Book picks similar to
Science with a Vengeance: How the Military Created the Us Space Sciences After World War II by David H. DeVorkin
chemistry
military-history
science
space-exploration
Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe
Peter D. Ward - 2000
In doing so, the authors synthesize information from astronomy, biology, and paleontology, and apply it to what we know about the rise of life on Earth and to what could possibly happen elsewhere in the universe. Everyone who has been thrilled by the recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and the indications of life on Mars and the Jovian moon Europa will be fascinated by Rare Earth, and its implications for those who look to the heavens for companionship.
Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
Graham Hancock - 2015
Twenty years on, Hancock returns with the sequel to his seminal work filled with completely new, scientific and archaeological evidence, which has only recently come to light...Near the end of the last Ice Age 12,800 years ago, a giant comet that had entered the solar system from deep space thousands of years earlier, broke into multiple fragments. Some of these struck the Earth causing a global cataclysm on a scale unseen since the extinction of the dinosaurs. At least eight of the fragments hit the North American ice cap, while further fragments hit the northern European ice cap. The impacts, from comet fragments a mile wide approaching at more than 60,000 miles an hour, generated huge amounts of heat which instantly liquidized millions of square kilometers of ice, destabilizing the Earth's crust and causing the global Deluge that is remembered in myths all around the world. A second series of impacts, equally devastating, causing further cataclysmic flooding, occurred 11,600 years ago, the exact date that Plato gives for the destruction and submergence of Atlantis.The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. But there were survivors - known to later cultures by names such as 'the Sages', 'the Magicians', 'the Shining Ones', and 'the Mystery Teachers of Heaven'. They travelled the world in their great ships doing all in their power to keep the spark of civilization burning. They settled at key locations - Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, Baalbek in the Lebanon, Giza in Egypt, ancient Sumer, Mexico, Peru and across the Pacific where a huge pyramid has recently been discovered in Indonesia. Everywhere they went these 'Magicians of the Gods' brought with them the memory of a time when mankind had fallen out of harmony with the universe and paid a heavy price. A memory and a warning to the future...For the comet that wrought such destruction between 12,800 and 11,600 years may not be done with us yet. Astronomers believe that a 20-mile wide 'dark' fragment of the original giant comet remains hidden within its debris stream and threatens the Earth. An astronomical message encoded at Gobekli Tepe, and in the Sphinx and the pyramids of Egypt,warns that the 'Great Return' will occur in our time...
Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War
Andrew J. Bacevich - 2010
In the Obama era, just as in the Bush years, these beliefs remain unquestioned gospel.In a vivid, incisive analysis, Andrew J. Bacevich succinctly presents the origins of this consensus, forged at a moment when American power was at its height. He exposes the preconceptions, biases, and habits that underlie our pervasive faith in military might, especially the notion that overwhelming superiority will oblige others to accommodate America's needs and desires—whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods. And he challenges the usefulness of our militarism as it has become both unaffordable and increasingly dangerous.Though our politicians deny it, American global might is faltering. This is the moment, Bacevich argues, to reconsider the principles which shape American policy in the world—to acknowledge that fixing Afghanistan should not take precedence over fixing Detroit. Replacing this Washington consensus is crucial to America's future, and may yet offer the key to the country's salvation.
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
Edward Dolnick - 2011
A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with nature’s most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.At the end of the seventeenth century—an age of religious wars, plague, and the Great Fire of London—when most people saw the world as falling apart, these earliest scientists saw a world of perfect order. They declared that, chaotic as it looked, the universe was in fact as intricate and perfectly regulated as a clock. This was the tail end of Shakespeare’s century, when the natural land the supernatural still twined around each other. Disease was a punishment ordained by God, astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens. It was a time when little was known and everything was new. These brilliant, ambitious, curious men believed in angels, alchemy, and the devil, and they also believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws—-a contradiction that tormented them and changed the course of history.The Clockwork Universe is the fascinating and compelling story of the bewildered geniuses of the Royal Society, the men who made the modern world.
The Electric Life of Michael Faraday
Alan W. Hirshfeld - 2006
He manned the barricades against superstition and pseudoscience, and pressed for a scientifically literate populace years before science had been deemed worthy of common study. A friend of Charles Dickens and an inspiration to Thomas Edison, the deeply religious Faraday sought no financial gain from his discoveries, content to reveal God's presence through the design of nature. Faraday speaks to us today through the prose of his letters and journals. In The Electric Life of Michael Faraday, Alan Hirshfeld presents an intimate and memorable portrait of an icon of science, making Faraday's most significant discoveries about electricity and magnetism readily understandable, and immortalizing his momentous contributions to the modern world.
Brief Answers to the Big Questions
Stephen Hawking - 2018
He is known for both his breakthroughs in theoretical physics as well as his ability to make complex concepts accessible for all, and was beloved for his mischievous sense of humor. At the time of his death, Hawking was working on a final project: a book compiling his answers to the "big" questions that he was so often posed--questions that ranged beyond his academic field. Within these pages, he provides his personal views on our biggest challenges as a human race, and where we, as a planet, are heading next. Each section will be introduced by a leading thinker offering his or her own insight into Professor Hawking's contribution to our understanding.
Fast Tract Digestion Heartburn
Norman Robillard - 2012
Fast Tract Digestion Heartburn is the first book to define and address the real cause of acid reflux. Acid reflux occurs as a result of digestive malabsorption of five difficult-to-digest carbohydrates. It leads to the overgrowth of gas-producing bacteria in the small intestine and the gas pressure drives acid reflux. Dropping a Mentos into a bottle of Coke is the perfect illustration of this phenomenon. Unfortunately, PPI drugs do not address the real cause, but also cause serious side effects including vitamin and mineral malabsorption, bone fractures, pneumonia, low blood magnesium levels, bacterial overgrowth, C diff infection and pneumonia as explained in the book.Fast Tract Digestion Heartburn offers science-based food choices and recipes (Fast Tract Diet) to limit the five difficult-to-digest carbohydrates, so that you can feel relief within a few days Also, it enables you to self-manage all of the symptoms of acid reflux going forward. The Fast Tract Diet is based on a scientific formula called Fermentation Potential (FP). FP is the key measure regardless of the carbohydrate count. Limiting foods with high FP will help control the overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine and, as a result, acid reflux. The Fast Tract Diet was clinically tested on reflux sufferers in the Boston area. The results were overwhelming and proved the effectiveness of the diet as an alternative to proton pump inhibitor drugs.
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Kai Bird - 2005
Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation-one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress. He was the author of a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials-an idea that is still relevant today. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and criticized the Air Force's plans to fight an infinitely dangerous nuclear war. In the now almost-forgotten hysteria of the early 1950s, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup, and, in response, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, Superbomb advocate Edward Teller and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked behind the scenes to have a hearing board find that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America's nuclear secrets. American Prometheus sets forth Oppenheimer's life and times in revealing and unprecedented detail. Exhaustively researched, it is based on thousands of records and letters gathered from archives in America and abroad, on massive FBI files and on close to a hundred interviews with Oppenheimer's friends, relatives and colleagues.We follow him from his earliest education at the turn of the twentieth century at New York City's Ethical Culture School, through personal crises at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Then to Germany, where he studied quantum physics with the world's most accomplished theorists; and to Berkeley, California, where he established, during the 1930s, the leading American school of theoretical physics, and where he became deeply involved with social justice causes and their advocates, many of whom were communists. Then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he transformed a bleak mesa into the world's most potent nuclear weapons laboratory-and where he himself was transformed. And finally, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which he directed from 1947 to 1966. American Prometheus is a rich evocation of America at midcentury, a new and compelling portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man profoundly connected to its major events—the Depression, World War II and the Cold War. It is at once biography and history, and essential to our understanding of our recent past—and of our choices for the future.
Why Things Break: Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart
Mark Eberhart - 2003
• Mercury thermometers are prohibited on airplanes for a crucial reason.• Kryptonite bicycle locks are easily broken.“Things fall apart” is more than a poetic insight—it is a fundamental property of the physical world. Why Things Break explores the fascinating question of what holds things together (for a while), what breaks them apart, and why the answers have a direct bearing on our everyday lives.When Mark Eberhart was growing up in the 1960s, he learned that splitting an atom leads to a terrible explosion—which prompted him to worry that when he cut into a stick of butter, he would inadvertently unleash a nuclear cataclysm. Years later, as a chemistry professor, he remembered this childhood fear when he began to ponder the fact that we know more about how to split an atom than we do about how a pane of glass breaks.In Why Things Break, Eberhart leads us on a remarkable and entertaining exploration of all the cracks, clefts, fissures, and faults examined in the field of materials science and the many astonishing discoveries that have been made about everything from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger to the crashing of your hard drive. Understanding why things break is crucial to modern life on every level, from personal safety to macroeconomics, but as Eberhart reveals here, it is also an area of cutting-edge science that is as provocative as it is illuminating.“An engaging personal account not just of the physics and chemistry of materials but of the ethics, economics, and politics of innovation, with delightful bonuses on topics from the origins of ‘ghostly’ noises in old houses to the amazing coevolution of armor and armor-piercing projectiles. If it ain’t broke, Mark Eberhart can tell you why—and explain equally well why a shatterproof world remains beyond our reach.”—Edward Tenner, author of Our Own Devices and Why Things Bite Back“I don’t remember a book that has taught me so much, nor previously encountering a teacher like the marvelous Mark Eberhart, who in Why Things Break provides enlightening and thoroughly captivating scientific explanations of subjects ranging from the structural failures leading to the sinking of the Titanic to everyday, no-less-fascinating topics such as the reason why, even at the same temperature, winter days always seem so much colder in Boston than in Denver.”—Richard Restak, M.D., author of Mozart’s Brain and The Fighter Pilot“Eberhart brings his insights to the reader by weaving personal anecdotes—from his childhood fear that cutting a stick of butter would release the energy of the atoms within to his arrival in Boston for an interview with MIT without a suitable winter coat—into a fascinating discussion of the forces that hold atoms and molecules together. A lively, unvarnished look at chemistry on the cutting edge.” —Kirkus Reviews
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
Alan Lightman - 2013
He looks at the difficult dialogue between science and religion; the conflict between our human desire for permanence and the impermanence of nature; the possibility that our universe is simply an accident; the manner in which modern technology has separated us from direct experience of the world; and our resistance to the view that our bodies and minds can be explained by scientific logic and laws. And behind all of these considerations is the suggestion—at once haunting and exhilarating—that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the extraordinary, perhaps unfathomable whole.
Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying
Wolfgang Langewiesche - 1944
It has been continuously in print for thirty-three years, and has enjoyed steadily increasing sales. Flight instructors have found that the book does indeed explain important phases of the art of flying, in a way the learner can use. It shows precisely what the pilot does when he flies, just how he does it, and why.
Infinite in All Directions
Freeman Dyson - 1988
In Dyson's view, science and religion are two windows through which we can look out at the world around us. The book is a revised version of a series of the Gifford Lectures under the title "In Praise of Diversity" given at Aberdeen, Scotland. They allowed Dyson the license to express everything in the universe, which he divided into two parts in polished prose: focusing on the diversity of the natural world as the first, and the diversity of human reactions as the second half.Chapter 1 is a brief explanation of Dyson's attitudes toward religion and science. Chapter 2 is a one–hour tour of the universe that emphasizes the diversity of viewpoints from which the universe can be encountered as well as the diversity of objects which it contains. Chapter 3 is concerned with the history of science and describes two contrasting styles in science: one welcoming diversity and the other deploring it. He uses the cities of Manchester and Athens as symbols of these two ways of approaching science. Chapter 4, concerned with the origin of life, describes the ideas of six illustrious scientists who have struggled to understand the nature of life from various points of view. Chapter 5 continues the discussion of the nature and evolution of life. The question of why life characteristically tends toward extremes of diversity remains central in all attempts to understand life's place in the universe. Chapter 6 is an exercise in eschatology, trying to define possible futures for life and for the universe, from here to infinity. In this chapter, Dyson crosses the border between science and science fiction and he frames his speculations in a slightly theological context.
Starman: The Truth Behind The Legend Of Yuri Gagarin
Jamie Doran - 1998
Yuri Gagarin is one of the great heroes of the twentieth century, but the details of his life and the Russian space effort have been shrouded in secrecy: even the names of the engineers who worked with Gagarin were a mystery to the West for many years.Starman is the first book to tell the compelling story behind Gagarin's life and his audacious first flight into space aboard a converted nuclear weapon.He was once the most famous man in the world yet in his life, as in death, he was a man the world knew almost nothing about.
Alone in the Fortress of the Bears: 70 Days Surviving Wilderness Alaska: Foraging, Fishing, Hunting
Bruce Buck Nelson - 2015
He would return in September. For the next ten weeks my survival would depend on foraging, hunting and fishing on an island I would share with 1,600 brown bears. This is my story of hunger and solitude, salmon fishing and stormy seas, torrential rains and mountain sunsets, giant halibut and deer hunting, campfires and killer whales. Illustrated with nearly fifty photos and a map.
Physics Part 1 Class - 10
Lakhmir Singh
Salient Features: 1.Very short answer type questions (including true-false type questions and fill in the blanks type questions). 2.Short answer type questions. 3. Long answer type questions (or Essay type questions). 4. Multiple choice questions (MCQs) based on theory. 5. Questions based on high order thinking skills (HOTS). 6. Multiple choice questions (MCQs) based on practical skills in science.. 7. NCERT book questions and exercises (with answers). 8. Value based questions (with answers).