In this fascinating volume, today’s foremost scientistsdiscuss their own versions and visions of Einstein: how he hasinfluenced their worldviews, their ideas, their science, and theirprofessional and personal lives. These twenty-four essays are atestament to the power of scientific legacy and are essentialreading for scientist and layperson alike. Contributors include: Roger Highfield on the Einstein myth John Archibald Wheeler on his meetings with Einstein Gino C. Segrè, Lee Smolin, and Anton Zeilinger on Einstein’sdifficulties with quantum theory Leon M. Lederman on the special theory of relativity Frank J. Tipler on why Einstein should be seen as a scientificreactionary rather than a scientific revolutionary

Evolutionary science lies at the heart of a modernunderstanding of the natural world. Darwin’s theory has withstood150 years of scientific scrutiny, and today it not only explainsthe origin and design of living things, but highlights theimportance of a scientific understanding in our culture and in ourlives. Recently the movement known as “Intelligent Design” has attractedthe attention of journalists, educators, and legislators. Thescientific community is puzzled and saddened by this trend–not onlybecause it distorts modern biology, but also because it divertspeople from the truly fascinating ideas emerging from the realscience of evolution. Here, join fifteen of our preeminent thinkerswhose clear, accessible, and passionate essays reveal the fact andpower of Darwin’s theory, and the beauty of the scientific quest tounderstand our world.

The multidisciplinary field of quantum computing strives toexploit some of the uncanny aspects of quantum mechanics to expandour computational horizons. Quantum Computing for ComputerScientists takes readers on a tour of this fascinating area ofcutting-edge research. Written in an accessible yet rigorousfashion, this book employs ideas and techniques familiar to everystudent of computer science. The reader is not expected to have anyadvanced mathematics or physics background. After presenting thenecessary prerequisites, the material is organized to look atdifferent aspects of quantum computing from the specific standpointof computer science. There are chapters on computer architecture,algorithms, programming languages, theoretical computer science,cryptography, information theory, and hardware. The text hasstep-by-step examples, more than two hundred exercises withsolutions, and programming drills that bring the ideas of quantumcomputing alive for today's computer science students andresearchers.

From one of the most significant neuroscientists at worktoday, a pathbreaking investigation of a question that hasconfounded philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists forcenturies: how is consciousness created? Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying andwriting about how the brain operates, and his work has garneredacclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and thehumanistic. In Self Comes to Mind, he goes against thelong-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from thebody, presenting compelling new scientific evidence thatconsciousness—what we think of as a mind with a self—is to beginwith a biological process created by a living organism. Besides thethree traditional perspectives used to study the mind (theintrospective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasiointroduces an evolutionary perspective that entails a radicalchange in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed andtold. He also advances a radical hypothesis regarding the o

Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spendtwenty years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos studyingnatural selection. They recognize each individual bird on theisland, when there are four hundred at the time of the author'svisit, or when there are over a thousand. They have observed abouttwenty generations of finches -- continuously. Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin'sfinches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.

This rigourous and self-contained book describes mathematicaland, in particular, stochastic methods to assess the performance ofnetworked systems. It consists of three parts. The first part is areview on probability theory. Part two covers the classical theoryof stochastic processes (Poisson, renewal, Markov and queuingtheory), which are considered to be the basic building blocks forperformance evaluation studies. Part three focuses on therelatively new field of the physics of networks. This part dealswith the recently obtained insights that many very different largecomplex networks - such as the Internet, World Wide Web, proteins,utility infrastructures, social networks - evolve and behaveaccording to more general common scaling laws. This understandingis useful when assessing the end-to-end quality of communicationsservices, for example, in Internet telephony, real-time video andinteracting games. Containing problems and solutions, this book isideal for graduate students taking courses in performanceanalys

Anthrax. Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-relatedfevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclearwinter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers began to till a newkilling field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of massdestruction--by doctors who had committed themselves to creating abiological Armageddon. Biohazard is the never-before-told story ofRussia's darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold Warsecret. No one knows more about Russia's astounding experiments withbiowarfare than Ken Alibek. Now the mastermind behind Russia's germwarfare effort reveals two decades of shocking breakthroughs...howMoscow's leading scientists actually reengineered hazardousmicrobes to make them even more virulent...the secrets behind thediscovery of an invisible, untraceable new class of biologicalagents just right for use in political assassinations...thestartling story behind Russia's attempt to turn a sample of theAIDS virus into the ultimate bioweapon. And in a chilling