Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human


Madelaine Böhme - 2019
    What they discover is beyond anything they imagined: the fossilized bones of Danuvius guggenmosi ignite a global media frenzy. This ancient ancestor defies our knowledge of human history—his nearly twelve-million-year-old bones were not located in Africa—the so-called birthplace of humanity—but in Europe, and his features suggest we evolved much differently than scientists once believed.In prose that reads like a gripping detective novel, Ancient Bones interweaves the story of the dig that changed everything with the fascinating answer to a previously undecided and now pressing question: How, exactly, did we become human? Placing Böhme’s discovery alongside former theories of human evolution, the authors show how this remarkable find (and others in Eurasia) are forcing us to rethink the story we’ve been told about how we came to be, a story that has been our guiding narrative—until now.

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.

Field and Wave Electromagnetics


David K. Cheng - 1982
    These include applications drawn from important new areas of technology such as optical fibers, radome design, satellite communication, and microstrip lines. There is also added coverage of several new topics, including Hall effect, radar equation and scattering cross section, transients in transmission lines, waveguides and circular cavity resonators, wave propagation in the ionosphere, and helical antennas. New exercises, new problems, and many worked-out examples make this complex material more accessible to students.

Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life


Matin Durrani - 2016
    Scientists have discovered that the way cats and dogs lap up liquids can be explained by the laws of surface tension, how ants navigate is due to polarized light, and why pistol shrimps can generate enough force to destroy aquarium glass using their ”elbows”!Each of FURRY LOGIC's six chapters tackles a separate branch of physics and, through more than 30 animal case studies, examines each creature's key features before describing the ways physics is at play in its life, how the connection between physics and animal behavior was discovered, and what remains to be found out. Science journalists Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher make the incredible interdisciplinary world of animals accessible to all, in an enthralling and entertaining read.

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.