I read this book in college and it helped change my life, showing me the glories of science in a historical perspective.
Beautifully illustrated and written, the book inspired me to appreciate the history of marvelous discoveries—from tools, fire, agriculture, metal, numbers, mathematics, writing and printing to astronomy, biology, and electronics—that advanced humans, making us the preeminent species on earth.
A classic book on how scientific revolutions occur—how, over thousands of years, the world moved from thinking that the sun revolved around the earth to realizing that the earth in fact rotated around the sun.
Theologians and many others aggressively fought this idea, and some scientists struggled to devise fanciful explanations to try to fit the data. Yet Copernicus, Galileo, and a few others bravely pursued the truth, undergoing arrest, excommunication, and death, and ultimately won.
This book taught me how scientific truths can encounter stiff opposition and battles, but ultimately triumph.
A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were-and still are. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. And fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn challenged long-standing…
Thomas captured the beauty and mystery of nature and science—how billions of cells in our body work intricately together to form tissues and organs that make us breathe, move, see, think, and fight infections, and how the world itself is analogous to one big cell.
I was amazed to understand the extraordinary complexities of Nature—how ants plan, communicate, and build farms, how our noses smell, how our eyes see and communicate to our brains, and how we hear and appreciate music.
Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good…
Vivid short histories about adventures and discoveries in microbiology.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and his close friend, the painter Johannes Vermeer, for instance, both used lenses—Vermeer in his painting and Leeuwenhoek in inventing the microscope and soon discovering blood cells, muscle fibers, sperm, and structures within human cells, as well as amoeba and protozoa—life forms no one knew existed that affect our lives.
“It manages to delight, and frequently to entrance, old and new readers [and] continues to engage our hearts and minds today with an indescribably brand of affectionate sympathy.”—F. Gonzalez-Crussi, from the Introduction
An international bestseller, translated into eighteen languages, Paul de Kruif’s classic account of the first scientists to see and learn about the microscopic world continues to fascinate new readers. This is a timeless dramatization of the scientists, bacteriologists, doctors, and medical technicians who discovered the microbes and invented the vaccines to counter them. De Kruif writes about how seemingly simple but really fundamental discovers of science—for instance, how…
Over many years, Martin Gardner authored a column on popular mathematics for Scientific American and a series of popular books. His writings also helped change my life, showing me how exciting and marvelous mathematics can be.
He illuminated how mathematics underlies nature—from the patterns and shapes of petals and leaves to the weather—and much of our daily lives. He illustrated how geodesic and other domes stand up without support structures in the middle, how past and secret military codes work, and how simple paper cutouts can have seemingly magical properties and reveal paradoxes.
Paradoxes and paper-folding, Moebius variations and mnemonics, fallacies, magic squares, topological curiosities, parlor tricks, and games ancient and modern, from Polyominoes, Nim, Hex, and the Tower of Hanoi to four-dimensional ticktacktoe. These mathematical recreations, clearly and cleverly presented by Martin Gardner, delight and perplex while demonstrating principles of logic, probability, geometry, and other fields of mathematics. Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes, and the Tower of Hanoi is the inaugural volume in Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Library. This book of the earliest of Gardner's enormously popular Scientific American columns and puzzles continues to challenge and fascinate readers. Now the author, in consultation with…
