


Margaret Wertheim - 2011
    Jim Carter, the Einstein of outsiders, has developed his own complete theory of matter and energy and gravity that he demonstrates with experiments in his backyard,-with garbage cans and a disco fog machine he makes smoke rings to test his ideas about atoms. Captivated by the imaginative power of his theories and his resolutely DIY attitude, Wertheim has been following Carter's progress for the past decade.Centuries ago, natural philosophers puzzled out the laws of nature using the tools of observation and experimentation. Today, theoretical physics has become mathematically inscrutable, accessible only to an elite few. In rejecting this abstraction, outsider theorists insist that nature speaks a language we can all understand. Through a profoundly human profile of Jim Carter, Wertheim's exploration of the bizarre world of fringe physics challenges our conception of what science is, how it works, and who it is for.

Human History in 50 Events: From Ancient Civilizations to Modern Times (History in 50 Events Series Book 1)


James Weber - 2015
     This book is perfect for history lovers. Author James Weber did the research and compiled this huge list of events that changed the course of history forever. Some of them include: - The first civilization in Mesopotamia in 3,000 B.C. - The Norman Invasion of England in 1066 - The invention of the printing press by Johannes Guttenberg around 1450 - The French Revolution in 1789 - The first motorized airplane flight in 1903 - The Moonlanding in 1969 and many many more The book includes pictures and explanations to every event, making this the perfect resource for students and anyone wanting to broaden their knowledge in histoy. Download your copy now! Tags: history, world history, history books, history of the world, human history, world history textbook, history books for kids, earth history, geographic history, earth history kindle, human history, history books for kids age 9 12, history of the world part 1, a little history of the world, history books for kids age 7-9, history books for young readers, history books for children, history books for kindle,

Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb


Thomas Powers - 2000
    . . [a] powerful book." -- New York Times One of the last secrets of World War II is why the Germans failed to build an atomic bomb. Germany was the birthplace of modern physics; it possessed the raw materials and the industrial base; and it commanded key intellectual resources. What happened? In Heisenberg's War, Thomas Powers tells of the interplay between science and espionage, morality and military necessity, and paranoia and cool logic that marked the German bomb program and the Allied response to it. On the basis of dozens of interviews and years of intensive research, Powers concludes that Werner Heisenberg, who was the leading figure in the German atomic effort, consciously obstructed the development of the bomb and in a famous 1941 meeting in Copenhagen with his former mentor Neils Bohr in effect sought to dissuade the Allies from their pursuit of the bomb. Heisenberg's War is a "superbly researched and well-written book" (Time) whose extraordinary story engrosses-and haunts.

Tales of the Quantum: Understanding Physics' Most Fundamental Theory


Art Hobson - 2016
    But far more fundamentally, we live in a universe made of quanta. Many things are not made of atoms: light, radio waves, electric current, magnetic fields, Earth's gravitational field, not to mention exotica such a neutron stars, black holes, dark energy, and dark matter. But everything, including atoms, is made of highly unified or "coherent" bundles of energy called "quanta" that (like everything else) obey certain rules. In the case of the quantum, these rules are called "quantum physics." This is a book about quanta and their unexpected, some would say peculiar, behavior--tales, if you will, of the quantum.The quantum has developed the reputation of being capricious, bewildering, even impossible to understand. The peculiar habits of quanta are certainly not what we would have expected to find at the foundation of physical reality, but these habits are not necessarily bewildering and not at all impossible or paradoxical. This book explains those habits--the quantum rules--in everyday language, without mathematics or unnecessary technicalities. While most popular books about quantum physics follow the topic's scientific history from 1900 to today, this book follows the phenomena: wave-particle duality, fundamental randomness, quantum states, superpositions (being in two places at once), entanglement, non-locality, Schrodinger's cat, and quantum jumps, and presents the history and the scientists only to the extent that they illuminate the phenomena.

The Quantum Astrologer's Handbook


Michael Brooks - 2017
    It resurrects from the vaults of neglect the polymath Jerome Cardano, a Milanese of the sixteenth century. Who is he? A gambler and blasphemer, inventor and chancer, plagued by demons and anxieties, astrologer to kings, emperors and popes. This stubborn and unworldly man was the son of a lawyer and a brothel keeper, but also a gifted physician and the unacknowledged discoverer of the mathematical foundations of quantum physics. That is the argument of this charming and intoxicatingly clever book, which is truly original in its style, and in the manner of the modernists embodies in its very form its theories about the world.'The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook' is a science book with the panache of a novel, for readers of Carlo Rovelli or Umberto Eco. It is a work of and about genius.

Einstein's Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time


Marcia Bartusiak - 2000
    Their quest: to be the first to detect gravitational waves, infinitesimal quakes that stretch and compress space-time and could add a brand-new dimension to our universal knowledge-allowing us to hear a sun going supernova, black holes colliding, and perhaps one day, the remnant rumble of the Big Bang itself...

Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics


Bruce A. Schumm - 2004
    In Deep Down Things, experimental particle physicist Bruce Schumm has taken this dictum to heart, providing in clear, straightforward prose an elucidation of the Standard Model of particle physics—a theory that stands as one of the crowning achievements of twentieth-century science. In this one-of-a-kind book, the work of many of the past century's most notable physicists, including Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Feynman, Gell-Mann, and Weinberg, is knit together in a thorough and accessible exposition of the revolutionary notions that underlie our current view of the fundamental nature of the physical world. Schumm, who has spent much of his life emmersed in the subatomic world, goes far beyond a mere presentation of the "building blocks" of matter, bringing to life the remarkable connection between the ivory tower world of the abstract mathematician and the day-to-day, life-enabling properties of the natural world. Schumm leaves us with an insight into the profound open questions of particle physics, setting the stage for understanding the progress the field is poised to make over the next decade or two.Introducing readers to the world of particle physics, Deep Down Things opens new realms within which are many clues to unraveling the mysteries of the universe.

Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles


Robert M. Eisberg - 1974
    Emphasizes the applications of theory, and contains new material on particle physics, electron-positron annihilation in solids and the Mossbauer effect. Includes new appendices on such topics as crystallography, Fourier Integral Description of a Wave Group, and Time-Independent Perturbation Theory.

The Vince Flynn Reader's Companion: A Collection of Excerpts


Vince Flynn - 2012
    In this free collection of excerpts, enjoy a taste of all of Vince Flynn’s thrillers starring CIA superagent Mitch Rapp.

Escaping Scientology: An Insider's True Story: My Journey With the Cult of Celebrity Spirituality, Greed and Power


Karen Schless Pressley - 2007
    In leader David Miscavige's inner sanctum, they built their mental prison as they melded into its radicalized lifestyle where danger, captivity and abuse were normalized. After three escapes, Karen chose between two unbearable options. Escaping Scientology Part I sweeps you into the lives of two young adults filled with hope and love as designer Karen and her award-winning musician-composer husband Peter overcome obstacles to succeed in the music and fashion industries together. Scientology re-focuses their goals toward the importance of clearing the planet and recruiting celebrities to build Scientology's social capital. Karen portrays the basic beliefs of Scientology that led to her radicalization into the Sea Org at the Celebrity Centre, a fortress where artists aspire to achieve greatness while attaining spiritual freedom through L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings. Karen shows how celebrities are lured into Scientology and develop a co-dependent relationship from which few break out. Part II reveals Karen as a flawed and complex woman when she and Peter move to the secretive International Management headquarters, where they join 800 fanatical Sea Org members that made billion-year commitments to make this a Scientology world without war, criminality, or insanity. Karen finds the dystopian outpost and its global operations to be proof that Time magazine’s 1991 article, “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power” captures the essence of Scientology’s mindset, that she describes as “war is everything and everything is war.” She is no passive victim as she attempts to stay in the driver’s seat and keep their marriage intact while fighting the pressures of the Int base culture that attempt to break them apart. Scientology goes under “Cruise Control” as Miscavige becomes obsessed with his biggest trophy, Tom Cruise, and stiffens his control and abusive punishment methods on the Int base staff. Karen rebels against regulations and spends time in Scientology’s prison camp. After two attempts to escape the Int base, she is trailed by security guards and coerced into returning. Failing to escape, she questions the evidence of her own senses, and makes a mind-twisting re-commitment to become the best version of a Sea Org member she can be. Karen carves out a world she can live within as she is promoted into the highest echelons of management, appointed by the Chairman of the Board RTC to Int Management Public Relations Officer and later to take charge of the image of Sea Org staff internationally from the Int Finance Office. While working on special projects under David and Shelley Miscavige, she travels to Scientology bases around the world where she sees human rights violations set in place by Hubbard’s policies that cause her to conclude Scientology is a for-profit business that builds billions of dollars of assets on the backs of Sea Org slave labor, while hiding behind the banner of the First Amendment, claiming benefits and protection as a non-profit religion. The epilogue of Part III portrays the mind-wrenching process of physical escape, and psychological anguish as Karen plies herself out of Scientology’s grip and endures its cruel disconnection policy. She re-acclimates herself to life on the outside while, brick by brick, she disassembles the walls of the mental prison she had built, and survives with the help of her accomplice and the love and support of her family. Karen's narrative memoir shows that Scientology's plan, authored by L.

The Story of Us


Tim Urban - 2019
    I’m Tim. I’m a single cell in society’s body. U.S. society, to be specific.So let me explain why we’re here.As a writer and a generally thinky person, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the society I live in, and societies in general. I’ve always imagined society as a kind of giant human—a living organism like each of us, only much bigger.When you’re a single cell in the body of a giant, it’s hard to understand what the giant’s doing, or why it is the way it is, because you can’t really zoom out and look at the whole thing all at once. But we do our best.The thing is, when I’ve recently tried to imagine what society might look like, I haven’t really been picturing this:Giant stick figure: "I am grown up."Based on what I see around me, in person and online, it seems like my society is actually more like this:Giant stick figure throwing a giant tantrum because their chocolate ice cream fell on the ground.Individual humans grow older as they age—but it kind of seems like the giant human I live in has been getting more childish each year that goes by.So I decided to write a blog post about this. But then something else happened.When I told people I was planning to write a post about society, and the way people are acting, and the way the media is acting, and the way the government is acting, and the way everyone else is acting, people kept saying the same thing to me.Don’t do it. Don’t touch it. Write about something else. Anything else. It’s just not worth it.They were right. With so many non-controversial topics to write about, why take on something so loaded and risk alienating a ton of readers? I listened to people’s warnings, and I thought about moving on to something else, but then I was like, “Wait what? I live inside a giant and the giant is having a six-year-old meltdown in the grocery store candy section and that’s a not-okay thing for me to talk about?”It hit me that what I really needed to write about was that—about why it’s perilous to write about society."

The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn


Louisa Gilder - 2008
    What happened during those years and what has happened since to refine the understanding of this phenomenon is the fascinating story told here.We move from a coffee shop in Zurich, where Einstein and Max von Laue discuss the madness of quantum theory, to a bar in Brazil, as David Bohm and Richard Feynman chat over cervejas. We travel to the campuses of American universities—from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Berkeley to the Princeton of Einstein and Bohm to Bell’s Stanford sabbatical—and we visit centers of European physics: Copenhagen, home to Bohr’s famous institute, and Munich, where Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli picnic on cheese and heady discussions of electron orbits.Drawing on the papers, letters, and memoirs of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, Louisa Gilder both humanizes and dramatizes the story by employing their own words in imagined face-to-face dialogues. Here are Bohr and Einstein clashing, and Heisenberg and Pauli deciding which mysteries to pursue. We see Schrödinger and Louis de Broglie pave the way for Bell, whose work is here given a long-overdue revisiting. And with his characteristic matter-of-fact eloquence, Richard Feynman challenges his contemporaries to make something of this entanglement.

How to Count to Infinity


Marcus du Sautoy - 2020
    But this book will help you to do something that humans have only recently understood how to do: to count to regions that no animal has ever reached. By the end of this book you'll be able to count to infinity... and beyond. On our way to infinity we'll discover how the ancient Babylonians used their bodies to count to 60 (which gave us 60 minutes in the hour), how the number zero was only discovered in the 7th century by Indian mathematicians contemplating the void, why in China going into the red meant your numbers had gone negative and why numbers might be our best language for communicating with alien life.But for millennia, contemplating infinity has sent even the greatest minds into a spin. Then at the end of the nineteenth century mathematicians discovered a way to think about infinity that revealed that it is a number that we can count. Not only that. They found that there are an infinite number of infinities, some bigger than others. Just using the finite neurons in your brain and the finite pages in this book, you'll have your mind blown discovering the secret of how to count to infinity.Do something amazing and learn a new skill thanks to the Little Ways to Live a Big Life books!

I'm Working on That: A Trek from Science Fiction to Science Fact


William Shatner - 1996
    Over five decades, Star Trek's celebration of mankind's technical achievements and positive view of the future have earned it an enduring place in our global culture. Its scientific vision has also had a profound effect on the past thirty years of technological breakthroughs. Join William Shatner, the original captain of the Starship Enterprise, as he reveals how Star Trek has influenced and inspired some of our greatest scientific minds -- the people behind the future we will all share. In interviews with dozens of scientists we learn about the inventions that will revolutionise our lives and the discoveries that will make it truly possible to explore the last great frontier -- space. As one Nobel Laureate commented on being shown a wood and plastic model of the engine core from a Star Trek: The Next Generation starship: I'm working on that. From the technicalities of warp speed to real-life replicators to the likelihood of our being able to beam across continents, this always-informative book takes us on a fascinating and eye-opening voyage to