We’ve all been told that thinking rationally is the key to success. But at the cutting edge of science, researchers are discovering that feeling is every bit as important as thinking in this "lively exposé of the growing consensus about the limited power...

A nontechnical guide to the basic ideas of modern causal inference, with illustrations from health, the economy, and public policy.Which of two antiviral drugs does the most to save people infected with Ebola virus? Does a daily glass of wine prolong or...

Book Five of Johannes Kepler's great masterpiece on planetary motion is presented with an introduction by the ultimate authority on this topic, noted physicist and bestselling author Stephen Hawking. Modifying Copernicus's sun-centered model of the...

A funny, insightful, and self-contained guide to Einstein's relativity theory and classical field theories--including electromagnetismPhysicist Leonard Susskind and data engineer Art Friedman are back. This time, they introduce readers to Einstein's...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“Most appealing... technical accuracy and lightness of tone... Impeccable.”—Wall Street Journal“A porthole into another world.”—Scientific American“Brings science dissemination to a new level.”—ScienceThe most trusted...

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them. Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them...

Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden was one of the highest-profile personalities among the Apollo astronauts, renowned for his outspokenness and potent views but also recognized as a warm and well-liked person who devoted much of his life after...

An adventure in Mathematical Archaelogy and what the Great Pyramid says to us today.

In this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our...

When physicist Alan Sokal recently submitted an article to the postmodernist journal Social Text, the periodical's editors were happy to publish it--for here was a respected scientist offering support for the journal's view that science is a subjective,...

The human brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For more than a century, a diverse array of researchers searched for a language that could be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and...

• Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science,...

Science/Engineering"Petroski has an inquisitive mind, and he is a fine writer. . . . [He] takes us on a lively tour of engineers, their creations and their necessary turns of mind."   --Los Angeles TimesFrom the Ferris wheel to the integrated circuit,...

A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 • A Booklist Top Ten Biography of 2021 • A Kirkus Reviews Best Science Book of 2021 The first major biography written for a general audience of the logician and mathematician whose Incompleteness Theorems...

What is life? Is it just the biologically familiar--birds, trees, snails, people--or is it an infinitely complex set of patterns that a computer could simulate? What role does intelligence play in separating the organic from the inorganic, the living...

Lavishly illustrated volume revealing the intricacies of a 1742 map of the cosmos.The expansive and intricate Atlas Coelestis, created by Johann Doppelmayr in 1742, set out to record everything known about astronomy at the time, covering constellations,...

A vivid portrait of how Naval oversight shaped American oceanography, revealing what difference it makes who pays for science.What difference does it make who pays for science?Some might say none. If scientists seek to discover fundamental truths about...

Combining the latest scientific advances with storytelling skills unmatched in the cosmos, an award-winning astrophysicist and popular writer leads us on a tour of some of the greatest mysteries of our universe.In the constellation of Eridanus, there...

A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn’s unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific...