Books: Science

If one person can change the world, four might do 16 times as much.The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World by Laura J. Snyder (Broadway, 2011) is the story of Charles Babbage, William Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones. They met at Cambridge about 1810. By 1860, through their... (See the whole review)

Intended for children, The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way by Joy Hakim as many small problems throughout but remains valuable for its sense of life. The author encourages understanding, exploration, discovery, and the integration of knowledge. You can find it remaindered online at prices low enough to gift an entire class of 5th graders,... (See the whole review)

For decades, Dr. Randell Mills has flummoxed both supporters and detractors with his dogged determination not only to prove the existence of a new state of hydrogen, the hydrino, but also to harness its power for the betterment of the human condition. I have followed the hydrino story since initially encountering it in a Mensa Bulletin letter in th... (See the whole review)

Death is Wrong is my new children’s book on indefinite life extension, illustrated by my wife Wendy Stolyarov. It combines child-friendly philosophical arguments for radically lengthening human lifespans with scientific facts about long-lived creatures, recent breakthroughs in extending animal lifespans, and the SENS research program for reve... (See the whole review)

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The human race may not survive the agricultural revolution.    “This book is not just about agriculture,” Manning writes, “but about the fundamental dehumanization that occurred with agriculture.”  ... (See the whole review)

This is the true story of a man’s heroic struggle against monumental difficulties, a man whose motto throughout life was “crashing through,” who, at the age of 46, faced his greatest challenge: to acquire sight, and learn to see, after having been blind since the age of three as the result of an accident. ... (See the whole review)

Here's a book allegedly about junk science, and it devotes an entire chapter on the "myth" that free market medicine (as in the US) is better than socialized medicine.  Evidently "science" proves that socialized medicine is actually better.  By what standard, you ask?  Not to fear.  He starts with the assumption that universal healthcare and equali... (See the whole review)

The Standard Model has a surprisingly low profile for such a fundamental and successful theory.... In physics news items, the Standard Model usually plays the whipping boy. Reports of successful experimental tests of the theory have an air of disappointment, and every hint of the theory's inadequacy is greeted with glee. It is the Rodney Dangerfiel... (See the whole review)

A humorous take by the creator of "THE FAR SIDE" on the consequences of environmentalism.

An interesting exposé on the enormous importance and unthought-of benefits that would come with an economy driven by hydrogen power instead of fossil fuels. The Hydrogen Economy begins with an explanation of how hydrogen can be plentifully derived from water, using natural energy sources such as wind and solar energy to drive the electrolysi... (See the whole review)

What does mathematics mean? Is it numbers or arithmetic, proofs or equations? ... (See the whole review)

Not a day goes by that most of us aren't presented with a graph, or a chart, or a poll by either a politician, a salesman or a newscaster - these all purport to tell us one thing, but on closer inspection many turn out to do nothing of the sort. Too high a proportion of too many of these glossy presentations don't really say what they purport to sa... (See the whole review)

Standard quantum mechanics offers some widely accepted "primacy of consciousness" interpretations at odds with Objectivism. By contrast, this book of "classical quantum mechanics" attempts to explain experimental observations using a "primacy of existence" premise. In late 1999, I wrote an article for The Daily Objectivist about this book and its... (See the whole review)

A perspective on the science of cosmology that I found to be interesting from the viewpoint of Objectivism. The scientific content of the book consists of a discussion of the flaws in the Big Bang Theory (some of which may be dated, since this was published in 1991) and a presentation of an alternative theory based on the physics of plasma. But t... (See the whole review)

Quantum mechanics is the most fundamental and important theory known to man.  It underpins modern science and technology and even provides us with a blueprint for reality itself.  And yet it has been said that if you are not shocked by it, you quite clearly don't understand it.  But is quantum physics really so unknowable?  Is reality really so str... (See the whole review)

Modern agriculture and food-preservation methods have done serious damage to the human diet. The detrimental effects on the human body caused by acidic wastes from processed food and chemical additives are myriad. Byproducts of the foods we eat, acidic wastes are the common denominator in all degenerative diseases. When acidic wastes accumulate, th... (See the whole review)

Few physicians talk about the clinical use of touch, and few medical schools teach it specifically, even though touch is a unique tool for diagnosis and therapeutic applications, as well as a means of communicating a caring attitude. In the poem "Line Drive," by Allen Ginsberg, the physician realizes that he "forgot to touch or be touched" while gi... (See the whole review)

At last! This is the book every AIDS-watcher has been awaiting, in which the most prominent and persistent critic of HIV as the cause of AIDS presents his case most exhaustively and popularly. Duesberg, himself a virologist, stoutly maintains that HIV cannot cause AIDS because it fails to meet the rules by which a virus is implicated as disease-cau... (See the whole review)

While the jury may yet be out on the empirical benefits of Barefoot's coral calcium, this book yields an enormous wealth of incredibly distilled and concentrated human biochemistry information... things that the mainstream medical industry definitely does not want you to know. ... (See the whole review)

In his provocative new book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil, who Forbes Magazine calls "the ultimate thinking machine," takes readers on an breathtaking tour of the history of computation and artificial intelligence and makes startling predictions for the future of technology, such as: * 2010: A translating telephone will allow you to s... (See the whole review)

Why don't zebras get ulcers--or heart disease, diabetes and other chronic diseases--when people do? In a fascinating look at the science of stress, biologist Robert Sapolsky presents an intriguing case, that people develop such diseases partly because our bodies aren't designed for the constant stresses of a modern-day life--like sitting in daily t... (See the whole review)

(This book is not what you think)  Founder of Lionheart Books, Reagan has produced the ideal smaller coffee-table book for the 21st century. The Hand of God combines dozens of dazzling images of starscapes and far planets captured by the Hubble telescope with reflections on the self, the stars, and the universe, from writers as various as Oscar Wil... (See the whole review)

Subtitled The Science Lover's Illustrated Guide to How Life Grows, Develops, Reproduces, and Gets Along, The Way Life Works is what happens when a biologist and artist share an interest in life from bacteria to humans, and collaborate on taking their knowledge public. The result is a most magnificent science book, devoted to the wonder and unity of... (See the whole review)

Meditative and yet authoritative, The Philosophical Programmer celebrates the creative possibilities of programming while reminding the reader of technology's ethical conundrums. Daniel Kohanski keeps this slim volume rooted in valid examples, providing a rich exploration of the thought process involved in machine code. He treats programming as a l... (See the whole review)

Evolution, Biology, Philosophy and more. Dense but well written.

In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, "The Language Instinct". He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.... (See the whole review)

Carl Sagan muses on the current state of scientific thought, which offers him marvelous opportunities to entertain us with his own childhood experiences, the newspaper morgues, UFO stories, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of pseudoscience. Along the way he debunks alien abduction, faith-healing, and channeling; refutes the arguments that scienc... (See the whole review)

Our conceptions of human nature affect every aspect of our lives, from child-rearing to politics to morality to the arts. Yet many fear that scientific discoveries about innate patterns of thinking and feeling may be used to justify inequality, to subvert social change, and to dissolve personal responsibility. In "The Blank Slate", Steven P... (See the whole review)

From the Back Cover "An original work of synthesis...a program of unrivalled ambition: to unify all the major branches of knowledge--sociology, economics, the arts and religion--under the banner of science." --The New York Times "As elegant in its prose as it is rich in its ideas...a book of immense importance." --Atlanta Journal & C... (See the whole review)