A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice: A vivid account of the generations-long dispute over Bayes’ rule, one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of applied mathematics and statistics“An intellectual romp touching on, among other topics,...

“Big questions are Gazzaniga’s stock in trade.”—New York Times“Gazzaniga is one of the most brilliant experimental neuroscientists in the world.”—Tom Wolfe“Gazzaniga stands as a giant among neuroscientists, for both the quality of his research and his...

A new intellectual biography of Ernest Rutherford, the twentieth century’s greatest experimental physicist. Ernest Rutherford, who grew up in colonial New Zealand and came to Cambridge on a scholarship, made numerous revolutionary discoveries, among them...

"As scholarly as [it] is . . . this book about education happens to double as an optimistic, even thrilling, summer read." —The New York TimesA brilliant combination of science and its real-world application, Now You See It sheds light on one of the...

The New York Times bestseller: A provocative, imaginative exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge“Dazzling.” – Steven Pinker, The GuardianIn this groundbreaking book, award-winning physicist David Deutsch argues that explanations have a...

**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award** The definitive history of nuclear weapons—from the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan...

Whether or not infants' earliest perception of the world is a "blooming, buzzing, confusion," it is not long before they come to perceive structure and order among the objects and events around them. At the core of this process, and cognitive development...

This book is the first since 1897 to describe the earliest reconstructable stages of the prehistory of English. It outlines the grammar of Proto-Indo-European, considers the changes by which one dialect of that prehistoric language developed into...

The bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos tackles perhaps the most mind-bending question in modern physics and cosmology: Is our universe the only universe?There was a time when "universe" meant all there is. Everything...

This is an introductory survey to the philosophy of science suitable for beginners and nonspecialists. Its point of departure is the question: why should we believe what science tells us about the world? In this attempt to justify the claims of science...

Encompassing new technologies, research methods, and opportunities for collaborative scholarship and open-source peer review, as well as innovative ways of sharing knowledge and teaching, the digital humanities promises to transform the liberal arts—and...

If the conscious mind--the part you consider to be you--is just the tip of the iceberg, what is the rest doing?In this sparkling and provocative book, renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman navigates the depths of the subconscious brain to illuminate its...

From Nobel prize-winner Roger Penrose, this groundbreaking book is for anyone "who is interested in the world, how it works, and how it got here" (New York Journal of Books).Penrose presents a new perspective on three of cosmology’s essential questions:...

Einstein's theory of general relativity opens the door for the study of other possible universes- and weird universes at that. Not many solutions to Einstein's tantalizing equations have ever been found, but those we know about are all remarkable:...

Hardly a week passes without some high-profile court case that features intellectual property at its center. But how did the belief that one could own an idea come about? And how did that belief change the way humankind lives and works? William Rosen,...

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas...

In this Very Short Introduction, Stephen J. Blundell illuminates the mysterious force of magnetism. For centuries, magnetism has been used for various purposes--through compasses it gave us the ability to navigate, and through motors, generators, and...

Mathematics is a fundamental human activity that can be practised and understood in a multitude of ways; indeed, mathematical ideas themselves are far from being fixed, but are adapted and changed by their passage across periods and cultures. In this...

We all played tag when we were kids. What most of us don't realize is that this simple chase game is in fact an application of pursuit theory, and that the same principles of games like tag, dodgeball, and hide-and-seek are also at play in military...

Leonhard Euler's polyhedron formula describes the structure of many objects--from soccer balls and gemstones to Buckminster Fuller's buildings and giant all-carbon molecules. Yet Euler's formula is so simple it can be explained to a child. Euler's Gem...