Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Essays

Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together exhilarating pieces by a who's who of scientists and science writers, including Stephen Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Albert Einstein,...

Here's something that doesn't happen every millennium: Roughly 35 million years ago, a stray meteorite dropped out of the sky over Virginia and left an impact that helped shape one of the continent's most distinctive coastlines. This scene of cataclysmic violence now lies beneath the calm waters of Chesapeake Bay. The occurrence of this prehistoric event only recently came to light, and the consequences of that impact will stretch far past our lifetimes. As Diane Casto Tennant makes clear in her new book, it wasn't the last interesting thing to happen in these parts.

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Freeman Dyson's latest book does not attempt to bring together all of the celebrated physicist's thoughts on science and technology into a unified theory. The emphasis is, instead, on the myriad ways in which the universe presents itself to us--and how, as observers and participants in its processes, we respond to it. -Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, - wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley, -stains the white radiance of eternity.- The author seeks here to explore the variety that gives life its beauty.

Taken from Dyson's recent public lectures--delivered to audiences with no...

During the latter half of the twentieth century, the world witnessed the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chronicling this significant occurrence in Ohio, and specifically in Kent, a university town in the American Midwest, Botanical Essays from Kent is a collection of writings and photographs that capture the spirit and excitement of botanical fieldwork during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.

With personal narratives based on fifty years of experience, author Tom S. Cooperrider...

Best known as the longtime writer of the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American--which introduced generations of readers to the joys of recreational mathematics--Martin Gardner has for decades pursued a parallel career as a devastatingly effective debunker of what he once famously dubbed "fads and fallacies in the name of science." It is mainly in this latter role that he is onstage in this collection of choice essays.

When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish takes aim at a gallery of amusing targets, ranging from Ann Coulter's qualifications as an...

Goran Grimvall is determined to help mere mortals understand how scientists get to the kernel of perplexing problems. Entertaining and enlightening, his latest book uses examples from sports, literature, and nature--as well as from the varied worlds of science--to illustrate how scientists make sense of and explain the world around us.

Grimvall's fun-to-read essays and easy-to-follow examples detail how order-of-magnitude estimation, extreme cases, dimensional analysis, and other modeling methods work. They also reveal how nonscientists absorb these concepts and use them at home,...