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The Man Who Knew Too Much
- Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
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Publisher's summary
A '"skillful, literate'" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer.
To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.
With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity - his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor - and elegantly explains his work and its implications.
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In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records.
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Discovery and Translation of Linear B Script
- By Sires on 01-11-14
By: Margalit Fox
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Is God a Mathematician?
- By: Mario Livio
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ancient times to the present, scientists and philosophers have marveled at how such a seemingly abstract discipline could so perfectly explain the natural world. More than that - mathematics has often made predictions, for example, about subatomic particles or cosmic phenomena that were unknown at the time, but later were proven to be true.
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Origins of Mathematics
- By Rick B on 07-08-21
By: Mario Livio
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Uncertainty
- Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science
- By: David Lindley
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" challenged centuries of scientific understanding, placed him in direct opposition to Albert Einstein, and put Niels Bohr in the middle of one of the most heated debates in scientific history. Heisenberg's theorem stated that there were physical limits to what we could know about sub-atomic particles; this "uncertainty" would have shocking implications.
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fascinating insight into the real drama of physics
- By Ryan on 09-07-10
By: David Lindley
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Undeniable
- How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed
- By: Douglas Axe
- Narrated by: Neil Hellegers
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the "design intuition" - the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.
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Seductively Challenge what are consider facts
- By Rafael Vila on 10-08-16
By: Douglas Axe
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The Metaphysical Club
- By: Louis Menand
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid (part history, part biography, part philosophy) consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months.
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The Great American Experiment
- By Victoria on 12-08-03
By: Louis Menand
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What Is Real?
- The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics
- By: Adam Becker
- Narrated by: Greg Tremblay
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
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Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, Copenhagen endured, as Bohr's students vigorously protected his legacy, and the physics community favored practical experiments over philosophical arguments.
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Good, "light" "read"... potential caveat below...
- By James S. on 03-31-18
By: Adam Becker
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The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
- The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
- By: Richard P. Feynman
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard P. Feynman, from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science - a life like no other. From his ruminations on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will delight anyone interested in the world of ideas.
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Interesting, but material is covered in better book.
- By Erlend on 04-06-16
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The Invention of Science
- A New History of the Scientific Revolution
- By: David Wootton
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 22 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history. The Invention of Science goes back 500 years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently.
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A Good Read Spoiled
- By David A. Donnelly on 12-23-16
By: David Wootton
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The Book of Why
- The New Science of Cause and Effect
- By: Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
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"Correlation does not imply causation". This mantra has been invoked by scientists for decades and has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed causality - the study of cause and effect - on a firm scientific basis.
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Great book! Not a great audiobook.
- By rrwright on 05-30-18
By: Judea Pearl, and others
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The Landscape of History
- How Historians Map the Past
- By: John Lewis Gaddis
- Narrated by: Jack Chekijian
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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What is history, and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today.
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Excellent Book!
- By Billy on 09-15-18
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What listeners say about The Man Who Knew Too Much
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- Ryan Brooks
- 06-16-23
Coming to age in Mathematics and being gay
If you know anyone into mathematics or computers and is homosexual, you might say your nerdy friend but it goes deeper than just this concept... I highly suggest they learn about Alan Turing and his actual story. I feel if I read this book when I was in high school or early college, I would have learned so much about myself earlier. David Leavitt is an amazing author and Richard Powers narration has just enough flair to keep all the 1s and 0s from putting me asleep.
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- CP
- 09-11-15
good book
very educational. Glossed through a lot at end if his life, but his contribution was interesting
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- Dan Fritze
- 04-01-22
terrible book I'd like to return it
Gobaly goop. I couldn't finish it. if you like listening to incomprehensible streams of numbers...
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- Rush D. Austin
- 07-17-14
First Audible Book I Returned
Any additional comments?
Professional programmer since 1999 and I had very high hopes for this book. Could not abide the long passages where the narrator was saying, "..zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine.." to describe the mathematical logic.
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9 people found this helpful