Showing titles in History

Over the last 220 years, society has evolved a universal belief that electricity is "safe" for humanity and the planet. Scientist and journalist Arthur Firstenberg disrupts this conviction by telling the story of electricity in a way it has never been told before - from an environmental point of view - by detailing the effects that this fundamental societal building block has had on our health and our planet.

Few recognize how the Great War, the industrialized slaughter that bled Europe from 1914 to 1918, shaped Einstein’s life and work. While Einstein never held a rifle, he formulated general relativity blockaded in Berlin, literally starving. He lost 50 pounds in three months, unable to communicate with his most important colleagues. Some of those colleagues fought against rabid nationalism; others were busy inventing chemical warfare - scientists trapped in the power plays of empire. Meanwhile, Einstein struggled to craft relativity and persuade the world that it was correct.

For as long as humans have lived, we have lived beneath the stars. But under the glow of today’s artificial lighting, we have lost the intimacy our ancestors once shared with the cosmos. In Starborn, cosmologist Roberto Trotta reveals how stargazing has shaped the course of human civilization. The stars have served as our timekeepers, our navigators, our muses—they were once even our gods. How radically different would we be, Trotta also asks, if our ancestors had looked up to the night sky and seen… nothing?

"More years ago than I care to reckon up, I met Richard Feynman." So begins The Language God Talks, Herman Wouk's gem on navigating the divide between science and religion. In one rich, compact volume, Wouk draws on stories from his life as well as on key events from the 20th century to address the eternal questions of why we are here, what purpose faith serves, and how scientific fact fits into the picture.

Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.

In Zoom, Bob Berman explores how motion shapes every aspect of the universe, literally from the ground up. With an informative and entertaining style and a knack for distilling the wondrous, Berman spans astronomy, geology, biology, meteorology, and the history of science, uncovering how clouds stay aloft, how the earth's rotation curves a home run's flight, and why a mosquito's familiar whine resembles a telephone's dial tone.

Griffins, cyclopes, monsters, and giants - these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? Through careful research and meticulous documentation, Adrienne Mayor convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact - in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.

In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.

Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion - effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest?

In Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Agnes Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from its first identification in seventeenth-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illness that could, quite literally, kill you) to the present day (when it is co-opted by advertising agencies and politicians alike to sell us goods and policies).

Richard Rhodes' landmark history of the atomic bomb won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in this majestic new masterpiece of history, science, and politics, he tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made, and traces the path by which this supreme artifact of 20th-century technology became the defining issue of the Cold War.

Physics has always been engaged in the pursuit of expanding our knowledge of the nature of matter and the world around us. But how can you use experiments to further this quest? How do you measure the mass of a particle a trillion times smaller than a grain of sand? And, finally, why is all this important? In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the experiments that changed the course of history.

By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed “Gino”), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level.

Black holes. DNA. The Large Hadron Collider. Ever had that sneaking feeling that you are missing out on some truly spectacular science? You do? Well fear not, for help is at hand. Ben Miller was working on his Physics PhD at Cambridge when he accidentally became a comedian. But first love runs deep, and he has returned to his roots, to share with you all his favourite bits of science. This is the stuff that you really need to know, not only because it matters, but because it will quite simply amaze and delight you.

Salk became a cultural hero and icon for a whole generation. Now, at the fiftieth anniversary of the first national vaccination program, and as humanity is tantalizingly close to eradicating polio worldwide, comes this unforgettable chronicle. Salk's work was an unparalleled achievement, and it makes for a magnificent listen.

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.

Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments―experiments that can only be done in the imagination―and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed forward the frontiers of science and technology.

The remarkable stories of the world's most famous body parts. All too often, historical figures feel distant and abstract; more myth and legend than real flesh and blood. These stories of bodies and its parts remind us that history's most-loved, and most-hated, were real breathing creatures who inhabited organs and limbs just like us - until they're cut off that is. Medical historian Dr Suzie Edge investigates over 40 cases of how we've used, abused, dug up, displayed, experimented on, and worshipped body parts.

If the United States couldn’t catch up to the Soviets in space, how could it compete with them on Earth? That was the question facing John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War. On February 20, 1962, when John Glenn blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7, his mission was not only to circle the planet; it was to calm the fears of the free world and renew America’s sense of self-belief. Mercury Rising recreates the tension and excitement of a flight that shifted the momentum of the space race and put the United States on the path to the moon.

Author Jim Holt explores the greatest metaphysical mystery of all: why is there something rather than nothing? This runaway best seller, which has captured the imagination of critics and the public alike, traces our latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. Holt adopts the role of cosmological detective, traveling the globe to interview a host of celebrated scientists, philosophers, and writers.