Showing titles in History & Philosophy

The term metaverse is suddenly everywhere, from debates over Fortnite to the pages of the New York Times to the speeches of Mark Zuckerberg, who proclaimed in June 2021 that “the overarching goal” of Facebook is to “bring the metaverse to life”. But what, exactly, is the metaverse? As pioneering theorist and venture capitalist Matthew Ball explains, it is the successor to the mobile internet that has defined the last two decades. 

We have always looked up at the sky and wondered. The desire to explore and understand what lies beyond us is at the heart of scientific discovery. Ever since the ancient Babylonians tracked celestial objects on clay tablets, the search for meaning in an infinitely vast universe has been a...

What is Now? This immediate moment, what we're experiencing right now . . . it bathes us like air, or gravity. Yet when we try to grasp this quality, to scrutinize it or bring it into focus, it vanishes, slipping through our fingers like a dream. And worse, according to the most trusted models of physics, Now doesn't even exist. If all this is so, then what, exactly, are we experiencing? How do we carve out time, sensation, self, and meaning from a blank, Now-less canvas?

Winner of the James Beard Award for Literary Writing "Engrossing...hard to put down." — The New York Times Book Review “Frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, I bow down. This is how it's done.” — Mary...

Of the codified laws of nature, only one inscribes a direction to time: the dreaded second law of thermodynamics, which declares that the disorder of a closed system tends to increase as time passes. New shoes eventually scuff, our bodies weaken and die. Yet our senses tell us that miraculous order constantly emerges, too: children grow and learn; spontaneous patterns manifest in murmurations of starlings. Can it be true that the laws of our universe mandate only dissolution?

A small group of eccentric researchers, experimenting on themselves from inside pressure tanks in the middle of the London air raids, explored the deadly science needed to enable the critical reconnaissance vessels and underwater breathing apparatuses that would enable the Allies' dramatic, history-making success during the next major beach landing: D-Day.

For fans of Wild and Lab Girl, Heartbreak is a uniquely immersive audiobook, merging science and self-discovery to change the way we think about loneliness, health, and what it means to fall in and out of love. Narrated by the author and accompanied by in-the-moment diary recordings and interviews, Heartbreak is an immersive audiobook that taps into one of the most shared experiences in the animal kingdom: heartbreak.

A TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2019 An intimate and compelling exploration into the unique psyche of the heart surgeon, by one of the profession’s most eminent figures. Although Professor Stephen Westaby was born with the necessary coordination and manual dexterity, it was a head trauma sustained during...

A magnificently reported and soulfully crafted exploration of the human immune system–the key to health and wellness, life and death. An epic, first-of-its-kind book, entwining leading-edge scientific discovery with the intimate stories of four individual lives, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning...

By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.

When acclaimed science writer Stefan Klein asks Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann what sets scientists apart, Hoffmann says, "First and foremost, curiosity." In this collection of intimate conversations with 19 of the world's best-known scientists (including three Nobel Laureates), Klein lets us listen in as today's leading minds reveal what they still hope to discover - and how their paradigm-changing work entwines with their lives outside the lab.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY PRIZE THE SUNDAY TIMES NO.2 BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BMA PRESIDENT’S AWARD 2017 An incredible memoir from one of the world’s most eminent heart surgeons, recalling some of the most remarkable and poignant cases he’s worked on. Grim Reaper sits on the...

John Forbes Nash, Jr., a prodigy and legend by the age of 30, dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards.

Humanly Possible is a wide-ranging, personal, thought-provoking and entertaining journey through the battle of ideas over some 700 years of history—mostly, but not exclusively, in Europe. Through a mixture of biography and philosophy, Bakewell seeks to understand what humanism is, why it has continued to flourish despite opposition from fanatics, mystics, tyrants and cultural pessimists of all kinds, and exactly why we should value and defend it in the 21st century.

Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological change want to stop talking about it now? At Work in the Ruins is the book that grew out of Dougald’s attempt to answer that question. He delves deeply into what he discovered during the globally shared isolating Covid moment, why the virus and the measures taken against it drove so many of us to despair, and how we can re-find our bearings if the pandemic is not the big event that changes everything but simply one in a chain of emergencies that are bringing about the end of the world as we knew it.

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.

The Top Ten Bestseller Black holes. DNA. The Large Hadron Collider. Ever had that sneaking feeling that you are missing out on some truly spectacular science? You do? Well, fear not, for help is at hand. Ben Miller was working on his Physics PhD at Cambridge when he accidentally became a...

Mystics and sages have long maintained that there exists an interconnecting cosmic field at the roots of reality that conserves and conveys information, a field known as the Akashic record. Recent discoveries in vacuum physics show that this Akashic field is real and has its equivalent in science's zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field consists of a subtle sea of fluctuating energies from which all things arise: atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, living beings, and even consciousness.

Brought to you by Penguin. An acclaimed physicist signposts a new revolution in fundamental physics, and with it a new description of reality For the last century, physics has been following the paths set out by the same two theories—quantum mechanics and general relativity—and, let’s face...

Ian Tattersall, a highly esteemed figure in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology, leads a fascinating tour of the history of life and the evolution of human beings. Starting at the very beginning, Tattersall examines patterns of change in the biosphere over time, and the correlations of biological events with physical changes in the Earth's environment.