Physics textbooks identify Thomas Young (1773-1829) as the experimenter who first proved that light is a wave--not a stream of corpuscles as Newton proclaimed. In any book on the eye and vision, Young is the London physician who showed how the eye focuses and proposed the three-color theory of vision confirmed only in 1959. In any book on ancient Egypt, Young is credited for his crucial detective work in deciphering the Rosetta Stone. It is hard to grasp how much he knew. Invited to contribute to a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Young offered the following subjects: Alphabet, Annuities, Attraction, Capillary Action, Cohesion, Colour, Dew, Egypt, Eye, Focus, Friction, Halo, Hieroglyphic, Hydraulics, Motion, Resistance, Ship, Sound, Strength, Tides, Waves, and anything of a medical nature. He asked that all his contributions be kept anonymous. While not yet thirty he gave a course of lectures at the Royal Institution covering virtually all of known science. But polymathy made him unpopular in the academy. An early attack on his wave theory of light was so scathing that English physicists buried it for nearly two decades until it was rediscovered in France. But slowly, after his death, great scientists recognized his genius. Today, in an age of professional specialization unimaginable in 1800, polymathy still disturbs us. Is this kind of curiosity selfish, even irresponsible? Here is the story of a driven yet modest hero, the last man who knew everything.

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, The Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius

Biographies & Memoirs

Robinson, Andrew

Historical

Pi Press

"Original, delightful, and full of ideas."--Robert Kirshner, Harvard University, author of "The Extravagant Universe" 
One of the hottest areas in science today is what we are learning at the place where physics meets biology. Among many revelations from this exciting cutting edge of research, Fred Adams relates an idea that would be a radical change in the way we think of the genesis of life. Specifically, life didn't start as pond scum in some primordial oozing lake, but rather in a deep biosphere underground, protected from the continuous bombardment of the Earth's surface that astrophysicists are now certain must have been occurring when life emerged. The genesis of life was IN our planet, not on it! What are the fundamental laws of physics? What was the big bang? How did galaxies form? How did stars form? How did planets form? How did life evolve? Once there was gravity, was life inevitable? Are we alone in the multiverse? A theory of everything is not just about the universe anymore, now it is about the living multiverse.

Our Living Multiverse: A Book of Genesis in 0+7 Chapters

Adams, Fred

Computers & Technology

Ever wonder what it's like to walk into a real crime scene? Inside The Dollhouse Murders lies a strange world of razor-sharp stories that show exactly how serious crimes are investigated. Walk through these miniature rooms with the Detective, who thinks instincts just get you into trouble, and his younger partner, who seems to have them all the time, to witness the state of the art in modern forensic techniques and the simple genius of an effective investigation. Eleven years ago, preeminent expert on crime scene forensics Thomas Mauriello built six dioramas to help him teach his crime lab students how to "peel" a crime scene. He invented scenarios and then meticulously fabricated the clues and their setting. Over the years these bizarre dioramas have been featured in men's magazines, a medical institute bulletin, a miniature-collector magazine, and an array of popular science media. But now, in collaboration with the brilliant novelist and science writer Ann Darby, Thomas Mauriello has produced the stories that go with his dioramas and thus made his science more accessible than ever before. Together with over 40 of John Consoli's ingenious full-color photographs, this is a unique window into the gritty, imperfect world of solving crimes.

The Dollhouse Murders: A Forensic Expert Investigates 6 Little Crimes

Literature & Fiction

Ann Darby

Thomas Mauriello

Photographs by John Consoli

United States

Here is the first complete portrait of the legendary flying dragons of deep time–the pterosaurs–designed for non-specialists, yet founded on the real science of these bizarre creatures. Presented lucidly and accessibly by one of the world’s leading experts, David Unwin’s book is built on a mountain of new fossil discoveries and the latest research. About 220 millions years ago, a group of reptiles took to the Earth’s vast and open skies. No longer tethered to the ground, the earliest pterosaurs evolved into a multitude of diverse forms, spread around the globe, and ruled the skies until they went extinct along with the dinosaurs about 65 millions years ago, rarely leaving fossils as a record of their existence. What they did leave was a mystery for paleontologists to solve; an enigma so difficult to crack that it took centuries of false starts and missteps before the path to a true understanding of pterosaurs was uncovered. Now, an understanding of the fundamental nature of these strange creatures is finally possible. In the last 15 years, stunning new fossil finds and significant advances in technology have led to a breakthrough in our knowledge of pterosaurs. New fossils of the earliest species were discovered in Italy, a remarkably well-preserved and complete wing was found in Central Asia, and, most extraordinarily, a pterosaur embryo inside an egg was unearthed in China. CAT scanning has let researchers glimpse inside pterosaur skulls and construct three-dimensional images of their bodies from crushed bones, and modern techniques for analyzing relationships between species have revealed surprising insights into the evolution of the group. Drawing on these and other advances, David Unwin, caretaker of Archaeopteryx and curator at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, paints pterosaurs and their world more vividly than has previously been possible. He eloquently reconstructs their biology and behavior. Pterosaurs weren’t scaly like dinosaurs, but hairy; most were brightly colored and adorned with remarkable head crests; they were excellent fliers with physiologically sophisticated wings; they walked on all fours; and varied in size from eight inches to forty feet in wingspan. He shows how they lived their lives, raised their young, and interacted with the different environments of Mesozoic Earth. Then, building on his thorough examination of their anatomy and lifestyle, and using the powerful technique of cladistic analysis, Unwin unravels the evolutionary history of pterosaurs and establishes their place in the one great tree of life. Packed with 95 color and 30 black and white illustrations–including 10 full-page original color paintings that are scientific recreations of different pterosaur species–The Pterosaurs From Deep Time takes readers on an wondrous expedition back through the lost world of the Earth’s deep past.

The Pterosaurs: From Deep Time

Science & Math

Unwin, David M.

Biological Sciences

The new mind science revolution sweeping the world is providing astonishing new insights into almost every aspect of our daily lives. But where did it all come from? One answer, as Allan Hobson now demonstrates in his elegant masterpiece 13 Dreams Freud Never Had, is the simple act of waking up and thinking about our dreams. 
Freud ushered in the modern era of neuroscience when he set out on his great Project for a Scientific Psychology in an effort to bring science to the world of our imaginations. One of the first sites of his investigation was the interpretation of dreams. Freud believed dreams resulted from an elaborate effort of the mind to conceal unacceptable instinctual wishes welling up from the unconscious when the ego relaxes its prohibition of the id in sleep. But modern neuroscience, including Hobson's own research, has shown this understanding of the brain to be wrong. As Hobson lucidly explains, the bizarre nature of our dreams has nothing to do with repressed emotion as Freud taught; it results from the way the brain is physically built. Chemical mechanisms in the brain stem, which shift the activation of various regions of the cortex, generate these changes. Here is an amazingly clear window on how thoughts are actually created from our memories of experiences. 
Each chapter of this book begins with notes describing a dream taken after Dr. Hobson awoke from it. Dr. Hobson discusses how the dreams can be interpreted given the circumstances of his waking life. Each chapter then shows how that interpretation fits into the physical structure of the brain—for instance, why movements our bodies make and movements we see in our mind's eye are so much a part of how we think. 
Allan Hobson and other brain researchers have, over the last several decades, been constructing a new neurocognitive model of the mind. With the unique perspective of one the revolution's leading researchers, this superb book delivers a fresh, vivid, and compellingly personal overview of how that new science of the mind is being built.

13 Dreams Freud Never Had: The New Mind Science

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Hobson, J. Allan

Psychology & Counseling

A tour of the human skeleton investigates the body's 213 bones and their relationship to other parts of the body.

Human Bones: A Scientific and Pictorial Investigation

Politics & Social Sciences

Alexander, R. McNeill

Diskin, Aaron

Anthropology

Combines historical text with geomorphological and scientific evidence to chronicle the search by explorers, scientists, and academics to understand the cause and evolution of the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon: Solving Earth's Grandest Puzzle

History

Powell, James Lawrence

Americas

Introduces the concepts of probability to help baseball fans develop a better understanding of the game.

A Mathematician at the Ballpark: Odds and Probabilities for Baseball Fans

Ross, Ken

History & Philosophy

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb and ended World War II, forged the alliance between science and government that made the American Century possible. David C. Cassidy's biography is not merely the life story of a brilliant physicist, it tells the hidden story of the political and social forces shaping the world in our time: the rise of American science. Oppenheimer, the eldest son of an aristocratic Jewish family living on the Upper West Side of New York City, attended the secular, progressive, and elite Ethical Culture School. Cassidy, building his narrative on previously untapped primary documents, shows the importance and character of Oppenheimer's early education. The liberal values he absorbed there ran counter to the culture he found at Harvard, whose president sought to foster a future managerial elite, the rulers of the new American society. These formative contrasts in values explain Oppenheimer's many seeming contradictions. Why did the scientist who correctly theorized black holes turn his back on cutting edge research? How did a gentle liberal humanist become responsible for the creation of the first real weapon of mass destruction? How could a brilliant mind like his virtually found "scientific militarism" and then let it destroy him? Cassidy opens up a life story that is emblematic of the transformation of America over the last three generations. It offers, as the best history can, an insight into the future technological and moral progress of a nation.

J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the American Century

Cassidy, David

Professionals & Academics

A brilliant, wryly humorous, brief tour of the human mind built on first hand experience with patients and a dazzling research career. This long awaited new book by V.S. Ramachandran is akin to the bestselling works about patients by Oliver SacksWhat is body image? Why do we blush? What is art? What is free will? What is self? Until recently, these questions were the province of philosophy, but studies of the brain are now producing explanations based on research anyone can see for themselves in PET scans and MRI images. Neuroscientists such as V.S. Ramachandran are now unlocking the key to what many have considered the metaphysics of our consciousness. This knowledge of the brain has progressed so rapidly few have yet recognized it for what it is. It will change how we think of human beings, even our very notion of understanding. This is a revolution, already underway that will have impact on all our lives. But until this book, topics such as art, creativity and love have received very little attention from neurology and new findings have not been offered in an approachable way. Dr. Ramachandran presents new theories and experiments that illuminate the biggest questions we can ask. Picking up where the great earlier thinkers like Freud, and Darwin began, V.S. Ramachandran and his colleagues are forging a whole new science. Walk through a final frontier of human knowledge with the perfect, eloquent, expert guide on this unique brief tour.

A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers

Ramachandran, V.S.

Philosophy

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