Showing titles in History

Brought to you by Penguin. Summer 1939. War is coming. The British believe that, through ingenuity and scientific prowess, they alone have a war-winning weapon: radar. They are wrong. The Germans have it too. They believe that their unique maritime history means their pilots have no need of...

In a world divided by the ideological struggles of the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, more than one-fifth of the people on the planet paused to watch the live transmission of the Apollo 11 mission. To watch as humanity took a giant leap forward. A companion book to the...

Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio.

Marcia Bjornerud's life as a geologist has coincided with an extraordinary period of discovery. From an insular girlhood in rural Wisconsin, she found her way to an unlikely career studying mountains in remote parts of the world. As one of few women in her field, she witnessed the shift in our understanding of the Earth, from solid object to an entity in a constant state of transformation. In the most tumultuous times of her own life, a deep understanding of our rocky planet imbued her life with meaning.

In this brilliant exploration of our cosmic environment, the renowned particle physicist and New York Times best-selling author of Warped Passages and Knocking on Heaven's Door uses her research into dark matter to illuminate the startling connections between the farthest reaches of space and life here on Earth.

'Indecently entertaining' A Daily Mail Book of the Week As any reader of murder mysteries can tell you, poison is one of the most enduring — and popular — weapons of choice for a scheming murderer. It can be slipped into a drink, smeared onto the tip of an arrow or the handle of a door, even...

Naming Darwin's Black Box to the National Review's list of the 100 most important nonfiction works of the 20th century, George Gilder wrote that it "overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning". Discussing the book in the New Yorker in May 2005, H. Allen Orr said of Behe, "He is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known."

The remarkable stories of the world's most famous body parts. Louis XIV's rear end inspired the British National Anthem. Queen Victoria's armpit led the development of antiseptics. Robert Jenkin's ear started a war. All too often, historical figures feel distant and abstract; more myth and...

Over two millennia ago, a Greek philosopher had a number of wondrous insights that paved the way to cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology, and biology, setting in motion a new way of seeing the world. In this elegant work, acclaimed physicist Carlo Rovelli brings to light the importance of Anaximander's overlooked legacy to modern science. He examines Anaximander as a scientist interested in shedding light on the deep nature of scientific thinking, which Rovelli locates in his rebellious ability to reimagine the world again and again.

Brought to you by Penguin. The secret life of gases - the strange, elusive and fascinating substances that shape our world, from the author of the best-selling, prize-winning Stuff Matters Why are most gases invisible, odourless and tasteless? Why do some poison us and others make us laugh? And...

A collection of BBC radio documentaries celebrating the lunar landings and their legacy. On July 20th 1969, for the first time in history, man walked on the moon. Over 50 years later, this 'giant leap for mankind' still captures our imagination, and in this four-part collection, we bring together some of the most fascinating and insightful BBC documentaries about our ever-changing relationship with our only natural satellite. 

Lost Discoveries, Dick Teresi's innovative history of science, explores the unheralded scientific breakthroughs from peoples of the ancient world -- Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Africans, New World and Oceanic tribes, among others -- and the non-European medieval world. They left an enormous...

Stepping effortlessly from myth to cutting-edge science, Mutants gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic code and the captivating people whose bodies have revealed it - a French convent girl who found herself changing sex at puberty; children who, echoing Homer's Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; a village of long-lived Croatian dwarves; one family, whose bodies were entirely covered with hair, was kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations and gave Darwin one of his keenest insights into heredity.

Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne here explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it.

In The Secrets of Alchemy, Lawrence M. Principe, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, brings alchemy out of the shadows and restores it to its important place in human history and culture. By surveying what alchemy was and how it began, developed, and overlapped with a range of ideas and pursuits, Principe illuminates the practice. He vividly depicts the place of alchemy during its heyday in early modern Europe, and then explores how alchemy has fit into wider views of the cosmos and humanity.

From the acclaimed author of The Nobel Prize comes this fascinating portrait of four of the greatest minds in the history of science and the impossible turning point they faced. As World War II wound down, and it became increasingly clear that the Allies would emerge victorious, Albert Einstein invited three close friends - all titans of contemporary science and philosophy - to his home at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey, to discuss what they loved best: science and philosophy.

Gravity is the weakest force in the everyday world, yet it is the strongest force in the universe. It was the first force to be recognised and described, yet it is the least understood. It is a 'force' that keeps your feet on the ground, yet no such force actually exists. Gravity, to steal the words of Winston Churchill, is 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'. And penetrating that enigma promises to answer the biggest questions in science: what is space? What is time? What is the universe? And where did it all come from?

Brought to you by Penguin. How did an architect help pioneer blood transfusion in the 1660s? Why did eighteenth-century dentists buy the live teeth of poor children? And what role did a sausage skin and an enamel bath play in making kidney transplants a reality? We think of transplant surgery as...

The American public's introduction to nuclear technology was manifested in destruction and death. With Hiroshima and the Cold War still ringing in our ears, our perception of all things nuclear is seen through the lens of weapons development. Nuclear power is full of mind-bending theories, deep secrets, and the misdirection of public consciousness - some deliberate, some accidental. The result of this fixation on bombs and fallout is that the development of a non-polluting, renewable energy source stands frozen in time.

The 20th century gave us two great theories of physics. The general theory of relativity describes the behavior of very large things, and quantum theory the behavior of very small things. In this landmark audiobook, John Gribbin - one of the best-known science writers of the past 30 years - presents his own version of the Holy Grail of physics, the search that has been going on for decades to find a unified "Theory of Everything" that combines these ideas into one mathematical package.