In Electric Universe , David Bodanis weaves tales ofromance, divine inspiration, and fraud through a lucid account ofthe invisible force that permeates our universe. In these pages thevirtuoso scientists who plumbed the secrets of electricity comevividly to life, including familiar giants like Thomas Edison; thevisionary Michael Faraday, who struggled against the prejudices ofthe British class system; and Samuel Morse, a painter who, beforeinventing the telegraph, ran for mayor of New York on a platform ofpersecuting Catholics. Here too is Alan Turing, whose dream of amarvelous thinking machine—what we know as the computer—was metwith indifference, and who ended his life in despair after Britishauthorities forced him to undergo experimental treatments to “cure”his homosexuality. From the frigid waters of the Atlantic to the streets of Hamburgduring a World War II firestorm to the interior of the human body, Electric Universe is a mesmerizing journey of discovery by amaster science writer.
We may know that Einstein was the epitome of genius, but howmany of us know what his theory really means, and what itsrealistic implications are? Einstein and Relativity presents adistillation of Einstein's life and work within their historicaland scientific contexts; and offers a truly accessible explanationof the concept that shaped the twentieth century. Just a few of thebig ideas covered here are Einstein's discovery that light is botha particle and a wave; how Einstein proved the existence ofmolecules; why there is no such thing as real time; and howEinstein's brilliance led to his worst nightmare - the atombomb.
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.
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.
