Polya, How to Solve It will show anyone in any field how to think straight. In lucid and appealing prose, Polya reveals how the mathematical method of demonstrating a proof or finding an unknown can be of help in attacking any problem that can be reasoned out--from building a bridge to winning a game of anagrams. Generations of readers have relished Polya's deft--indeed, brilliant--instructions on stripping away irrelevancies and going straight to the heart of the problem.

    How does Jane Goodall’s relationship with her dog Rusty inform her thinking about our relationship to other species? Which time and place would Jared Diamond most prefer to live in, in light of his work on the role of chance in history? What does driving a sports car have to do with Steven Weinberg’s quest for the “theory of everything”? Physicist and journalist Stefan Klein’s intimate conversations with nineteen of the world’s best-known scientists (including three Nobel Laureates) let us listen in as they talk about their paradigm-changing work—and how it is deeply rooted in their daily lives. • Cosmologist Martin Rees on the beginning and end of the world • Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on egoism and selflessness • Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran on consciousness • Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn on aging • Philosopher Peter Singer on morality • Physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis on human relationships • Biochemist Craig Venter on the human genome • Chemist and poet Roald Hoffmann on beauty

    Finished only weeks before his death in 1994, it is the self-portrait of one of this century's most original and influential intellectuals.Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. But he emphatically was not a builder of theories or a writer of rules. Rather, his fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of "big" science and "big" philosophy. Feyerabend gave voice to a radically democratic "epistemological anarchism:" he argued forcefully that there is not one way to knowledge, but many principled paths; not one truth or one rationality but different, competing pictures of the workings of the world. "Anything goes," he said about the ways of science in his most famous book, Against Method. And he meant it.Here, for the first time, Feyerabend traces the trajectory that led him from an isolated, lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the height of international academic success. He writes of his experience in the German army on the Russian front, where three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong pain. He recalls his promising talent as an operatic tenor (a lifelong passion), his encounters with everyone from Martin Buber to Bertolt Brecht, innumerable love affairs, four marriages, and a career so rich he once held tenured positions at four universities at the same time.Although not written as an intellectual autobiography, Killing Time sketches the people, ideas, and conflicts of sixty years. Feyerabend writes frankly of complicated relationships with his mentor Karl Popper and his friend and frequent opponent Imre Lakatos, and his reactions to a growing reputation as the "worst enemy of science."

    Roosevelt expresses her philosophy of life by relating the experiences which have enabled her to cope with personal and public responsibilities.

    Yet unlike Einstein, with whom he formed a warm and abiding friendship, Gödel has long escaped all but the most casual scrutiny of his life.Stephen Budiansky’s Journey to the Edge of Reason is the first biography to fully draw upon Gödel’s voluminous letters and writings—including a never-before-transcribed shorthand diary of his most intimate thoughts—to explore Gödel’s profound intellectual friendships, his moving relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life. It also offers an intimate portrait of the scientific and intellectual circles in prewar Vienna, a haunting account of Gödel’s and Jewish intellectuals’ flight from Austria and Germany at the start of the Second World War, and a vivid re-creation of the early days of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where Gödel and Einstein both worked.Eloquent and insightful, Journey to the Edge of Reason is a fully realized portrait of the odd, brilliant, and tormented man who has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, and illuminates the far-reaching implications of Gödel’s revolutionary ideas for philosophy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and man’s place in the cosmos.

    In this new major work Abraham Pais, himself an eminent physicist who worked alongside Einstein in the post-war years, traces the development of Einstein's entire oeuvre. This is the first book which deal comprehensively and in depth with Einstein's science, both the successes and the failures.Running through the book is a completely non-scientific biography (identified in the table of contents by italic type) including many letters which appear in English for the first time, as well as other information not published before.Throughout the preparation of this book, Pais has had complete access to the Einstein Archives (now in the possession of the Hebrew University) and the invaluable guidance of the late Helen Dukas--formerly Einstein's private secretary.

    But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, Copenhagen endured, as Bohr's students vigorously protected his legacy, and the physics community favored practical experiments over philosophical arguments. As a result, questioning the status quo long meant professional ruin. And yet, from the 1920s to today, physicists like John Bell, David Bohm, and Hugh Everett persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. What Is Real? is the gripping story of this battle of ideas and of the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth.

    Crease tells the stories behind ten of the greatest equations in human history. Was Nobel laureate Richard Feynman really joking when he called Maxwell's electromagnetic equations the most significant event of the nineteenth century? How did Newton's law of gravitation influence young revolutionaries? Why has Euler's formula been called "God's equation," and why did a mysterious ecoterrorist make it his calling card? What role do betrayal, insanity, and suicide play in the second law of thermodynamics?The Great Equations tells the stories of how these equations were discovered, revealing the personal struggles of their ingenious originators. From "1 + 1 = 2" to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Crease locates these equations in the panoramic sweep of Western history, showing how they are as integral to their time and place of creation as are great works of art.

    He holds that the universe is self-aware, and that consciousness creates the physical world.

    This dual biography of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud— and their parallel journeys of discovery that altered forever our understanding of the very nature of reality. Einstein and Freud were the foremost figures in search of the next level of scientific knowledge—evidence we can’t see. Here on the frontier of the invisible, their investigations reached unprecedented realms—relativity and the unconscious—and spawned the creation of two new sciences, cosmology and psychoanalysis. Together they have allowed us for more than a hundred years to explore previously unimaginable universes without and within.

     In 1963, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given two years to live. More than half a century later, Hawking had made some of the most significant contributions to our understanding of the universe since Albert Einstein. The world’s most famous physics professor, a best-selling author, and a father of three, Stephen lived his life to its fullest. Bridging the world of theoretical physics with the reach of pop culture, Stephen Hawking became an emblem of human determination and intellectual curiosity. Inside you will read about... ✓ Early Life and Terminal Illness ✓ Hawking Radiation and Black Holes ✓ The Hawking Family ✓ A Gambling Man ✓ Late Life and Death And much more!

     For four hundred years, since early scientists discovered that the universe did not revolve around the earth, people have felt cut off-adrift in a meaningless cosmos. That is about to change. In their groundbreaking new book, The View from the Center of the Universe, Joel R. Primack, Ph.D., one of the world's leading cosmologists, and Nancy Ellen Abrams, a philosopher and writer, use recent advances in astronomy,physics, and cosmology to frame a compelling new theory of how to understand the universe and our role in it. While most of us think of the universe as empty space peppered with stars separated by vast distances, the truth, the authors argue, is far richer and more meaningful. For the first time in history, we know that the universe is more coherent and spiritually significant than anyone ever imagined and that our place in it is actually central to the expanding universe in important ways. According to Primack and Abrams, this new cosmology clarifies how the universe operates, what it's made of, how it may have originated, and how it is evolving. Even more surprising, these startling ideas spring from both cutting-edge science and the metaphors of ancient symbols. The result is a very human book that satisfies our fundamental need for order and meaning in our world and in our lives.

    Eventually he left his life in science to study with Tibetan teachers, and he is now a Buddhist monk and translator for the Dalai Lama, living in the Shechen monastery near Kathmandu in Nepal. Trinh Thuan was born into a Buddhist family in Vietnam but became intrigued by the explosion of discoveries in astronomy during the 1960s. He made his way to the prestigious California Institute of Technology to study with some of the biggest names in the field and is now an acclaimed astrophysicist and specialist on how the galaxies formed. When Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Thuan met at an academic conference in the summer of 1997, they began discussing the many remarkable connections between the teachings of Buddhism and the findings of recent science. That conversation grew into an astonishing correspondence exploring a series of fascinating questions. Did the universe have a beginning? Or is our universe one in a series of infinite universes with no end and no beginning? Is the concept of a beginning of time fundamentally flawed? Might our perception of time in fact be an illusion, a phenomenon created in our brains that has no ultimate reality? Is the stunning fine-tuning of the universe, which has produced just the right conditions for life to evolve, a sign that a “principle of creation” is at work in our world? If such a principle of creation undergirds the workings of the universe, what does that tell us about whether or not there is a divine Creator? How does the radical interpretation of reality offered by quantum physics conform to and yet differ from the Buddhist conception of reality? What is consciousness and how did it evolve? Can consciousness exist apart from a brain generating it?The stimulating journey of discovery the authors traveled in their discussions is re-created beautifully in The Quantum and the Lotus, written in the style of a lively dialogue between friends. Both the fundamental teachings of Buddhism and the discoveries of contemporary science are introduced with great clarity, and the reader will be profoundly impressed by the many correspondences between the two streams of thought and revelation. Through the course of their dialogue, the authors reach a remarkable meeting of minds, ultimately offering a vital new understanding of the many ways in which science and Buddhism confirm and complement each other and of the ways in which, as Matthieu Ricard writes, “knowledge of our spirits and knowledge of the world are mutually enlightening and empowering.” “The Quantum and the Lotus is a mind-expanding, eye-opening exploration of the exciting parallels between cutting-edge thinking in physics and Buddhism–a scintillating conversation any thinking person would delight in overhearing.” —Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence“The Quantum and the Lotus is the rich and inspiring result of a deeply interesting dialogue between Western science and Buddhist philosophy. This remarkable book will contribute greatly to a better understanding of the true nature of our world and the way we live our lives.” —His Holiness the Dalai Lama

    Frank Wilczek has played a lead role in establishing the new paradigms. Transcending the clash and mismatch of older ideas about what matter is, and what space is, Wilczek presents here some brilliant and clear syntheses. Space is a dynamic material, the engine of reality; matter is a subtle pattern of disturbance in that material.Extraordinarily readable and authoritative, The Lightness of Being is the first book to unwrap these exciting new ideas for the general public. It explores their implications for basic questions about space, mass, energy, and the longed-for possibility of a fully unified theory of Nature. Along the way, Wilczek presents new perspectives on many strange aspects of our fantastic universe. Pointing toward new directions where the great discoveries in fundamental physics are likely to come, he envisions a new Golden Age in physics.

    He went on to become a twentieth-century icon-a man whose name and face are synonymous with "genius." Now, at last, ordinary readers can explore Einstein's life and work in this new For Dummies guide. Physicist Carlos Calle chronicles Einstein's career and explains his work-including the theories of special and general relativity-in language that anyone can understand. He shows how Einstein's discoveries affected everything from the development of the atom bomb to the theory of quantum mechanics. He sheds light on Einstein's personal life and beliefs, including his views on religion and politics. And he shows how Einstein's work continues to affect our world today, from nuclear power to space travel to artificial intelligence.