Engineering Physics

Since 2001, James Kakalios has taught "Everything I Needed to Know About Physics I Learned from Reading Comic Books", a hugely popular university course that generated coast-to-coast media attention for its unique method of explaining complex physics concepts through comics. With The Physics of Superheroes, named one of the best science books of 2005 by Discover, he introduced his colorful approach to an even wider audience. Now Kakalios presents a totally updated, expanded edition that features even more superheroes and findings from the cutting edge of science.

Did NASA really spend millions creating a pen that would write in space? Is chocolate poisonous to dogs? Does stress cause gray hair? These questions are a sample of the urban lore investigated in this audiobook, Fact or Fiction: Science Tackles 58 Popular Myths. Drawing from Scientific American’s “Fact or Fiction” and “Strange But True” columns, we’ve selected 58 of the most surprising, fascinating, useful, and just plain wacky topics confronted by our writers over the years.

Escucha ahora la biografía definitiva de Albert Einstein, uno de los iconos del siglo XX y su mayor genio.

In 1695, Isaac Newton already renowned as the greatest mind of his agemade a surprising career change. He left quiet Cambridge, where he had lived for 30 years and made his earth-shattering discoveries, and moved to London to take up the post of Warden of His Majestys Mint. Newton was preceded to the city by a genius of another kind, the budding criminal William Chaloner.

Une histoire des notions d'espace et de temps. Des visions du cosmos dans la Grèce ancienne aux théories récentes sur la gravité quantique, Carlo Rovelli explore les métamorphoses de la notion d'espace et de temps. Une approche lumineuse de l'histoire des sciences par le biais de ces " coordonnées fondamentales de notre description du monde ". L'espace et le temps dans la physique contemporaine.

Neuroscientists have painstakingly built up an understanding of the structure of the brain. Could this help physicists understand the levels of self-organization they observe in other systems? These same physicists, meanwhile, are trying to explain how particles organize themselves into the objects around us. Could their discoveries help explain how neurons produce our conscious experience? Exploring these questions and more, George Musser tackles the extraordinary interconnections between quantum mechanics, cosmology, human consciousness, and artificial intelligence.

Lighthearted, quirky, and upbeat, this book explores the portrayal of science and technology on both the big and little screen - and how Hollywood is actually doing a better job of getting it right than ever before. Grounded in the real-word, and often cutting-edge, science and technology that inspires fictional science, the authors survey Hollywood depictions of topics such as quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and alien worlds.

For centuries, electricity was seen as little more than a curious property of certain substances that sparked when rubbed. Then, in the 1790s, Alessandro Volta began the scientific investigation that ignited an explosion of knowledge and invention. The force that once seemed inconsequential was revealed to be responsible for everything from the structure of the atom to the functioning of our brains. In harnessing its power, we have created a world of wonders—complete with roller coasters and radar, computer networks and psychopharmaceuticals.

As we navigate through life we instinctively model time as having a flowing present that divides a fixed past from open future. This model develops in childhood and is deeply saturated within our language, thought, and behavior, affecting our conceptions of the universe, freedom, and the self. Yet as central as it is to our lives, physics seems to have no room for this flowing present. What Makes Time Special? demonstrates this claim in detail and then turns to two novel positive tasks.

Stephen W. Hawking's Cambridge lectures, exploring the most complex theories of physics, both past and present, remain the most important scientific theories known of time, space, and the nature of the cosmos. This 30th Anniversary remastered edition of The Cambridge Lectures offers listeners a unique opportunity to hear the full series of seven famed lectures exactly as Professor Hawking presented them during his tenure as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.

This book is about science and how it works. It is about what it means for a paradigm to shift and what it really takes to shift it. And it is about the strange and unusual world of quantum physics and what it tells us about who we are. At the start of the 20th Century, a dramatic revolution in science occurred. Over the course of a few decades our most fundamental notions of time, space and consciousness were all being called into question. In undeniable ways, it became clear that the nature of reality is intimately interwoven with our experience of it.

Following the discovery of the Higgs boson, Frank Close has produced this major revision to his classic and compelling introduction to the fundamental particles that make up the universe. Frank Close takes us on a journey into the atom to examine known particles such as quarks, electrons, and the ghostly neutrino, and explains the key role and significance of the Higgs boson. Along the way he provides fascinating insights into how discoveries in particle physics have actually been made, and discusses how our picture of the world has been radically revised in the light of these developments.

Flash crashes. Speed dating. Instant messaging. From the devices we carry to the lives we lead, everything is getting faster, faster. But where did this great acceleration come from? And where will it lead? In this vitally important new audiobook, Robert Colvile explains how the cult of disruption in Silicon Valley, the ceaseless advance of technology and our own fundamental appetite for novelty and convenience have combined to speed up every aspect of daily life.

Since the 1950s, scientists have attempted to harness nuclear fusion—the process that creates the Sun's energy—to generate near-limitless amounts of electricity. But the fact that we still have no fusion power plants is testament to the complexities of the challenge. Now, the deepening climate crisis means that researchers around the world are in a race to create a mini-Sun here on Earth. The glittering prize is an energy source that emits no greenhouse gases and could solve energy equity and supply issues at a stroke.

Knowledge of the basic ideas and principles of science is fundamental to cultural literacy. But most books on science are often too obscure or too specialized to do the general listener much good.

What is the nature of the material world? How does it work? What is the universe and how was it formed? What is life? Where do we come from and how did we evolve? How and why do we think? What does it mean to be human? How do we know? There are many different versions of our creation story. This book tells the version according to modern science. It is a unique account, starting at the Big Bang and travelling right up to the emergence of humans as conscious intelligent beings, 13.8 billion years later.

"See for yourself!" was the clarion call of the 1600s. Natural philosophers threw off the yoke of ancient authority, peered at nature with microscopes and telescopes, and ignited the scientific revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses and created paintings filled with realistic effects of light and shadow. The hub of this optical innovation was the small Dutch city of Delft.

Condensed matter physics is what happens when atoms cluster together to make something of a size we can understand—something like a car, say, rather than a galaxy. It's what makes things hover in mid-air or crystals glow (thermoluminescence). It's also what we mean by magick. Join Felix Flicker on an empirical adventure in condensed matter physics, the scientific mechanism behind the mysteries of alchemy, transmogrification, and much more. This is the one-stop guide on how to harness the enigmatic workings of the natural world to become a thoroughly modern wizard.

The discovery of the quantum - the idea, born in the early 1900s in a remote corner of physics, that energy comes in finite packets instead of infinitely divisible quantities - planted a rich set of metaphors in the popular imagination. Quantum imagery and language now bombard us like an endless stream of photons. Phrases such as multiverse, quantum leap, alternate universe, the uncertainty principle, and Schrödinger's cat get reinvented continually in cartoons and movies, coffee mugs and T-shirts, and fiction and philosophy.

Un homme qui a profondément changé notre vision du monde S'il est quelqu'un que l'on peut qualifier de génie, c'est certainement Einstein. Il a façonné la physique du XXème siècle. Non seulement ses découvertes ont permis l'avènement de notre univers technologique (électronique, laser, énergie nucléaire, etc.), mais surtout, il a profondément modifié notre conception du monde. Il y a un avant Einstein et un après Einstein qui se prolonge aujourd'hui puisque ses théories n'ont pas, pour l'essentiel, été démenties. Inventeur des deux grandes théories du XXe : relativité et théorie quantique.