His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Equally legendary were Gö's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first popular biography of this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life. After describing his childhood in the Moravian capital of Brno, the authors trace the arc of Gö's remarkable career, from the famed Vienna Circle, where philosophers and scientists debated notions of truth, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived and worked until his death in 1978. In the process, they shed light on Gö's contributions to mathematics, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence -- even cosmology -- in an entertaining and accessible way.

    Sherwin Nuland, “a gifted and deeply intelligent writer” (San Francisco Chronicle), combines knowledge, compassion, and elegance of expression to shed light on the workings of our bodies from the perspective of a surgeon. Dr. Nuland recounts age-old legends about the functions and "personalities" of the body's organs and, in riveting vignettes of the surgery he has performed, he describes the connections between myth and reality. A brilliant blend of science and folklore, The Mysteries Within reveals the enigmas not only of the body but also of the human imagination.

    Agreement that they were far and away the best pop group ever is all but universal. And nowhere is the spirit of the Sixties - both in its soaring optimism and its drug-spirited introspection - more perfectly expressed than in the Beatles' music. Taking all the elements which combined to create each song as it was captured on vinyl - the songwriting process, the stimuli of contemporary pop hits and events, the evolving input from each of the Four, the brilliant innovations pulled off in the studio and, ultimately, the twisting grip of psychedelic drugs - the Beatles are pinpointed, record by record, in precise and fascinating detail against the backdrop of that vibrant era.

    Yet in the late twentieth century truth became suddenly rather unfashionable. The precedence given to assorted political and ideological agendas, along with the rise of relativism, postmodernism and pseudoscience in academia, led to a decline both of truth as a serious subject, and an intellectual tradition that began with the Enlightenment.Why Truth Matters is a timely, incisive and entertaining look at how and why modern thought and culture lost sight of the importance of truth. It is also an eloquent and inspiring argument for restoring truth to its rightful place. Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson, editors of the successful butterfliesandwheels website—itself established to "fight fashionable nonsense"—identify and debunk such senselessness, and the spurious claims made for it, in all its forms. Their account ranges over religious fundamentalism, Holocaust denial, the challenges of postmodernism and deconstruction, the wilful misinterpretation of evolutionary biology, identity politics and wishful thinking.Why Truth Matters is both a rallying cry for the Enlightenment vision and an essential read for anyone who's ever been bored, frustrated, bewildered or plain enraged by the worst excesses of the fashionable intelligentsia.

    He is beloved around the world for his pioneering detective fiction, tales of horror, and haunting, atmospheric verse. But what if there was another side to the man who wrote "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher"?In The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. Even as he composed dazzling works of fiction, he remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues. As one newspaper put it, "Mr. Poe is not merely a man of science--not merely a poet--not merely a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more."Taking us through his early training in mathematics and engineering at West Point and the tumultuous years that followed, Tresch shows that Poe lived, thought, and suffered surrounded by science--and that many of his most renowned and imaginative works can best be understood in its company. He cast doubt on perceived certainties even as he hungered for knowledge, and at the end of his life delivered a mind-bending lecture on the origins of the universe that would win the admiration of twentieth-century physicists. Pursuing extraordinary conjectures and a unique aesthetic vision, he remained a figure of explosive contradiction: he gleefully exposed the hoaxes of the era's scientific fraudsters even as he perpetrated hoaxes himself.Tracing Poe's hard and brilliant journey, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is an essential new portrait of a writer whose life is synonymous with mystery and imagination--and an entertaining, erudite tour of the world of American science just as it was beginning to come into its own.

    Welcome to Weezer’s weird world, steered by brainchild Rivers Cuomo — perhaps the world’s most unlikely rock star. Exhaustively researched, Rivers’ Edge documents the rise of the band from Cuomo’s beginnings as a failure on Hollywood’s hair metal scene to his reinvention of himself as the undeniable ruler of Weezer. Luerssen uncovers what really happened during Weezer’s strange hiatus and subsequent re-emergence in 2000, which was one of the most successful comebacks in music history. Through key interviews with friends, associates, members of Weezer, and bandmates in their solo projects, Rivers’ Edge is a must-own for any Weezer fan.

    In Dimensions, he presented his theory that UFOs are probably not spacecraft but manifestations of a consciousness-controlling technology from "dimensions beyond spacetime"; in Confrontations, he bolstered that theory with examples from his own casebook. Here, deftly blending theory & memoir, he attempts to clear ufololgy of "the weeds & the vines of human fantasy &...the poisonous flowers of unbalanced minds." That is, to him, cases from the infamous Roswell incident (spacecraft & aliens purportedly captured by the USAAF in '47) to the popular legend of Area 51 (aliens working tentacle-in-hand with US officials beneath the Nevada desert) to the alleged abduction of Franck Fontaine in '79 (exhaustively researched 1sthand by Vallee) to the purported top-secret federal UFO-investigating committee of Howard Blum's Out There ('90) aren't only mostly nonsense, but--here's the rub--"complex hoaxes that have been carefully engineered for our benefit." But by whom, & why? By federal disinformation agents, & possibly as "psychological warfare experiments" or "as a cover for something else"--i.e., experimental spy/warcraft or real "flying discs." He offers little hard evidence to back those conjectures, but he does unglove the heavy hand of military intelligence in many cases, while at the same time exposing the absurdity of others, including Budd Hopkins' best-selling alien-rape reports. So what's left? A host of genuinely mysterious cases, e.g., the '89 USSR sightings, & the spirit of rigorous scientific inquiry that he urges they be subjected to. Except for his wobbly conclusions, a forceful & refreshingly iconoclastic study that, for all its good sense, will likely add up to only a cry in the alien-infested ufowilderness.--Kirkus (edited)

    Author Benjamin Radford has investigated unexplained phenomena for over a decade, not just read or written about them, but actually gone out to see what's there. Unlike most other books and reality TV shows on the supernatural or paranormal, Radford strictly adheres to scientific methods. In a nutshell, Scientific Paranormal Investigation is the equivalent of The X-Files meets CSI: Crime Scene Investigations: applying scientific methods and principles to real-life mysteries, and coming up with explanations when it seems none are possible. Whether the subject is a crime scene or a haunted house, the questions are the same: What did eyewitnesses see? What does the evidence show? If the paranormal ghosts, psychics, or Bigfoot really exist, there should be valid scientific evidence for them. Scientific Paranormal Investigation draws from dozens of cases and mysteries, explaining step-by-step the science-based methods Radford used to solve them.

    This title addresses the perennial questions: continuity of life after death, purpose of existence, good and evil, consciousness and substance, sexuality, karma, evolution, and human and planetary transformation.

    Their attitude towards Einstein is like that of Mark Twain towards the writer of a work on mathematics: here was a man who had written an entire book of which Mark could not understand a single sentence. Einstein, therefore, is great in the public eye partly because he has made revolutionary discoveries which cannot be translated into the common tongue. We stand in proper awe of a man whose thoughts move on heights far beyond our range, whose achievements can be measured only by the few who are able to follow his reasoning and challenge his conclusions. There is, however, another side to his personality. It is revealed in the addresses, letters, and occasional writings brought together in this book. These fragments form a mosaic portrait of Einstein the man. Each one is, in a sense, complete in itself; it presents his views on some aspect of progress, education, peace, war, liberty, or other problems of universal...

    He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

    He was investigated for sedition by the House Committee on Un-American activities, harassed by the FBI and CIA, blacklisted, picketed, and even stoned by conservative groups. How Can I Keep from Singing is an inside history of Pete Seeger, whose life has remained a closely guarded secret until now. In this ASCAP award-winning book, David Dunaway parts the curtain through interviews with Pete, his family, friends, and fellow musicians to present a rich, compelling portrait of one of the most remarkable performers, composers, and activists of this century.

    It seems the more our maps of the known world get filled in, the more we crave mysterious locations full of strange creatures.Enter Colin Dickey, Cultural Historian and Tour Guide of the Weird. With the same curiosity and insight that made Ghostland a hit with readers and critics, Colin looks at what all fringe beliefs have in common, explaining that today's Illuminati is yesterday's Flat Earth: the attempt to find meaning in a world stripped of wonder. Dickey visits the wacky sites of America's wildest fringe beliefs--from the famed Mount Shasta where the ancient race (or extra-terrestrials, or possibly both, depending on who you ask) called Lemurians are said to roam, to the museum containing the last remaining "evidence" of the great Kentucky Meat Shower--investigating how these theories come about, why they take hold, and why as Americans we keep inventing and re-inventing them decade after decade. The Unidentified is Colin Dickey at his best: curious, wry, brilliant in his analysis, yet eminently readable.

    The "love" in the title of this book has a double meaning, referring not only to young Albert's exhilarating infatuation with his discoveries of the vistas of a new physics in general relativity, but also his ecstatic, cerebral, and tormented relationship with his first wife, Mileva Maric. While Mileva has always been a controversial figure in the Einstein legend - some commentators have gone as awarding her equal credit for the discovery of relativity - no book has treated her as fully and as sympathetically as Overbye's. The Einsteins were the first modern couple, and for the nearly twenty years of their marriage they were as often colleagues as they were emotional adversaries.Drawing upon hundreds of Einstein's published and unpublished letters, Overbey presents the greatest of scientific romances in a vivid new light, told with novelistic detail and narrative drive. The story of young Einstein is the story of the young man who actually did the revolutionary work that made the old man famous, a young man whose demanor is more that of James Dean than AlbertSchweitzer, a teenager in love, a draftdodger, bohemian, poet, violinist, and whirlwind who left personal, political, and professional chaos in his wake.Einstein in Love bring that man to life as never before, as well as a large cast of the greatest scientific minds in Europe, as told by one of today's most respected science journalists.

    His film roles have always been idiosyncratic, earning him international respect and adoration—from Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Donnie Brasco to his Oscar-nominated turns as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and as J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland. His good looks, oddball charm, and tempestuous love affairs have helped push him into the limelight and kept him there. Now, in this updated biography (originally titled What’s Eating Johnny Depp?), Nigel Goodall looks at his bad-boy image, his rise to fame, and his high-profile romances.