Explaining why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts, Johnson presents surprising examples of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning. How does a lively neighborhood evolve out of a disconnected group of shopkeepers, bartenders, and real estate developers? How does a media event take on a life of its own? How will new software programs create an intelligent World Wide Web? In the coming years, the power of self-organization -- coupled with the connective technology of the Internet -- will usher in a revolution every bit as significant as the introduction of electricity. Provocative and engaging, Emergence puts you on the front lines of this exciting upheaval in science and thought.

    this is one of those rare books that will change your beliefs - and in doing so will change your life. tHE ANt AND tHE FERRARI offers readers a clear, navigable path through the big questions that confront us all today. What is the meaning of life? Can we be ethical beings in today's world? Can we know if there is life after death? Is there such a thing as Absolute truth? What caused the Big Bang and why should you care?

    Along the tidal rivers of Malaysia, thousands of fireflies congregate and flash in unison; the moon spins in perfect resonance with its orbit around the earth; our hearts depend on the synchronous firing of ten thousand pacemaker cells. While the forces that synchronize the flashing of fireflies may seem to have nothing to do with our heart cells, there is in fact a deep connection. Synchrony is a science in its infancy, and Strogatz is a pioneer in this new frontier in which mathematicians and physicists attempt to pinpoint just how spontaneous order emerges from chaos. From underground caves in Texas where a French scientist spent six months alone tracking his sleep-wake cycle, to the home of a Dutch physicist who in 1665 discovered two of his pendulum clocks swinging in perfect time, this fascinating book spans disciplines, continents, and centuries. Engagingly written for readers of books such as Chaos and The Elegant Universe, Sync is a tour-de-force of nonfiction writing.

    Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history–and discerning where history will lead us next.In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moral significance–a way of looking at our biological and cultural evolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality has improved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning may itself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, witty, profound, Nonzero offers breathtaking implications for what we believe and how we adapt to technology's ongoing transformation of the world.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    How to Fish is a gem of a book that gets to the heart of the passion for angling: that there's more to fishing than catching fish.

    Kathryn Schulz, editor of Grist magazine, argues that error is the fundamental human condition and should be celebrated as such. Guiding the reader through the history and psychology of error, from Socrates to Alan Greenspan, Being Wrong will change the way you perceive screw-ups, both of the mammoth and daily variety, forever.

    Tell people that the mind is like space: open, clear and limitless, and talk about both the way and the goal." In 1969 Ole and Hannah Nydahl became the first Western students of H.H. the Karmapa, the head of the Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. After years of practice in the Himalayas, he authorized them to teach and start centers in his name. An audience with the Queen of Denmark started their work in the West. A basement in historical Copenhagen became the first Tibetan Buddhist center on the European continent, and a rusted-through VW-bus with race-car qualities got them everywhere. Riding the Tiger is the inside story of the development of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. In his refreshingly unsentimental style, Lama Ole shows all aspects of the work. With breathtaking intensity, he highlights both healthy and unhealthy tendencies in the light of the Buddha's ultimate aim: to bring about the fully developed beings whose every activity blesses the world. Amazon Review: Jason Anderson from Monterey, CA: "Lama Ole Nydahl is a unique figure in modern Buddhist history--first Western student of the Black Hat lama, H.H. the XVIth Gyalwa Karmapa, married lama 'without robes, ' and spiritual figure personally chosen by the Karmapa to teach and make foundations in his name--and Riding the Tiger is filled to overflowing with his particular energies and gifts. It is a galloping book that takes the reader around the world, inviting him in for a close-up look at the making of a Buddhist center for meditation and study, and Lama Ole has successfully started over one hundred such centers. And a deep look, as well, at the nature of Buddhism in the West, how it has been transplanted, how it has flourished. ... This is a magical book and a magical ride!

    Nobody is perfect. And that includes five of the greatest scientists in history—Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein. But the mistakes that these great luminaries made helped advance science. Indeed, as Mario Livio explains, science thrives on error, advancing when erroneous ideas are disproven.As a young scientist, Einstein tried to conceive of a way to describe the evolution of the universe at large, based on General Relativity—his theory of space, time, and gravity. Unfortunately he fell victim to a misguided notion of aesthetic simplicity. Fred Hoyle was an eminent astrophysicist who ridiculed an emerging theory about the origin of the universe that he dismissively called “The Big Bang.” The name stuck, but Hoyle was dead wrong in his opposition.They, along with Darwin (a blunder in his theory of Natural Selection), Kelvin (a blunder in his calculation of the age of the earth), and Pauling (a blunder in his model for the structure of the DNA molecule), were brilliant men and fascinating human beings. Their blunders were a necessary part of the scientific process. Collectively they helped to dramatically further our knowledge of the evolution of life, the Earth, and the universe.

    Some of the most potent beliefs among brilliant minds are based on supposition alone -- yet that is enough to push those minds toward making the theory viable.Eminent cultural impresario, editor, and publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), John Brockman asked a group of leading scientists and thinkers to answer the question: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it? This book brings together the very best answers from the most distinguished contributors. Thought-provoking and hugely compelling, this collection of bite-size thought-experiments is a fascinating insight into the instinctive beliefs of some of the most brilliant minds today.

    For real.If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel.Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word "geometry," from the Greek for "measuring the world." If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world—it explains it. Shape shows us how.

    The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself. And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

    This book considers many of those ideas and presents a new solution why three is the magic number.

    Indeed, many physicists today believe that there are other dimensions beyond the four of our space-time, and that a unified vision of the various forces of nature can be achieved, if we consider that everything we see around us, from the trees to the stars are nothing but vibrations in hyperspace. Hyperspace theory - and its more recent derivation, superstring theory - is the eye of this revolution. In this book, Michio Kaku shows us a fascinating panorama, which completely changes our view of the cosmos, and takes us on a dazzling journey through new dimensions: wormholes connecting parallel universes, time machines, "baby universes" and more. Similar wonders are emerging in some pages in which everything is explained with elegant simplicity and where the mathematical formulation is replaced by imaginative illustrations that allow the problems to be visualized. The result is a very entertaining and surprising book, which even leaves behind the greatest fantasies of the old science fiction authors.

    When I was sixteen, I had a mental breakdown. It happened while I was on vacation in the Caribbean with my family. I’d been reading an old Zen book, and it did me in. I’d experienced some strange mental states before, but this was different. As I read this book, death moved to the foreground of all my thoughts—and then stayed there. I found myself in a tropical paradise, terrified. Living seemed too cruel to carry on with. Buddha had said all life was suffering and all that meant was that everything was hopeless. There was no way out. Escape was impossible. When you looked at things soberly, it was obvious. Life, inevitably, was really just suffering and death. I kept this anxiety to myself as best I could. There was nothing to say anyway. No one could help. I was helpless, mortified, but aware that I was unable to do anything about it. The stress began to wear on my body. It felt worse and worse. I would have killed myself right there if death didn’t scare me even more than life. I reasoned if I killed myself at least this particular suffering would be over. These feelings peaked and then went on, and on, and on. At some point, I took a drive with my family to a beach on the other side of the island. It was bad. My insides felt as if they were being torn out. I didn’t understand what was happening. I felt like vomiting but couldn’t. Finally, we arrived at the beach. I sat under a tree, in the shade, trying to act sane. And then I thought I died. Something happened and then nothing. And then there was something again. I don’t know. Was I dead? I looked around and realized I wasn’t. I was on the beach, under a tree. But there was no “I.” Everything was different. Everything had dropped off. Where was “I”? I didn’t exist. What was happening? What was this? It was indescribable. You couldn’t describe this. Any description was pointless. Everything was perfect just as it was, but at the same time, it wasn’t that. Because there was no everything. There was nothing at all. There was no need to describe anything ever again because there was nothing. Words and description were meaningless. Nothing was real. Nothing mattered! And this was, undoubtedly, the best news possible. The greatest realization I could wish to have. Yet that couldn’t begin to explain how good this was. It was way beyond any conception I could come up with. Everything, and everybody, was saved. That was clear. Everything was fine—now and forever. Nothing needed to be done, ever. The whole thing—life, death, reality, individuality, good, bad, right, wrong—was a lie. An illusion. A sham. Everything just was—just is. And this was perfection, beyond any belief, rationalization or label I could ever put on it. It made no sense, and it was perfect. It was before time itself. It transcended thought, was past my comprehension. Thought created all this suffering—and thought itself was not real. Without thought, all was grace—always. It was all blissfully and blatantly simple, yet totally illogical. I sat on that beach, thunderstruck. It was laughable. Whatever you thought, it didn’t matter. Thought had nothing to do with anything real. Everything was always perfect, no matter what you thought…

    Refashioning the story of human evolution in a work that is certain to generate headlines, Wilson draws on his remarkable knowledge of biology and social behavior to show that group selection, not kin selection, is the primary driving force of human evolution. He proves that history makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology. Demonstrating that the sources of morality, religion, and the creative arts are fundamentally biological in nature, Wilson presents us with the clearest explanation ever produced as to the origin of the human condition and why it resulted in our domination of the Earth’s biosphere.