Stimulating, illuminating, and always surprising, The Big Questions challenges readers to re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs and reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives.

    Richard Restak, Brainis both a practical owner’s manual and a complete guide to the brain’s development and function. Its pages explore not only the brain’s physical form—its 100 billion nerve cells and near-infinite network of synapses—but also its interactions that regulate every thought and action. Brainfeatures the latest discoveries about improving and optimizing mental acuity right alongside sidebars on breakthrough moments in neuroscience. Explained here also are the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of the brain, addressed in accessible, engaging language.Combining the latest advances in our understanding of the mind-body connection and ongoing research into such diseases as dementia, depression, and PTSD, Brainis an indispensable guide to mens sana in corpore sano—at every stage of life.

    The meme is also one of the most important--and controversial--concepts to emerge since 'The Origin of the Species' appeared nearly 150 years ago.In 'The Meme Machine' Susan Blackmore boldly asserts: "Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection." Indeed, Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive - making tools, for example, or using language--survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible. These memes then passed themselves on from generation to generation by helping to ensure that the genes of those who acquired them also survived and reproduced. Applying this theory to many aspects of human life, Blackmore offers brilliant explanations for why we live in cities, why we talk so much, why we can't stop thinking, why we behave altruistically, how we choose our mates, and much more.With controversial implications for our religious beliefs, our free will, our very sense of "self," 'The Meme Machine' offers a provocative theory everyone will soon be talking about.

    Contributors include Steven Weinberg, Peter Galison, John Maynard Smith, and Frank Wilczek.

    Following the hugely successful The Science Book and The Math Book comes a richly illustrated chronology of physics, containing 250 short, entertaining, and thought-provoking entries. In addition to exploring such engaging topics as dark energy, parallel universes, the Doppler effect, the God particle, and Maxwells demon, the books timeline extends back billions of years to the hypothetical Big Bang and forward trillions of years to a time of “quantum resurrection.” Like the previous titles in this series, The Physics Book helps readers gain an understanding of major concepts without getting bogged down in complex details.

    As we enter the year 2000, zero is once again making its presence felt. Nothing itself, it makes possible a myriad of calculations. Indeed, without zero mathematicsas we know it would not exist. And without mathematics our understanding of the universe would be vastly impoverished. But where did this nothing, this hollow circle, come from? Who created it? And what, exactly, does it mean? Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero begins as a mystery story, taking us back to Sumerian times, and then to Greece and India, piecing together the way the idea of a symbol for nothing evolved. Kaplan shows us just how handicapped our ancestors were in trying to figurelarge sums without the aid of the zero. (Try multiplying CLXIV by XXIV). Remarkably, even the Greeks, mathematically brilliant as they were, didn't have a zero--or did they? We follow the trail to the East where, a millennium or two ago, Indian mathematicians took another crucial step. By treatingzero for the first time like any other number, instead of a unique symbol, they allowed huge new leaps forward in computation, and also in our understanding of how mathematics itself works. In the Middle Ages, this mathematical knowledge swept across western Europe via Arab traders. At first it was called dangerous Saracen magic and considered the Devil's work, but it wasn't long before merchants and bankers saw how handy this magic was, and used it to develop tools likedouble-entry bookkeeping. Zero quickly became an essential part of increasingly sophisticated equations, and with the invention of calculus, one could say it was a linchpin of the scientific revolution. And now even deeper layers of this thing that is nothing are coming to light: our computers speakonly in zeros and ones, and modern mathematics shows that zero alone can be made to generate everything.Robert Kaplan serves up all this history with immense zest and humor; his writing is full of anecdotes and asides, and quotations from Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens extend the book's context far beyond the scope of scientific specialists. For Kaplan, the history of zero is a lens for looking notonly into the evolution of mathematics but into very nature of human thought. He points out how the history of mathematics is a process of recursive abstraction: how once a symbol is created to represent an idea, that symbol itself gives rise to new operations that in turn lead to new ideas. Thebeauty of mathematics is that even though we invent it, we seem to be discovering something that already exists.The joy of that discovery shines from Kaplan's pages, as he ranges from Archimedes to Einstein, making fascinating connections between mathematical insights from every age and culture. A tour de force of science history, The Nothing That Is takes us through the hollow circle that leads to infinity.

    Medicine, anatomy, astronomy, mathematics and cosmology were all invented in their world. Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates were amongst its stars, master architects all of the modern as well as the ancient.

    It is a bridge from the computational courses (such as calculus or differential equations) that students typically encounter in their first year of college to a more abstract outlook. It lays a foundation for more theoretical courses such as topology, analysis and abstract algebra. Although it may be more meaningful to the student who has had some calculus, there is really no prerequisite other than a measure of mathematical maturity. Topics include sets, logic, counting, methods of conditional and non-conditional proof, disproof, induction, relations, functions and infinite cardinality.

    The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context.  Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science.

    Byrne wanted the book to be the size and shape of a portable Bible, and thus The New Sins resembles the sort of book a strange person in a robe would try to give you in an airport. Bizarre and profound, the book includes 80 color photographs taken by the author.

    The eponymous riddle, according to legend, was devised by Albert Einstein as a child. He claimed that only about 2% of the population would be able to work out the correct answer. There are no tricks and there is only one answer. It requires the cool application of logic to solve. And a lot of patience.Einstein's Riddle features fifty of the toughest logic problems, lateral thinking puzzles, and tests of mental agility. By turns entertaining and infuriating, the puzzles challenge our preconceptions, tell us about how we reason, and provide a rigorous intellectual workout.

    Hewitt's text is famous for engaging readers with analogies and imagery from real-world situations that build a strong conceptual understanding of physical principles ranging from classical mechanics to modern physics. With this strong foundation, readers are better equipped to understand the equations and formulas of physics, and motivated to explore the thought-provoking exercises and fun projects in each chapter. Included in the package is the workbook. Mechanics, Properties of Matter, Heat, Sound, Electricity and Magnetism, Light, Atomic and Nuclear Physics, Relativity. For all readers interested in conceptual physics.

    His matrix theory is one of the bases of modern quantum mechanics, while his "uncertainty principle" has altered our whole philosophy of science.In this classic, based on lectures delivered at the University of Chicago, Heisenberg presents a complete physical picture of quantum theory. He covers not only his own contributions, but also those of Bohr, Dirac, Bose, de Broglie, Fermi, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Somerfield, Rupp, ·Wilson, Germer, and others in a text written for the physical scientist who is not a specialist in quantum theory or in modern mathematics.Partial contents: introduction (theory and experiment, fundamental concepts); critique of physical concepts of the corpuscular theory (uncertainty relations and their illustration); critique of the physical concepts of the wave theory (uncertainty relations for waves, discussion of an actual measurement of the electromagnetic field); statistical interpretation of quantum theory (mathematical considerations, interference of probabilities, Bohr's complementarity); discussion of important experiments (C. T. R. Wilson, diffraction , Einstein-Rupp, emission, absorption and dispersion of radiation, interference and conservation laws, Compton effect, radiation fluctuation phenomena, relativistic formulation of the quantum theory).An 80-page appendix on the mathematical apparatus of the quantum theory is provided for the specialist.

    Now, Tyson invites us to go behind the scenes of his public fame by unveiling his candid correspondence with people across the globe who have sought him out in search of answers. In this hand-picked collection of one hundred letters, Tyson draws upon cosmic perspectives to address a vast array of questions about science, faith, philosophy, life, and of course, Pluto. His succinct, opinionated, passionate, and often funny responses reflect his popularity and standing as a leading educator.Tyson’s 2017 bestseller Astrophysics for People in a Hurry offered more than one million readers an insightful and accessible understanding of the universe. Now, revealing Tyson’s most candid and heartfelt writing yet, Letters from an Astrophysicist introduces us to a newly personal dimension of Tyson’s quest to understand our place in the cosmos.

    This ideal guide shows us how mathematics can illuminate the human condition.