General Books

Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel

Michio Kaku

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A fascinating exploration of the science of the impossible—from death rays and force fields to invisibility cloaks—revealing to what extent such technologies might be achievable decades or millennia into the future.

One hundred years ago, scientists would have said that lasers, televisions, and the atomic bomb were beyond the realm of physical possibility. In Physics of the Impossible, the renowned physicist Michio Kaku explores to what extent the technologies and devices of science fiction that are deemed equally impossible today might well become commonplace in the future.

From teleportation to telekinesis, Kaku uses the world of science fiction to explore the fundamentals—and the limits—of the laws of physics as we know them today. He ranks the impossible technologies by categories—Class I, II, and III, depending on when they might be achieved, within the next century, millennia, or perhaps never. In a compelling and thought-provoking narrative, he explains:
· How the science of optics and electromagnetism may one day enable us to bend light around an object, like a stream flowing around a boulder, making the object invisible to observers “downstream”
· How ramjet rockets, laser sails, antimatter engines, and nanorockets may one day take us to the nearby stars
· How telepathy and psychokinesis, once considered pseudoscience, may one day be possible using advances in MRI, computers, superconductivity, and nanotechnology
· Why a time machine is apparently consistent with the known laws of quantum physics, although it would take an unbelievably advanced civilization to actually build one
Kaku uses his discussion of each technology as a jumping-off point to explain the science behind it. An extraordinary scientific adventure, Physics of the Impossible takes readers on an unforgettable, mesmerizing journey into the world of science that both enlightens and entertains.

Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

Brian Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 505 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Don't know if its the subject matter or Greene... 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

...but this stuff is good. Greene goes a little overboard with the analogies, but it's almost necessary to do so with such technical material (at least when it's obvious his target reader is someone with little collegiate-level training in physics). I personally love anything that attempts to explain our physical world, and Greene does just that in a very original and sincere way. String theory is a hard concept to grasp -and quantum mechanics is even harder, but after reading this book two times through, the information really begins to sink in. Most people are simply unaware of the possibility of additional dimensions, or at least, are aware of them but believe they only exist in science fiction. I can't wait for technology to catch up to the claims these scientists are making. I advise anyone to read this book. Good intro to the subjects.

Editorial Review:

In a rare blend of scientific insight and writing as elegant as the theories it explains, Brian Greene, one of the world's leading string theorists, peels away the layers of mystery surrounding string theory to reveal a universe that consists of eleven dimensions where all matter is generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy. Greene uses everything from an amusement park ride to ants on a garden hose to explain the beautiful yet bizarre realities that modern physics is unveiling. Dazzling in its brilliance, unprecedented in its ability to both illuminate and entertain, The Elegant Universe is a tour de force of scientific writing - a delightful, lucid voyage through modern physics that brings us closer to understanding how the universe works.

The Field Updated Ed: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe

Lynne Mctaggart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 125 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Not what I expected 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Being an Osteopath I thought it might have been a book on how one might be able to perceive the field. Unfortunately it is more about evidence for the field which is more theoretical than I had hoped for.

Editorial Review:

Science has recently begun to prove what ancient myth and religion have always espoused: There may be such a thing as a life force.

In this groundbreaking classic, investigative journalist Lynne McTaggart reveals a radical new paradigm—that the human mind and body are not separate from their environment but a packet of pulsating power constantly interacting with this vast energy sea, and that consciousness may be central in shaping our world.

The Field is a highly readable scientific detective story presenting a stunning picture of an interconnected universe and a new scientific theory that makes sense of supernatural phenomena. Documented by distinguished sources, The Field is a book of hope and inspiration for today's world.

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking

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Total reviews: 352 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

unintelligible 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

History will look back at this best selling book and here is what it should say: This book is very lucid to those who have not read it, but it is quite unintelligible to those who have. Buy this book, it doesn't cost that much, to see how a supposedly great scientist cannot put together a coherent thought on paper. It you want to read clear scientific writing, read Lev Landau and then compare to this tripe by Hawking.

Editorial Review:

A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, was a landmark volume in science writing and in world-wide acclaim and popularity, with more than 9 million copies in print globally. The original edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the ensuing years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro—and the macrocosmic world—observations that have confirmed many of Hawking's theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book.

Now a decade later, this edition updates the chapters throughout to document those advances, and also includes an entirely new chapter on Wormholes and Time Travel and a new introduction. It make vividly clear why A Brief History of Time has transformed our view of the universe.

A Briefer History of Time

Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From One of the Most Brilliant Minds of Our Time
Comes a Book that Clarifies His Most Important Ideas

Stephen Hawking’s worldwide bestseller, A Brief History of Time, remains one of the landmark volumes in scientific writing of our time. But for years readers have asked for a more accessible formulation of its key concepts—the nature of space and time, the role of God in creation, and the history and future of the universe.

Professor Hawking’s response is this new work that will guide nonscientists everywhere in the ongoing search for the tantalizing secrets at the heart of time and space.…

Although “briefer,” this book is much more than a mere explanation of Hawking’s earlier work. A Briefer History of Time both clarifies and expands on the great subjects of the original, and records the latest developments in the field—from string theory to the search for a unified theory of all the forces of physics. Thirty-seven full-color illustrations enhance the text and make A Briefer History of Time an exhilarating and must-have addition in its own right to the great literature of science and ideas.

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

Brian Greene

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 210 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

"The Entropic Arrow Of Time Is Double-Headed." 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

My educational background is largely in biology and chemistry, but I have always found physics the most intriguing of the sciences. I have studied and read a lot of physics books over the years, and having seen Brian Greene discuss some of the more confusing of the subjects in this book on television, was immediately convinced that I must read "The Fabric of the Cosmos". I truly applaud Greene's effort to produce such a comprehensive, up to date, and comprehensible book with no mathematics to speak of.

The book is largely a success, and covers the history of physics and physical thought, and brings the reader all the way through a groundbreaking explanation of string theory and M-theory. The book is quite well written and is generally easy to follow. I appreciated especially his explanations of the conflicts between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the potential that string theory has in regards to a unified theory. I was somewhat unconvinced by his arguments about the symmetry of entropy in spacetime, though to be fair, I am unconvinced by some of Boltzmann's thinking on the issue, which is the ultimate origin of the philosophical predicament. Regardless of this and similar minor issues, I think most discussions are quite lucid and relatively logical and easy to follow.

The book falls down in a couple of ways: though relatively easy to read, it is extremely long. I have no problems with a lengthy tome, but this book sometimes labors under myriad examples and analogies which become redundant and very monotonous to read. Perhaps, for instance, the seemingly endless discussion of Newton's spinning bucket of water warranted a couple of pages, but here it just went on and on. The book could have been equally lucid and grasped just as well with many fewer extended analogies. It's obvious that Mr. Greene loves certain shows on television, as seemingly endless references to "The Simpsons" and "The X-Files" are common throughout the book. I hated this cutesy touch.

I happen to like math, but its absence here is wise as the book would obviously reach far fewer people if mathematical reasoning was added to the already cumbersomely long text. I did very much appreciate the notes in the back of the book which were very useful and delved somewhat deeper into subjects discussed in the text. On balance I recommend the book to people who want a basic introduction to historical and current physical thought, and who don't mind a degree of redundancy in the text.

Editorial Review:

From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists and author the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.

Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.

A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations

Daniel Fleisch

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

For me this book is a great review. I took advantage of both the pod casts and problem solutions. I prefer this authors notations to many of the other EM texts I have read.

Editorial Review:

Gauss's law for electric fields, Gauss's law for magnetic fields, Faraday's law, and the Ampere-Maxwell law are four of the most influential equations in science. In this guide for students, each equation is the subject of an entire chapter, with detailed, plain-language explanations of the physical meaning of each symbol in the equation, for both the integral and differential forms. The final chapter shows how Maxwell's equations may be combined to produce the wave equation, the basis for the electromagnetic theory of light. This book is a wonderful resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in electromagnetism and electromagnetics. A website hosted by the author at www.cambridge.org/9780521701471 contains interactive solutions to every problem in the text as well as audio podcasts to walk students through each chapter.

Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines

Richard A. Muller

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Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Learn the science behind the headlines—the tools of terrorists, the dangers of nuclear power, and the reality of global warming.

We live in complicated, dangerous times. They are also hyper-technical times. As citizens who will elect future presidents of the most powerful and influential country in the world, we need to know—truly understand, not just rely on television's talking heads—if Iran's nascent nuclear capability is a genuine threat to the West, if biochemical weapons are likely to be developed by terrorists, if there are viable alternatives to fossil fuels that should be nurtured and supported by the government, if nuclear power should be encouraged, and if global warming is actually happening. This book is written in everyday, nontechnical language on the science behind the concerns that our nation faces in the immediate future. Even active readers of serious journalism will be surprised by the lessons that the book contains. It is "must-have" information for all presidents—and citizens—of the twenty-first century. 50 illustrations.

Four Laws That Drive the Universe

Peter Atkins

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The laws of thermodynamics drive everything that happens in the universe. From the sudden expansion of a cloud of gas to the cooling of hot metal, and from the unfurling of a leaf to the course of life itself--everything is moved or restrained by four simple laws. They establish fundamental concepts such as temperature and heat, and reveal the arrow of time and even the nature of energy itself.
Written by Peter Atkins, one of the worlds leading authorities on thermodynamics, this powerful and compact introduction explains what these four laws are and how they work, using accessible language and virtually no mathematics. Guiding the reader a step at a time, Atkins begins with Zeroth (so named because the first two laws were well established before scientists realized that a third law, relating to temperature, should precede them--hence the jocular name zeroth), and proceeds through the First, Second, and Third Laws, offering a clear account of concepts such as the availability of work and the conservation of energy. Atkins ranges from the fascinating theory of entropy (revealing how its unstoppable rise constitutes the engine of the universe), through the concept of free energy, and to the brink, and then beyond the brink, of absolute zero.
C.P. Snow once remarked that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is like never having read a work by Shakespeare. This brief but brilliant book introduces general readers to one of the cornerstones of modern science, four laws that are as integral to the well-educated mind as such great dramatic works as Hamlet or Macbeth.

The Holographic Universe

Michael Talbot

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 223 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I SO GET THIS BOOK 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed the book so much I am on my second reading of the book. This book explains Quantum Physics better for me than dance of the wu-li masters.
I am a Buddhist and most of everything in this book rings true to the Buddhist view of life. Someone needs to take this material and make a documentary out of it. thanks F. White-Poe

Editorial Review:

Today nearly everyone is familiar with holograms, three-dimensional images projected into space with the aid of a laser. Now, two of the world's most eminent thinkers -- University of London physicists David Bohm, a former protege of Einstein's and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, one of the architects of our modern understanding of the brain -- believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. This remarkable new way of looking at the universe explains now only many of the unsolved puzzles of physics, but also such mysterious occurrences as telepathy, out-of-body and near death experiences, "lucid" dreams, and even religious and mystical experiences such as feelings of cosmic unity and miraculous healings.