There are so many biographical versions of the quantum theory, but none that focus on Einstein’s achievements in such detail.
The narrative is rich in detail and compelling as a real page turner, filled with informative physics and background details from Einstein’s life story. I was sad to leave the book behind. By the end I wanted to know so much more.
Einstein and the Quantum reveals for the first time the full significance of Albert Einstein's contributions to quantum theory. Einstein famously rejected quantum mechanics, observing that God does not play dice. But, in fact, he thought more about the nature of atoms, molecules, and the emission and absorption of light--the core of what we now know as quantum theory--than he did about relativity. A compelling blend of physics, biography, and the history of science, Einstein and the Quantum shares the untold story of how Einstein--not Max Planck or Niels Bohr--was the driving force behind early quantum theory. It paints a…
I learned about Robin Dunbar’s work many years ago with his book about Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language.
The deep thoughts and ideas stuck in my mind and they come back to me from time to time in my own work. After a chance meeting with the author, I discovered that he’d written an update on his famous work around the Dunbar Number and the scaling of groups in the animal kingdom.
This book was a fascinating romp through the dynamics of social systems with many new memorable teachings.
'Fascinating...In essence, the number and quality of our friendships may have a bigger influence on our happiness, health and mortality risk than anything else in life save for giving up smoking' Guardian, Book of the Day
Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think. The single most surprising fact to emerge out of the medical literature over the last decade or so has been that the number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking.
This book challenges us to think about the history of civilization itself. Real Asimovian, Hari Seldon stuff—Turchin’s research takes us through the history of cilvilization to learn key lessons about what destabilised human society across the millennia.
The conclusion is a fascinating new take on the usual accounts of human civilization. It also lays out a clear warning about the path we’re taking in an attempt to level up the world and eliminate poverty, to educate the world, and strive for prosperity for all. The path involves a delicate balance that we’ve surely been unwilling to see…
'A pre-eminent digital-age seer. . . a great collected narrative of human hope and human failure' Tim Adams, Observer
'Extraordinary. . . the culmination of many years of highly original and innovative work' Niall Ferguson, Bloomberg BEST BOOKS 2023: THE GUARDIAN * THE TIMES * SUNDAY TIMES One of the most iconoclastic thinkers of our time offers a brilliant new theory of how society works
What leads to political turbulence and social breakdown? How do elites maintain their dominant position? And why do ruling classes sometimes suddenly lose their grip on power?
For decades, complexity scientist Peter Turchin has been…
This book is a tour de force through the fields of physics, computing, linguistics, and neuroscience. Our modern scientific ideas of space and time have been handed down to us from a long history and they have undergone many revisions. Yet many of those ideas have been turned completely upside down by the information revolution. Quantum physics and Einstein's Theory Of Relativity made us rethink them in the 20th century, but have we made too much of their strangeness, and take too narrow a view? Will we meet the same strangeness again in the growing computing cloud? Evidence amassing in the vast computer systems that power the Internet suggests that this may be the case.
