A Short History of Nearly Everything is a general science book by Bill Bryson, which explains some areas of science in ordinary language. It was the bestselling popular science book of 2005 in the UK, selling over 300,000 copies. A Short History deviates from Bryson's popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. In it, he explores time from the Big Bang to the discovery of quantum mechanics, via evolution and geology. Bryson tells the story of science through the stories of the people who made the discoveries, such as Edwin Hubble, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Bill Bryson wrote this book because he was dissatisfied with his scientific knowledge – that was, not much at all. He writes that science was a distant, unexplained subject at school. Textbooks and teachers alike did not ignite the passion for knowledge in him, mainly because they never delved in the whys, hows, and whens.

Martins GARDNERS

RELATIVITĀTES TEORIJA VISIEM

IZDEVNIECĪBA «LIESMA» RĪGĀ 1969

RELATIVITY FOR THE million

by martin gardner

Ulustrated by Anthony Ravielli

MACMILLAN NEW YORK, LONDON

Two views of the world clashed at the dawn of thought. In the great debate between the earliest Greek philosophers, Heraclitus argued for perpetual change, but Parmenides maintained there was neither time nor motion. Over the ages, few thinkers have taken Parmenides seriously, but I shall argue that Heraclitan flux, depicted nowhere more dramatically than in Turner’s painting below, may well be nothing but a well-founded illusion. I shall take you to a prospect of the end of time. In fact, you see it in Turner’s painting, which is static and has not changed since he painted it. It is an illusion of flux. Modern physics is beginning to suggest that all the motions of the whole universe are a similar illusion – that in this respect Nature is an even more consummate artist than Turner. This is the story of my book. Richard Feynman once quipped that "Time is what happens when nothing else does." But Julian Barbour disagrees: if nothing happened, if nothing changed, then time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. Put simply, time does not exist. In this highly provocative volume, Barbour presents the basic evidence for a timeless universe, and shows why we still experience the world as intensely temporal. It is a book that strikes at the heart of modern physics. It casts doubt on Einstein's greatest contribution, the spacetime continuum, but also points to the solution of one of the great paradoxes of modern science, the chasm between classical and quantum physics. Indeed, Barbour argues that the holy grail of physicists--the unification of Einstein's general relativity with quantum mechanics--may well spell the end of time. Barbour writes with remarkable clarity as he ranges from the ancient philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides, through the giants of science Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, to the work of the contemporary physicists John Wheeler, Roger Penrose, and Steven Hawking. Along the way he treats us to enticing glimpses of some of the mysteries of the universe, and presents intriguing ideas about multiple worlds, time travel, immortality, and, above all, the illusion of motion. The End of Time is a vibrantly written and revolutionary book. It turns our understanding of reality inside-out.

¡El detective más famoso del mundo se convierte en el mejor profesor de física en una serie de sorprendentes casos en los que la ciencia se vuelve loca y la naturaleza asesina! En este libro lleno de suspense, Colin Bruce ha recreado la atmósfera original de las historias de Sherlock Holmes para explicar de un modo muy emocionante los más fascinantes principios de la física a través de doce aventuras completamente originales del habitante novelesco más famoso de Londres. En esta colección de relatos, de ritmo trepidante, Sherlock Holmes tiene que descifrar las paradojas y los principios de las físicas clásica y cuántica para poder resolver un crimen, prevenir un asesinato o rescatar a una doncella en peligro. Colín Bruce vive en Oxford, Inglaterra, y es físico y escritor de ciencias. Es un experto en las paradojas de la física y un amante de los misterios.

Deutsch’s pioneering and accessible book integrates recent advances in theoretical physics and computer science to explain and connect many topics at the leading edge of current research and thinking, such as quantum computers, and physics of time travel, and the ultimate fate of the universe.

Richard P. Feynman was one of this century’s most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, in 1918, he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a BS in 1939. He went on to Princeton and received his Ph.D. in 1942. During the war years he worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University, where he worked with Hans Bethe. He all but rebuilt the theory of quantum electrodynamics and it was for this work that he shared the Nobel Prize in 1965. His simplified rules of calculation became standard tools of theoretical analysis in both quantum electrodynamics and high-energy physics. Feynman was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1950, where he later accepted a permanent faculty appointment, and became Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1959. He had an extraordinary ability to communicate his science to audiences at all levels, and was a well-known and popular lecturer. Richard Feynman died in 1988 after a long illness. Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, called him ‘the most original mind of his generation’, while in its obituary The New York Times described him as ‘arguably the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists’.

A number of collections and adaptations of his lectures have been published, including The Feynman Lectures on Physics, QED (Penguin, 1990), The Character of Physical Law (Penguin, 1992), Six Easy Pieces (Penguin, 1998), The Meaning of It All (Penguin, 1999) and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces (Allen Lane, 1998; Penguin, 1999). The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation and The Feynman Lectures on Computation are both forthcoming in Penguin. His memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, were published in 1985.

In this engaging scientific memoir, Kenneth Ford recounts the time when, in his mid-twenties, he was a member of the team that designed and built the first hydrogen bomb. He worked with—and relaxed with—scientific giants of that time such as Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Stan Ulam, John von Neumann, and John Wheeler, and here offers illuminating insights into the personalities, the strengths, and the quirks of these men. Well known for his ability to explain physics to nonspecialists, Ford also brings to life the physics of fission and fusion and provides a brief history of nuclear science from the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 to the ten-megaton explosion of “Mike” that obliterated a Pacific Island in 1952.

Ford worked at both Los Alamos and Princeton’s Project Matterhorn, and brings out Matterhorn’s major, but previously unheralded contribution to the development of the H bomb. Outside the lab, he drove a battered Chevrolet around New Mexico, a bantam motorcycle across the country, and a British roadster around New Jersey. Part of the charm of Ford’s book is the way in which he leavens his well-researched descriptions of the scientific work with brief tales of his life away from weapons.

• It contains real physics, clearly presented for non-specialists

• Combining historical scholarship and his own recollections, the author offers important insights into the people and the work that led to the first H bomb

• Personal anecdotes enliven the book

STEPHEN HAWKING, uno de los pensadores más influyentes de nuestro tiempo, se ha convertido en un icono intelectual no sólo por la osadía de sus ideas, sino también por la claridad y agudeza con que las expresa. En este nuevo libro, Hawking nos conduce hasta la frontera misma de la física teórica -donde la verdad supera muchas veces a la ficción- para explicarnos en términos verdaderamente sencillos los principios que rigen nuestro universo.

Como otros muchos físicos teóricos, también Hawking se ha lanzado en pos del grial de la ciencia: la escurridiza Teoría del Todo que guarda el corazón del cosmos. Con un estilo asequible y divertido, nos lleva de la mano en su búsqueda de los secretos del universo, desde la supergravedad hasta la supersimetría, desde la teoría cuántica hasta la teoría M, desde la holografía hasta la dualidad, nos hace alcanzar las últimas fronteras de la ciencia, donde la teoría de supercuerdas y las p-branas podrían esconder la clave final del rompecabezas, y nos permite asistir entre bastidores a una de sus aventuras intelectuales más ambiciosas donde trata de «combinar la teoría general de la relatividad de Einstein con la idea de Richard Feynman sobre la posibilidad de encajar múltiples historias en una teoría completa y unificada que habrá de describir todo cuanto sucede en el universo».

Con su característico entusiasmo, el profesor Hawking nos invita a acompañarle en ese extraordinario viaje por el espacio-tiempo, hacia un increíble país de las maravillas en el que partículas, membranas y cuerdas danzan en once dimensiones, allí donde los agujeros negros se evaporan y desaparecen llevandose consigo su secreto, y donde habita la pequeña nuez, la semilla cósmica originaria, de la que surgió nuestro universo.

El universo en una cáscara de nuez es imprescindible para cuantos deseamos comprender el universo en que vivimos. Como ya sucedió con la Historia del tiempo, el nuevo libro de Hawking nos ilumina y nos conmueve porque a través de su lectura experimentamos también nosotros la misma emoción que embarga a la comunidad científica a medida que va arrancando al cosmos sus secretos.

Sometimes, to laymen theoretical physics can seem as mercurial and trend-following as high fashion. That's where Stephen Hawking steps in. Since the publication of A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (1988), the longtime Oxford professor has been finding ways to explain these complex and ever-changing theories. Here, working with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking delivers another bang-up book with GRAND DESIGN, in which the authors attempt to clarify one of the most fundamental and puzzling questions-how did are universe begin. Examining M-theory, string theory, parallel universes, quantum theory, and other ideas in chatty yet informative prose, GRAND DESIGN takes a quick tour of the history of the development of these crazy ideas and then synthesizes the questions and possible solutions that lie in the gray matter between science, philosophy, and the imagination.

"This lecture is about whether we can predict the future, or whether it is arbitrary and random. In ancient times, the world must have seemed pretty arbitrary. Disasters such as floods or diseases must have seemed to happen without warning or apparen t reason. Primitive people attributed such natural phenomena, to a pantheon of gods and goddesses, who behaved in a capricious and whimsical way. There was no way to predict what they would do, and the only hope was to win favour by gifts or actions."

On December 26, 1898, Marie Curie announced the discovery of radium and observed that “radioactivity seems to be an atomic property.” A mere 47 years later, “Little Boy"exploded over Hiroshima. Before the Fallout is the epic story of the intervening half century, during which an exhilarating quest to unravel the secrets of the material world revealed how to destroy it, and an open, international, scientific adventure transmuted overnight into a wartime sprint for the bomb.

Weaving together history, science, and biography, Diana Preston chronicles a human chain reaction of scientists and leaders whose discoveries and decisions forever changed our lives. The early decades of the 20th century brought Einstein’s relativity theory, Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus, and Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics, and scientists of many nations worked together to tease out the secrets of the atom. Only 12 years before Hiroshima, one leading physicist dismissed the idea of harnessing energy from atoms as “moonshine.” Then, on the eve of World War II, the power of atomic fission was revealed, alliances were broken, friendships sundered, and science co-opted by world events.

Preston interviewed the surviving scientists, and she offers new insight into the fateful wartime meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr, along with a fascinating conclusion examining what might have happened had any number of events occurred differently. She also provides a rare portrait of Hiroshima before the blast.

As Hiroshima’s 60th anniversary approaches, Before the Fallout compels us to consider the threats and moral dilemmas we face in our still dangerous world.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after its initial publication, remains the seminal and complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan.

Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly—or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the bomb, with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers—Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and von Neumann—stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight.

Richard Rhodes gives the definitive story of man’s most awesome discovery and invention. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is a narrative and a document with literary power commensurate with its subject.

[200 color illustrations]

Carl Sagan, writer and scientist, returns from the frontier to tell us about how the world works. In his delightfully down-to-earth style, he explores and explains a mind-boggling future of intelligent robots, extraterrestrial life and its consquences, and other provocative, fascinating quandries of the future that we want to see today.

New York Times Bestseller: This life story of the quirky physicist is “a thorough and masterful portrait of one of the great minds of the century” (The New York Review of Books). Raised in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was irreverent, eccentric, and childishly enthusiastic—a new kind of scientist in a field that was in its infancy. His quick mastery of quantum mechanics earned him a place at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer, where the giddy young man held his own among the nation’s greatest minds. There, Feynman turned theory into practice, culminating in the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945, when the Atomic Age was born. He was only twenty-seven. And he was just getting started. In this sweeping biography, James Gleick captures the forceful personality of a great man, integrating Feynman’s work and life in a way that is accessible to laymen and fascinating for the scientists who follow in his footsteps. To his colleagues, Richard Feynman was not so much a genius as he was a full-blown magician: someone who “does things that nobody else could do and that seem completely unexpected.” The path he cleared for twentieth-century physics led from the making of the atomic bomb to a Nobel Prize-winning theory of quantam electrodynamics to his devastating exposé of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. At the same time, the ebullient Feynman established a reputation as an eccentric showman, a master safe cracker and bongo player, and a wizard of seduction. Now James Gleick, author of the bestselling Chaos, unravels teh dense skein of Feynman‘s thought as well as the paradoxes of his character in a biography—which was nominated for a National Book Award—of outstanding lucidity and compassion.

Як виник Всесвіт? І як з’явилася наша реальність? І чому ми взагалі існуємо? Лоуренс Крайс запрошує вас у захопливу подорож, щоб дізнатися відповіді на ці та інші питання. В цій книзі він доступною мовою розповідає про фізику та її витоки, наукові дослідження появи Всесвіту, ділиться історіями з життя видатних науковців минулого та сучасності, їхніми досягненнями та відкриттями. Ніяких нудних термінів та незрозумілих формул. Книжка, яка розкриє всі таємниці походження Всесвіту.

Ці уроки створені для тих, хто знає мало або зовсім нічого не знає про сучасну науку. У них подано експрес-огляд найцікавіших аспектів великої революції, що відбулась у фізиці в ХХ столітті, а також запитань і таємниць, які ця революція відкрила людству. Адже наука показує не тільки шляхи до кращого розуміння світу, а й величезний обсяг невідомого…