Published in 1913, a best-seller in the 1930s and long out of print, Physics for Entertainment was translated from Russian into many languages and influenced science students around the world. Among them was Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman, the Russian mathematician (unrelated to the author), who solved the Poincaré conjecture, and who was awarded and rejected the Fields Medal. Grigori's father, an electrical engineer, gave him Physics for Entertainment to encourage his son's interest in mathematics. In the foreword, the book's author describes the contents as "conundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining anecdotes, and unexpected comparisons," adding, "I have quoted extensively from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain and other writers, because, besides providing entertainment, the fantastic experiments these writers describe may well serve as instructive illustrations at physics classes." The book's topics included how to jump from a moving car, and why, "according to the law of buoyancy, we would never drown in the Dead Sea." Ideas from this book are still used by science teachers today.

'Never before has there been so many and such dreadful weapons in so many irresponsible hands.' - Karl Popper, from the Preface All Life is Problem Solving is a stimulating and provocative selection of Popper's writings on his main preoccupations during the last twenty-five years of his life. This collection illuminates Popper's process of working out key formulations in his theory of science, and indicates his view of the state of the world at the end of the Cold War and after the collapse of communism.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by Bloomberg (Chosen by Philip Tetlock), Booklist ’s Top 10 Science Books of the Year, and Shortlisted for Physics World ’s Book of the Year A Major Biography of the Nobel Prize–Winning Physicist, Enrico Fermi, a Leading Architect of the Atomic Age Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world’s physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called “the Pope” by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics. Fleeing Fascism and anti-Semitism, Fermi became a leading figure in America’s most secret project: building the atomic bomb. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi’s life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century, this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves.

In 2013 Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design became a national bestseller, provoking a wide-ranging debate about the adequacy of Darwinian theory to explain life's history. In Debating Darwin's Doubt: A Scientific Controversy that Can No Longer Be Denied , leading scholars in the intelligent design community respond to critiques of Meyer's book and show that the core challenge posed by Meyer remains unanswered: Where did the influx of information essential to the creation of new body plans come from? In addition to ten chapters by Stephen Meyer, Debating Darwin's Doubt also includes contributions from biologists Richard Sternberg, Douglas Axe, and Ann Gauger; philosopher of biology Paul Nelson; mathematicians William Dembski and David Berlinski; and Center for Science and Culture research coordinator Casey Luskin. In forty-four chapters, these contributing authors explore topics such as orphan genes, cladistics, small shelly fossils, protein evolution, the length of the Cambrian explosion, the God-of-the-Gaps objection to intelligent design, and criticisms raised by proponents of theistic evolution. Anyone who wants to understand the cutting-edge of current scientific debates over modern Darwinian theory needs to read this book.

"A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavor. This stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach, according to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve. In his previous book, The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch describe the four deepest strands of existing knowledge-the theories of evolution, quantum physics, knowledge, and computation-arguing jointly they reveal a unified fabric of reality. In this new book, he applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems, from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species. Filled with startling new conclusions about human choice, optimism, scientific explanation, and the evolution of culture, The Beginning of Infinity is a groundbreaking book that will become a classic of its kind"--

"This book is a guide to our lving, changing planet. We journey to the rim of a great meteor crater ... we travel back in time to 1930, in the icy heart of Greenland ... We journey to the outer reaches of our solar system, dive to a rock erupt from the heart of the earth to form new undersea mountains and a new ocean floor. Ulimately we will come to see this planet not as a hunk of stone in space but more like a living organism -- with its own internal dynamics, exchanging gases, healing itself, increasingly dependent on a new host creature -- man-- to shape its future."--Fly leaf.

Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough says Richard P. Feynman in The Smartest Men in the World, one of the many pieces in this collection of Feynman's best short works.

How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses, and making inferences? According to the model of Inference to the Best Explanation, we work out what to infer from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In Inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves. The second edition has been substantially enlarged and reworked, with a new chapter on the relationship between explanation and Bayesianism, and an extension and defence of the account of contrastive explanation. It also includes an expanded defence of the claims that our inferences really are guided by diverse explanatory considerations, and that this pattern of inference can take us towards the truth. This edition of Inference to the Best Explanation has also been updated throughout and includes a new bibliography.

Doing Physics makes concepts of physics easier to grasp by relating them to everyday knowledge. Addressing some of the models and metaphors that physicists use to explain the physical world, Martin H. Krieger describes the conceptual world of physics by means of analogies to economics, anthropology, theater, carpentry, mechanisms such as clockworks, and machine tool design. The interaction of elementary particles or chemical species, for example, can be related to the theory of kinship—who can marry whom is like what can interact with what. Likewise, the description of physical situations in terms of interdependent particles and fields is analogous to the design of a factory with its division of labor among specialists. For the new edition, Krieger has revised the text and added a chapter on the role of mathematics and formal models in physics. Doing Physics will be of special interest to economists, political theorists, anthropologists, and sociologists as well as philosophers of science.

Excerpt from Diamond Design: A Study of the Reflection and Refraction and Refraction of Light in a Diamond This book is written principally for students of precious stones and jewellers, and more particularly, for' diamond manufacturers and diamond cutters and polishers. The author will follow the evolution of the shape given to a cut diamond, and discuss the values of the various shapes and the reason for' the discarding of the old shapes and the practically universal adoption of the brilliant.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Beginner Books -- "Their cartoon format and irreverent wit make difficult ideas accessible and entertaining." -- Newsday aking us through the upheavals in biological thought which made The Origins of Species possible, Jonathan Miller introduces us to that odd revolutionary, Charles Darwin -- a remarkably timid man who spent most of his life in seclusion; a semi-invalid riddled with doubts, fearing the controversy his theories might unleash; yet also the man who finally undermined belief in God's creation. Along the way we meet a fascinating cast of characters: Darwin's scientific predecessors, his contemporaries (including Alfred Russell Wallace, whose anticipation of natural selection forced Darwin to publish), his opponents, and his successors whose work in modern genetics provided necessary modifications to Darwin's own work. Splendidly illustrated, this clever, witty, highly informative book is the perfect introduction to Darwin's life and thought.

Book by Isaac Asimov

Enter the wondrous world of Isaac Asimov, where the sky is not the limit--only the beginning! In this, his 23rd collection of essays, Asimov transports the reader from the earth's core to the farthest reaches of outer space. A captivating, scientific smorgasbord.

A wide-ranging compendium of twenty-six essays explores such scientific subjects as particle physics, the planets, the biology and physics of decompression, evolution, the history of time, and the benefits and problems of high technology robotics

A collection of previously published essays on various branches of physics.

"Time and Free Will" is Henri Bergson's doctoral thesis, which was first published in French in 1889. In the work French philosopher Bergson introduces us to his theory of duration, a response to Immanuel Kant's ideas regarding free will as something only possible outside of time and space. Bergson argues that the traditional concept of free will is merely confusion among philosophers caused by an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended and a lack of understanding of mechanics. He contends instead that free will is bound to causality and could only be understood in reference to first-person experience and perception. Duration was a way of understanding free will as it referred to each individual person's experience of time, not as a linear mathematical progression, but as something that slows down or speeds up as the person experiences and reflects upon life events. Bergson was one of the most influential philosophers of his day and his ideas, beginning with the publication of "Time and Free Will", profoundly changed the direction of modern European philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and follows the translation of F. L. Pogson.

Was there ever life on Mars? Will Earth be hit by an asteroid? Are there any other solar systems? Backyard Astronomy guides you through the mysteries of the universe and tells you everything you need to know about becoming a proficient backyard astronomer.

What’s in a word? Did you know that a lens is named for the lentil seed it resembles? That a straight line actually comes from the words stretched linen? or that a hippopotamus is literally a “river horse”? That oxygen means “giving birth to sharpness” because Lavoisier, who named it, mistakenly thought it was in all acids? (And acid, by the way, comes from the Latin word for vinegar). That alcohol is the word for an ancient Arabic cosmetic? That petroleum in Latin is “olive oil from a rock”? That a nucleus is a "little nut” or that deoxyribonucleic acid simply means . . . ? Well, read the book and see. The vocabulary of Science has always been a forbidding one, bristling with many-syllabled words and odd, unfamiliar terms. Now Professor Asimov has opened up this language to the ordinary reader by conducting an informal exploration into the roots and histories of hundreds of scientific terms. The result is a really fascinating book that combines a vast quantity of scientific information with an equal amount of language history. Even the longest tongue-twisters have simple origins if you go back far enough; and Professor Asimov makes each discovery of the origins of a word a sort of detective story that can’t fail to stimulate the reader’s interest. This is a perfect book to dip into again and again. Not only is it entertaining in its own right, but it is also a wonderful introduction to what should become the popular indoor sport of word-chasing. A complete index to the more than 1500 terms covered makes it a unique reference book as well.