Editor Max Brockman introduces the work of some of today’sbrightest and most innovative young scientists in this fascinatingand exciting collection of writings that describe the veryboundaries of our knowledge. Future Science features nineteen young scientists, most of whomare presenting their innovative work and ideas to a generalaudience for the first time. Featured in this collection areWilliam McEwan (son of the novelist), a virologist, discussing hisresearch into the biology of antiviral immunity; Naomi Eisenberger,a neuroscientist, wondering how social rejection affects usphysically; Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist, showing whatmassive datasets can teach us about society and ourselves; andAnthony Aguirre, a physicist, who gives readers a tantalizingglimpse of infinity.

In this book, a new approach is pioneered in providing a unifiedtheory in continuum mechanics. General Continuum Mechanics isintended for the beginner, but it develops advanced materialcovering interdisciplinary subjects. With applications ofconvective, Lagrangian, and Eulerian coordinates and the first andsecond laws of thermodynamics, the first-year graduate student willlearn solid mechanics and fluid mechanics as an integrated subject.Electromagnetic continuum and relativistic continuum are included.The conservational properties of mass, momentum, and energy onearth and in the universe constitute the ingredients of this book.They are the monumental contributions of Newton, Maxwell, andEinstein, a panorama of beauty of universal laws that evolved overthe last four centuries. No boundaries are needed to separate them,but rather we integrate them in harmony and place them inperspective. This is the book for interdisciplinary studies tocarry out the modern scientific projects in which engineering,physics, and

In his bestselling The Moral Animal, Robert Wright applied theprinciples of evolutionary biology to the study of the human mind.Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining thedirection of evolution and human history–and discerning wherehistory will lead us next. In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, eversince the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern.Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex bymastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright'snarrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, fromstone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering suchsurprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the usefulstability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moralsignificance–a way of looking at our biological and culturalevolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality hasimproved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning mayitself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, wi

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

Structural proof theory is a branch of logic that studies thegeneral structure and properties of logical and mathematicalproofs. This book is both a concise introduction to the centralresults and methods of structural proof theory, and a work ofresearch that will be of interest to specialists. The book isdesigned to be used by students of philosophy, mathematics andcomputer science. The book contains a wealth of results onproof-theoretical systems, including extensions of such systemsfrom logic to mathematics, and on the connection between the twomain forms of structural proof theory - natural deduction andsequent calculus. The authors emphasize the computational contentof logical results. A special feature of the volume is acomputerized system for developing proofs interactively,downloadable from the web and regularly updated.