Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Science & Technology

Adrian Desmond and James Moore's gripping narrative reveals the great personal cost to Darwin of pursuing inflammatory truths--telling the whole story of how he came to his epoch-making conclusions

No Ordinary Genius traces Feynman's remarkable adventures inside and outside science, in words and more than one-hundred photographs, many of them supplied by his family and close friends. The words are often his own and those of family, friends, and colleagues such as his sister, Joan Feynman; his children, Carl and Michelle; Freeman Dyson; Hans Bethe; Daniel Hillis; Marvin Minsky; and John Archibald Wheeler. The book gives vivid insight into the mind of a great creative scientist at work and at play, and it challenges the popular myth of the scientist as a cold reductionist...

In 1977, Feynman and his sidekick fellow drummer and geography enthusiast Ralph Leighton set out to make arrangements to visit Tuva, doing noble and hilarious battle with Soviet red tape, befriending quite a few Tuvans, and discovering the wonders of Tuvan throat-singing. Their Byzantine attempts to reach Tannu Tuva would span a decade, interrupted by Feynman's appointment to the committee investigating the Challenger disaster, and his tragic struggle with the cancer that finally killed him. Tuva or Bust chronicles the deepening friendship of two zany, brilliant strategists whose love of the...

Drawing upon never before disclosed facts about Kinsey's childhood, Jones traces the roots of Kinsey's scholarly interest in human sexuality to his tortured upbringing. Between the sexual tensions of the culture and Kinsey's devoutly religious family, Jones depicts Kinsey emerging from childhood with psychological trauma but determined to rescue humanity from the emotional and sexual repression he had suffered. New facts about his marriage, family life, and relationships with students and colleagues enrich this portrait of the complicated, troubled man who transformed the state of public...

Through family interviews, diaries, letters, and workbooks that had been sealed for over sixty years, Barbara Goldsmith reveals the Marie Curie behind the myth--an all-too-human woman struggling to balance a spectacular scientific career, a demanding family, the prejudice of society, and her own passionate nature. Obsessive Genius is a dazzling portrait of Curie, her amazing scientific success, and the price she paid for fame.

Probing the life and work of Kurt Godel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning--and brought him to the edge of madness.

Adele Marion Fielde, born in 1839, was a teacher, an evangelist, a social activist, scientist, lexicographer, writer and lecturer. As an American missionary in China, she became a local teacher and evangelist, struggling to reconcile her Baptist upbringing with her restless intellect. As an energetic social activist, she was a major figure in the suffragist movement, the abolition of the slave trade and the founding of two hospitals. As a scientist she conducted seminal research which is still discussed and studied today.

Ya. B. Zeldovich was undoubtedly one of the greatest physicists and cosmologists of the 20th century. This volume presents reminiscences about this exemplary academician, providing biographical and historical insights from colleagues who knew him best. Zeldovich's achievements are outlined, including those in relativistic astrophysics and cosmology; the theory of combustion; and the Soviet atomic and hydrogen bomb project. This monograph contains incisive commentary on Soviet science and the impact that Zeldovich had on future generations, not only in the former Soviet Union but throughout...

The true story, originally published as Rocket Boys, that inspired the Universal Pictures film.

It was 1957, the year Sputnik raced across the Appalachian sky, and the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was slowly dying.

Faced with an uncertain future, Homer Hickam nurtured a dream: to send rockets into outer space. The introspective son of the mine's superintendent and a mother determined to get him out of Coalwood forever, Homer fell in with a group of misfits who learned not only how to turn scraps of metal into sophisticated rockets but how to sustain their...

From the #1 bestselling author of October Sky comes this rich, unforgettable tale. With the same dazzling storytelling that distinguished his first memoir, Homer Hickam takes us deeper into the soul of his West Virginia hometown at a moment when its unique way of life is buffeted by forces of time and change.

It is fall 1959. Homer "Sonny" Hickam and his fellow Rocket Boys are in their senior year at Big Creek High, and the town of Coalwood finds itself at a painful crossroads.

The strains can be felt within the Hickam home, where Homer Sr. struggles to save the mine, and his...

Homer Hickam won the praise of critics and the devotion of readers with his first two memoirs set in the hardscrabble mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia. The New York Times crowned his first book, the #1 national bestseller October Sky, "an eloquent evocation ... a thoroughly charming memoir." And People called The Coalwood Way, Hickam's follow-up to October Sky, "a heartwarmer ... truly beautiful and haunting."

Now Homer Hickam continues his extraordinary story with Sky of Stone, dazzling us with exquisite storytelling as he takes us back to...

Deep in the volcano country of central Africa live some of the rarest, most intriguing animals on earth -- the mountain gorillas. Here, in the mist-shrouded forests, Dian Fossey courageously dedicated her life to studying them. Here she patiently waited until the luminous-eyed gorillas accepted her presence, hugged her, and loved her...while she fought for their survival against poachers, callous researchers, zoo collectors, and local bureaucrats. And here, surrounded by these enemies, she died, mysteriously and brutally murdered.
Now, one of the world's most respected naturalist writers...

"Dr. Jane Goodall's revolutionary study of chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe preserve forever altered the very, definition of "humanity." Now, in a poignant and insightful memoir, Jane Goodall explores her extraordinary life and personal spiritual odyssey, with observations as profound as the knowledge she has brought back from the forest."--BOOK JACKET. "It has been a life blessed with faith, resolve, and purpose, though not without its crises. Jane Goodall endured the horrors of the London blitz and World War II, postwar hardships, vicious rumors and "establishment" assaults on the integrity...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean's wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower--the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii--a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America's strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida's swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In...

In 1859, Bernhard Riemann, a little-known thirty-two year old mathematician, made a hypothesis while presenting a paper to the Berlin Academy titled "On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quantity." Today, after 150 years of careful research and exhaustive study, the Riemann Hyphothesis remains unsolved, with a one-million-dollar prize earmarked for the first person to conquer it.

Alternating passages of extraordinarily lucid mathematical exposition with chapters of elegantly composed biography and history, Prime Obsession is a fascinating and fluent account of an epic...

One of the few unquestioned greats of twentieth-century science, Linus Pauling was the only person to receive two unshared Nobel Prizes-one in chemistry, for deciphering the quantum physics of large molecules, and one in peace, for helping to end nuclear bomb testing. His brilliance was allied with a certain stubbornness, and when he died in 1994, at the age of 93, he was embroiled in controversy regarding his advocacy of vitamin C as a treatment for cancer. Based on thirty years of interviews, this masterful biography is filled with insights into the life and work of this complex,...

The definitive biography of Tsien Hsue-Shen, the pioneer of the American space age who was mysteriously accused of being a communist, deported, and became--to America's continuing chagrin--the father of the Chinese missile program.

Discover the trials & triumphs of great female inventors

Astrolabe
Automatic Dishwasher
Barbie Doll
Buffered Aspirin
COBOL
Cotton Gin
Disposable Phone
Drip Coffeemaker
Fabric Softener Sheets
Hang Glider
IV Fluids
Jell-O
Kevlar
Mars Rover
Nystatin
PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)
Protease Inhibitors
Rolfing
Smallpox Variolation
Space Suit
Spic & Span
Tract Housing
Vacuum Canning
Windshield Wipers
Zig-Zag Sewing Machine
Zovirax
...

"Show me any civilization that believes that reality exists only because man can perceive it, that the cosmos was erected to support man on its pinnacle, that man is exclusively divine, and then I will predict the nature of his cities and its landscapes, the hot dog stands, the neon shill, the ticky-tacky houses, the sterile core, the mined and ravaged countryside. This is the image of anthropocentric man. He seeks not unity with nature but conquest, yet unity he finds, when his arrogance and ignorance are stilled and he lies dead under the greensward." Ian L. McHarg Multiply and Subdue the...

Blends the brilliance of the scientific genius with the compassion, playfulness, and wit of the private figure

"A fascinating read with more interesting material about Einstein as a human being than I have ever seen before."--Robert Jastrow, astrophysicist and bestselling author

"A thoughtful and captivating account of one whom I had the joy of knowing and loving."--George Wald, Nobel Prize Laureate

His face is one of the most recognized on the planet. His very name is synonymous with genius. Yet, for all the attention and countless biographies, our...