98 books like Cosmic Jackpot

I loved this book because it offers a refreshing view of what neuroscience can and should be. Unlike different, highly credentialed neuroscientists who routinely offer vastly incompatible views of consciousness and who we ultimately are, this book instead focuses on the extraordinary theme of how the brain organizes the engineering of consciousness rather than on the more elusive and controversial deeper questions. 

As an illustration of the many mind-broadening themes broached in this superb book, instinct is often used as the be-all and end-all explanation of certain animal and human behaviors. Of the two hundred or so books I have read on the subject of consciousness and the brain, I have never before come across a more cogent explanation of how instinct arises and sets over many generations. 

This often startling book provides a tour d'horizon of unsettled questions in modern physical science and, most importantly, of the intriguing directions the answers could take. It should inspire many in the rising generations of students to take the baton from their elders and seek a career in science at the edges of human understanding. A book I so wish had already been around when I began studying physics.

Tom Siegfried is a distinguished science journalist. 

The first time I came across this wonderful book, I did the inevitable double take: I had happened to study infinity in its many possible renditions, and the title of this superb book seems to be a mistake: an obvious, silly contradiction in terms, because we can always add one to any purported 'biggest number in the world' and thereby immediately produce an even bigger number. Yet...This book describes the weird, weird world of huge numbers, the race amongst a rarefied coterie of aficionados to find ever bigger specific, provable numbers, and much else besides. 

Mind-blowing.

I loved this book because it so effectively punctures the myth that mathematics might be dull or boring while teaching much about numbers, the founding stones of all the other branches of mathematics, and ultimately of all of science itself.

At first sight, numbers can seem deceptively bland–what else could be as plain vanilla as 1, 2, and 3? Yet simple numbers inevitably give rise to a whole menagerie of other, increasingly exotic numbers–most of which are soon shown to collectively behave in unforeseeable, puzzling ways (such as prime numbers do). Irrational numbers are starkly counterintuitive, and Julian Harvil does an extraordinary job of showing how and why.

I love this book because, in typical Paul Davies fashion, it approaches the fine-tuning issue from all perspectives, asks the big questions, and then, like a murder mystery, probes the most likely explanations. The book is a feast for the intellect.

While it describes many of the cosmos's most notable fine-tuning features, such as the strength of gravity, the value of the cosmological constant, and the smoothness of the cosmic background radiation, Paul Davies puts his own spin on the mysteries, examining them with the rigor of a scientist and a philosopher.

I also like this book because Davies shows care for the reader, filling the book with simple examples (such as synchronized ballerinas to illustrate the horizon problem) to explain a scientific conundrum and summarizing key points at the end of each chapter. Last, I appreciate the books of Paul Davies because, whether I agree or disagree with his… show more.

I bought this book in 1976, when it first came out and it’s now held together with Sellotape.

It offers an in-depth description of Saturn, a much misunderstood and maligned planet, through the signs and houses it occupies in a birth chart and includes a section on aspects as well aspects in synastry. No one else offers as much insight into the Saturnian principle and the painful lessons in life it can describe as Liz Greene. She does this planetary principle justice. 

This is the book for readers who wish to sample Berlin’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary work in a single volume across its whole range. It includes his most celebrated essays in philosophy, political theory, the history of ideas, and twentieth-century portraiture. His two most famous pieces, The Hedgehog and the Fox (on Tolstoy’s view of history) and Two Concepts of Liberty (on ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ political freedom), are here, as are his accounts of his formative meetings with the great Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, his impressions of Churchill and Roosevelt, and his pellucid accounts of romanticism and nationalism. The essays are linked by his ruling preoccupation with understanding human nature in all its irreducibly various guises: what he called, following Kant, ‘the crooked timber of humanity’.

We appreciate this book because it helped us to introduce the concept of a ‘hierarchical category,’ which is necessary to describe our MES. We accomplished this by translating Koestler's concept of a "hierarchy of holons," where a holon embodies a 'hybrid nature' akin to a two-faced Janus.

Technically, a hierarchical category organizes objects into numbered levels (0 to m). An object at level n is dual-faced: 'simple' compared to levels above n, but 'complex' compared to levels < n, this object being the "colimit" (or combination) of linked objects < n. Within a hierarchical category, we compute the 'complexity order' for each object. The category aligns with pure reductionism if it lacks objects with a complexity order greater than 1.

This is the most readable philosophy book I know. Nietzsche wrote it in his brilliantly witty, epigrammatic style. Each episode is about a page long.

Concentrate on "Book Four." There, Nietzsche famously tells us that God is dead. Find out what he really means. (We criticize everything and can feel no true reverence.) Consequently, we seek convenience and flexibility over and over again. Stunningly, Nietzsche sets out four contrarian, incompatible good lives. (Philosophers have always sought to define one good life.)

If you read nothing else, read epigrams 290, 295, and 303: "The life of constant revision to perfect a style," "The life of short stories," "The life of brilliant improvisation," and "The risk-taking life." I use Nietzsche’s model of good lives to help business leaders restore their businesses and themselves.

I believe an understanding of how human society evolved into its current state is a key ingredient in the search for ways to influence its future. Desmond Morris provides an insightful foundation for this by analyzing the human-animal from a Zoologist’s viewpoint. He traces our evolution from a small insect-eating forest dweller to a fruit and nut-eating ape to a predominantly carnivorous hunting ape.

This last major transition most interests me because it explains the significant biological and cultural changes needed to compete with established carnivores. This includes lengthened brain development, communication, male/female bonding, social organization, and territorial protection. While this transition introduced major differences between humans and other primates, the inertia of evolution over millions of years still impacts our behavior.