Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics


John Stewart Bell - 1987
    This work has played a major role in the development of our current understanding of the profound nature of quantum concepts and of the fundamental limitations they impose on the applicability of the classical ideas of space, time and locality. This book contains all of John Bell's published and unpublished papers on the conceptual and philosophical problems of quantum mechanics.

The Ethics of Belief


William Kingdon Clifford - 1877
    A dynamic table of contents enables to jump directly to the chapter selected. Table of Contents - About This Book - The Duty Of Inquiry - The Weight Of Authority - The Limits Of Inference

Readings about the Social Animal


Elliot Aronson - 1973
    Organized to illustrate the major themes of Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal, this collection of classic and contemporary readings explores the most important ideas, issues, and debates in social psychology today.

Exoplanets: The Search for Another Earth


Danielle George - 2020
    Those that have liquid water. And maybe even life.She wonders how we might be able to take the our first ever high resolution picture of an exoplanet using the microchips found in mobile phones. And she meets world-leading astrophysicists to ask if within our lifetimes humans might step foot on an earth-like planet.An ITN production for Audible Originals.

New Scientist: The Origin of (almost) Everything


Graham Lawton - 2016
    Introduction by Professor Stephen HawkingFrom what actually happened in the Big Bang to the accidental discovery of post-it notes, science is packed with surprising discoveries. Did you know, for instance, that if you were to get too close to a black hole it would suck you up like a noodle (it's called spaghettification), why your keyboard is laid out in QWERTY (it's not to make it easier to type) or whether the invention of the wheel was less important to civilisation than the bag (think about it). New Scientist does. And now they and illustrator Jennifer Daniel want to take you on a whistlestop journey from the start of our universe (through the history of stars, galaxies, meteorites, the Moon and dark energy) to our planet (through oceans and weather to oil) and life (through dinosaurs to emotions and sex) to civilisation (from cities to alcohol and cooking), knowledge (from alphabets to alchemy) ending up with technology (computers to rocket science). Witty essays explore the concepts alongside enlightening infographics that zoom from how many people have ever lived to showing you how a left-wing brain differs from a right-wing one.

Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds


Daniel C. Dennett - 1998
    One of the foremost workers in this multidisciplinary field is Daniel Dennett. This book brings together his essays on the philosphy of mind, artificial intelligence, and cognitive ethology that appeared in inaccessible journals from 1984 to 1996. Highlights include "Can Machines Think?", "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies", "Artificial Life as Philosophy", and "Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why". Collected in a single volume, the essays are now available to a wider audience.

Red Giants and White Dwarfs


Robert Jastrow - 1967
    "A masterpiece of science."—Werner von Braun.

Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein


John W. Moffat - 2008
    But what if, nonetheless, Einstein got it wrong?Since the 1930s, physicists have noticed an alarming discrepancy between the universe as we see it and the universe that Einstein's theory of relativity predicts. There just doesn't seem to be enough stuff out there for everything to hang together. Galaxies spin so fast that, based on the amount of visible matter in them, they ought to be flung to pieces, the same way a spinning yo-yo can break its string. Cosmologists tried to solve the problem by positing dark matter—a mysterious, invisible substance that surrounds galaxies, holding the visible matter in place—and particle physicists, attempting to identify the nature of the stuff, have undertaken a slew of experiments to detect it. So far, none have.Now, John W. Moffat, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, offers a different solution to the problem. The cap­stone to a storybook career—one that began with a correspondence with Einstein and a conversation with Niels Bohr—Moffat's modified gravity theory, or MOG, can model the movements of the universe without recourse to dark matter, and his work chal­lenging the constancy of the speed of light raises a stark challenge to the usual models of the first half-million years of the universe's existence.This bold new work, presenting the entirety of Moffat's hypothesis to a general readership for the first time, promises to overturn everything we thought we knew about the origins and evolution of the universe.

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750


Jonathan I. Israel - 2001
    The Radical Enlightenment played a part in this revolutionary process, which effectively overthrew all justification for monarchy, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical power, as well as man's dominance over woman, theological dominance of education, and slavery. Despite the present day interest in the revolutions of the eighteenth century, the origins and rise of the Radical Enlightenment have received limited scholarly attention. The greatest obstacle to the movement finding its proper place in modern historical writing is its international scope: the Radical Enlightenment was not French, British, German, Italian, Jewish or Dutch, but all of these at the same time.In this wide-ranging volume, Jonathan Israel offers a novel interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment down to La Mettie and Diderot, two of its key exponents. Particular emphasis is placed on the pivotal role of Spinoza and the widespread underground international philosophical movement known before 1750 as Spinozism.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013


Siddhartha Mukherjee - 2013
    Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, a leading cancer physician and researcher, selects the year’s top science and nature writing from journalists who dive into their fields with curiosity and passion, delivering must-read articles from a wide array of fields.

SUMMARY The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson


OneHour Reads - 2018
    His ultimate proposition is that people need to start caring less about everything. Instead, the key to living a good life is in individuals knowing what matters to them and not wasting energy stressing over every little thing. He then proceeds to educate us on how to move forward by going backwards. Manson strongly believes that the endless pursuit of a flawless life, fueled by today's picture-perfect social media standards, is responsible for many of the psychological illnesses that have become rampant. The book culminates in a conclusion that we need to look beyond ourselves, drop the entitled airs, and embrace the ugliness and uncertainties before we can live better lives. This book contains a comprehensive, well detailed summary and key takeaways of the original book by Mark Manson. It summarizes the book in detail, to help people effectively understand, articulate and imbibe the original work by Mark. This book is not meant to replace the original book but to serve as a companion to it Contained is anExecutive Summary of the original book Key Points of each chapter and Brief chapter-by-chapter summaries To get this book, Scroll Up Now and Click on the "Buy now with 1-Click" Button to Download your Copy Right Away! Enjoy this edition instantly on your Kindle device! Now available in paperback and digital editions. Audio book coming soon!! Disclaimer: This is a summary, review of the book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" and not the original book.

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World


Leon Festinger - 1956
    How would these people feel when their prophecy remained unfulfilled? Would they admit the error of their prediction, or would they readjust their reality to make sense of the new circumstances?"We've all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We're familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed thru the most devastating attacks. But human resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with a whole heart; suppose further a commitment to this belief, suppose irrevocable actions have been taken because of it; finally, suppose evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that the belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of such beliefs than ever before. Indeed, s/he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting others to this view. How and why does such a response to contradictory evidence come about? This is the question on which this book focuses. We hope that, by the end of the volume, we will have provided an adequate answer to the question, an answer documented by data."When Prophecy Fails is a classic text in social psychology authored by L. Festinger, H. Riecken and S. Schachter. It chronicles the experience of a UFO cult that believed the end of the world was at hand. In effect, it's a sociopsychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world & the adjustments made when the prediction failed to materialize. "The authors have done something as laudable as it is unusual for social psychologists. They espied a fleeting social movement important to a line of research they were interested in and took after it. They recruited a team of observers, joined the movement & watched it from within under great difficulties until its crisis came and went. Their report is of interest as much for the method as for the substance."--Everett C. Hughes, The American Journal of Sociology.

Planet Earth Strangest Places: Fun Facts and Pictures for Kids


Speedy Publishing - 2015
    This will let children know that there is a world out there they do not even know about. This will also make children wonder what goes on in these strange places. Some children will even develop the goal to visit some of these places when they get older. Most children do not know that there are strange places all over the earth.

Science and Hypothesis


Henri Poincaré - 1902
    Explaining how such basic concepts as number and magnitude, space and force were developed, the great French mathematician refutes the skeptical position that modern scientific method and its results are wholly factitious. The places of rigorous logic and intuitive leaps are both established by an analysis of contrasting methods of idea-creation in individuals and in modern scientific traditions. The nature of hypothesis and the role of probability are investigated with all of Poincaré's usual fertility of insight.Partial contents: On the nature of mathematical reasoning. Magnitude and experiment. Space: non-Euclidean geometrics, space and geometry, experiment and geometry. Force: classical mechanics, relative and absolute motion, energy and thermodynamics. Nature: hypotheses in physics, the theories of modern physics, the calculus of probabilities, optics and electricity, electro-dynamics."Poincaré's was the last man to take practically all mathematics, both pure and applied as his province. Few mathematicians have had the breadth of philosophic vision that Poincaré's had, and none is his superior in the gift of clear exposition." — Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell, Professor of Mathematics, University of Cambridge

The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes


Donald D. Hoffman - 2019
    How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease.The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.