Engineering Physics

It was Richard Feynman's outrageous and scintillating method of teaching that earned him legendary status among students and professors of physics. From 1961 to 1963, Feynman delivered a series of lectures at the California Institute of Technology that revolutionized the teaching of physics. In Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, taken from these famous Lectures on Physics, Feynman delves into one of the most revolutionary discoveries in twentieth-century physics: Einstein's theory of relativity.

In The Quantum World, leading physicists and New Scientist take you on a journey through quantum theory, its mind-bending properties and the technologies transforming our world. Forget everything you thought you knew about reality. The world is a seriously bizarre place. Things can exist in two places at once and travel backwards and forwards in time. Waves and particles are one and the same, and objects change their behaviour according to whether they are being watched.

¿Qué son las matemáticas? ¿Para qué sirven? ¿Por qué es importante conocer su historia? Estas son algunas de las preguntas a las que da respuesta esta obra que nos narra de forma concisa la historia de esta ciencia desde la Prehistoria hasta nuestros días. Pero esta narración no es solamente una superposición de personajes históricos y de sus felices descubrimientos, sino que es una reivindicación de los componentes emocionales, incluso irracionales, que muchas veces han acompañado las actitudes apasionadas de estos célebres personajes, empeñados en buscar soluciones...

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change.

Quantum computing represents a transformative technology with unparalleled potential to revolutionize industries, solve complex global challenges, and advance scientific discovery. Its ability to process vast amounts of data and optimize intricate systems can drive breakthroughs in areas such as healthcare, climate modeling, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence.

Buckle up for a joy ride through physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Drawing on conversations with hundreds of the world's top scientists and her own work as an award-winning science writer, Natalie Angier does the impossible: she makes science fascinating and seriously fun, even for those of us who, in Angier's words, "still can't tell the difference between a proton, a photon, and a moron".

Aristotle considers ‘the principles and causes of change, or movement’ behind both animate and inanimate things. It is philosophy, not science, but over centuries affected the views of those involved in the ‘natural sciences’. The text emerged from the Lyceum, the school founded by Aristotle, and is accepted to be a compilation of texts, some of which - but perhaps not all - is by Aristotle. Regardless of authorship, its importance is unquestioned.

Superconductivity is one of the most exciting areas of research in physics today. Outlining the history of its discovery and the race to understand its many mysterious and counterintuitive phenomena, this Very Short Introduction audiobook explains in accessible terms the theories that have been developed and how they have influenced other areas of science, including the Higgs boson of particle physics and ideas about the early universe.

Victorian era steam engines and particle physics may seem worlds apart, yet a new branch of science, quantum thermodynamics, reenvisions the scientific underpinnings of the Industrial Revolution through the lens of today's roaring quantum information revolution. In her exciting new book, Harvard physicist Dr. Nicole Yunger Halpern introduces these concepts with what she calls "quantum steampunk," after the fantastical genre. Quantum Steampunk explores the field's aesthetic, shares its whimsy, and gazes into the potential of a quantum future.

We are constantly bombarded with inaccurate, contradictory and sometimes misleading information - until now. Ben Goldacre masterfully dismantles the dubious science behind some of the great drug trials, court cases and missed opportunities of our time. He also shows us the fascinating story of how we know what we know, and gives us the tools to uncover bad science for ourselves.

In the early 17th century, Galileo broke free from the hold of ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. He drastically changed the framework through which we view the natural world when he asserted that we should base our theory of reality on what we can observe rather than pure thought. In the process, he invented what we would come to call science. This set the stage for all the breakthroughs that followed - from Kepler to Newton to Einstein.

Instead of “what if the South won the Civil War?” cosmologists ask, “what if the constants that make up the fundamental building blocks of physics were different?” Physicists argue that any slight change to the laws of physics would mean a disruption in the evolution of the universe - and our existence. With the many factors that had to align for us to exist, it can seem like the laws of physics might seem finely tuned to make our existence possible. Instead of a supernatural or divine explanation, this book explores the possibility is that our universe isn’t the only one.

From quarks to computing, this fascinating introduction covers every element of the quantum world in clear and accessible language. Drawing on a wealth of expertise to explain just what a fascinating field quantum physics is, Rae points out that it is not simply a maze of technical jargon and philosophical ideas, but a reality which affects our daily lives.

Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped to lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life, he was also ignored by most working scientists, his ideas opposed by even his closest friends.

From the solar system to spinning tops, hurricanes to hula hoops, power plants to pendulums, one mysterious force shapes almost every aspect of our lives: spin. Despite its ubiquity, rotational force continues to baffle and surprise, and few people realize how it makes our planet habitable or how it has been tamed by engineers to make our lives more comfortable. Charting the development of engineering and technology from the earliest prehistoric drills to the gas turbine, Roland Ennos presents a riveting account of human ingenuity and the seemingly infinite ways spin affects our daily lives.

In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built.

Some see dust as dull stuff, useless at best, and sneeze-inducing at worst. But in the hands of writer Hannah Holmes, dust becomes a dazzling and mysterious force. As Holmes says, dust is a messenger, and air is its medium. And by the end of this fascinating journey through The Secret Life of Dust, we cannot help but agree.

The untold story of the heretical thinkers who challenged the establishment to rethink quantum physics and the nature of reality. Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity's finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and author of the classic The First Three Minutes, Weinberg shares his views on some of the most fundamental and fascinating aspects of physics and the universe. But he does not seclude science behind disciplinary walls or shy away from politics, taking on what he sees as the folly of manned spaceflight, the harms of inequality, and the importance of public goods. His point of view is rationalist, realist, reductionist, and devoutly secularist.

Icy, rocky, sometimes dusty, always mysterious – comets and asteroids are among the Solar System's very oldest inhabitants, formed within a swirling cloud of gas and dust in the area of space that eventually hosted the Sun and its planets. Locked within each of these extra-terrestrial objects is the 4.6-billion-year wisdom of Solar System events, and by studying them at close quarters using spacecraft we can coerce them into revealing their closely-guarded secrets. This offers us the chance to answer some fundamental questions about our planet and its inhabitants.