James Gleick Libri

Richard Feynman was the most brilliant and influential physicist of our time. Architect of quantum theories, enfant terrible of the atomic bomb project, caustic inquisitor on the space shuttle commission, ebulent bongo-player and storyteller - Feynman played a bewildering assortment of roles in the science of the post-war era. A brilliant interweaving of Richard Feynman's colourful life and a detailed and accessible account of his theories and experiments.

From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon.

The author describes how scientists studying the growth of complexity in nature are discovering order and pattern in chaos. He explains concepts such as nonlinearity, the Butterfly Effect, universal constants, fractals, and strange attractors, and examines the work of scientists such as Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, Edward Lorenz, and Benoit Mandelbrot

Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, and with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey amongst others, this is a remarkable volume celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society.On a damp weeknight in November, 350 years ago, a dozen or so men gathered at Gresham College in London. A twenty-eight year old — and not widely famous — Christopher Wren was giving a lecture on astronomy. As his audience listened to him speak, they decided that it would be a good idea to create a Society to promote the accumulation of useful knowledge.With that, the Royal Society was born. Since its birth, the Royal Society has pioneered scientific exploration and discovery. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, Alexander Fleming — all were fellows.Bill Bryson’s favourite fellow was Reverend Thomas Bayes, a brilliant mathematician who devised Bayes’ theorem. Its complexity meant that it had little practical use in Bayes’ own lifetime, but today his theorem is used for weather forecasting, astrophysics and stock market analysis. A milestone in mathematical history, it only exists because the Royal Society decided to preserve it — just in case. The Royal Society continues to do today what it set out to do all those years ago. Its members have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. Truly international in its outlook, it has created modern science.Seeing Further celebrates its momentous history and achievements, bringing together the very best of science writing. Filled with illustrations of treasures from the Society’s archives, this is a unique, ground-breaking and beautiful volume, and a suitable reflection of the immense achievements of science.

Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect. During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave them names—mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes for granted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible and dared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in his generation.James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the most acclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader into Newton’s reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanations of the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies, rest, and motion. Ideas so basic to the twenty-first century we literally take them for granted.

We are quick to acknowledge that our lives have been transformed by technology over the last ten years - that virtual reality has become as permanent a fixture in our lives as material reality; but the arrival of the electronic world over the last ten years was not a single invention, nor a single event; it could not be encompassed in a single moment. The last ten years can be characterized in three ways: the speed, the hysteria and the remarkable range of devices, aspects, and larger ramifications of what happened. Everyone knows about the accelerated pace of our lives. Everyone recognizes that the clamour has become unprecedented, but as much as we have all lived through the last ten years, it is hard to grasp the extent and expanse of what has happened.

Time is the datum that rules our lives. The frenetic purpose - more than we want to admit - is to save time. Think of one of those conveniences that best conveys the most elemental feeling of power over the passing the microwave oven. In your "hurry sickness" you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice. Do you stand at the microwave for that minute and a half? Or is that long enough to make a quick call or run in the next room to finish paying a bill? If haste is the gas pedal for the pace of our lives, then multi-tasking is overdrive. This work dissects our unceasing daily struggle to squeeze as much as we can - but never enough - into the 1440 minutes of each day. Speed is the key strategy for saving time, and James Gleick shows us how in just about every area - from business cycle time to beeper medicine, from Federal Express to quick playback buttons on answering machines, from the pace of television to our growing need to do two things at once, speed has become the experience we all have in common - it, more than the message, is what connects us.

From the acclaimed author of "The Information" and "Chaos, " a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself. Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, "The Time Machine." A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture from Marcel Proust to "Doctor Who, " from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges. He explores the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future."

Pasjonująca instrukcja obsługi współczesności. Każda epoka ma swoją cechę szczególną. Żyjemy w wieku „informacji”, tak jak nasi przodkowie żyli w wieku „pary”, „żelaza” czy choćby „kamienia łupanego”. Czym właściwie jest „informacja”? Na to pytanie odpowiada znany popularyzator nauki i autor bestsellerów James Gleick. Jego najnowsza książka to rewolucyjna lektura, która pozwala zupełnie inaczej spojrzeć na współczesny świat. Informacja to podróż przez wieki sięgająca najdawniejszych czasów, kiedy każda myśl odchodziła w zapomnienie równie szybko, jak się rodziła. Gleick prowadzi czytelnika od pierwszych systemów komunikacyjnych, takich jak tam-tamy, aż do współczesności, kiedy wszyscy bezwiednie staliśmy się ekspertami od wszystkiego, a problemem nie jest brak informacji, ale jej nadmiar. Przybliża sylwetki częstokroć zapomnianych geniuszy i wizjonerów odpowiedzialnych za to, jak rozumiemy dzisiaj informację i jak się nią posługujemy. Każda informacja może zmienić Twój punkt widzenia. Ta Informacja odmieni całkowicie Twoje spojrzenie na świat.Pasjonująca instrukcja obsługi współczesności Każda epoka ma swoją cechę szczególną. Żyjemy w wieku „informacji”, tak jak nasi przodkowie żyli w wieku „pary”, „żelaza” czy choćby „kamienia łupanego”. Czym właściwie jest „informacja”? Na to pytanie odpowiada znany popularyzator nauki i autor bestsellerów James Gleick. Jego najnowsza książka to rewolucyjna lektura, która pozwala zupełnie inaczej spojrzeć na współczesny świat. Informacja to podróż przez wieki sięgająca najdawniejszych czasów, kiedy każda myśl odchodziła w zapomnienie równie szybko, jak się rodziła. Gleick prowadzi czytelnika od pierwszych systemów komunikacyjnych, takich jak tam-tamy, aż do współczesności, kiedy wszyscy bezwiednie staliśmy się ekspertami od wszystkiego, a problemem nie jest brak informacji, ale jej nadmiar. Przybliża sylwetki częstokroć zapomnianych geniuszy i wizjonerów odpowiedzialnych za to, jak rozumiemy dzisiaj informację i jak się nią posługujemy. Każda informacja może zmienić Twój punkt widzenia. Ta Informacja odmieni całkowicie Twoje spojrzenie na świat.