Engineering Physics

Ever since the dawn of civilization, we have been driven by a desire to know - to understand the physical world and the laws of nature. But are there limits to human knowledge? Are some things simply beyond the predictive powers of science? Or are those challenges the next big discovery waiting to happen?

On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle’s retiring namesake—the only person in history to have an existing single particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world’s most famous scientists.

Years ago, cosmologist Stephon Alexander received life-changing advice: to discover real physics, he needed to stop memorizing and start taking risks. In Fear of a Black Universe, Alexander shows that great physics requires us to think outside the mainstream - to improvise and rely on intuition. His approach leads him to three principles that shape all theories of the universe: the principle of invariance, the quantum principle, and the principle of emergence. Alexander uses them to explore some of physics' greatest mysteries.

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.

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.

Geneticist Adam Rutherford and mathematician Hannah Fry guide listeners through time and space, through our bodies and brains, showing how emotions shape our view of reality, how our minds tell us lies, and why a mostly bald and curious ape decided to begin poking at the fabric of the universe.

In 1911, some of the greatest minds in science convened at the First Solvay Conference in Physics, a meeting like no other. Almost half of the attendees had won or would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Over the course of those few days, these minds began to realize that classical physics was about to give way to quantum theory, a seismic shift in our history and how we understand not just our world, but the universe.

Prepare to learn everything we still don’t know about our strange and mysterious Universe. Humanity's understanding of the physical world is full of gaps. Not tiny little gaps you can safely ignore - there are huge yawning voids in our basic notions of how the world works. PHD Comics creator Jorge Cham and particle physicist Daniel Whiteson have teamed up to explore everything we don't know about the Universe: The enormous holes in our knowledge of the cosmos. Armed with entertaining and lucid explanations of science, they give us the best answers currently available.

The aurora borealis, often referred to as the Northern Lights, is a natural light-show that appears in the sky around the north magnetic pole. Auroras can sometimes be seen in other places of the world, but not as clearly. In the southern hemisphere, the phenomenon is called "aurora australis".

Quantum theory is the most revolutionary discovery in physics since Newton. This book gives a lucid, exciting, and accessible account of the surprising and counterintuitive ideas that shape our understanding of the sub-atomic world. It does not disguise the problems of interpretation that still remain unsettled 75 years after the initial discoveries. Uncertainty, probabilistic physics, complementarity, the problematic character of measurement, and decoherence are among the many topics discussed.

Musician, composer, TV presenter, and educator Richard Mainwaring uses the concept of the Infinite Piano to reveal the extraordinary world of frequency in a multitude of arenas―from medicine to religion to the environment to the paranormal―through the universality of music and a range of memorable human (and animal) stories laced with dry humor. Whether you’re science curious, musically inclined, or just want to know what a Szechuan pepper has to do with physics, What the Ear Hears (and Doesn’t) is an immensely enjoyable book filled with “did you know?” trivia.

The Arabic legacy of science and philosophy has long been hidden from the West. British-Iraqi physicist Jim Al-Khalili unveils that legacy to fascinating effect by returning to its roots in the hubs of Arab innovation that would advance science and jump-start the European Renaissance.

Fear of Physics is a lively, irreverent, and informative look at everything from the physics of boiling water to cutting-edge research at the observable limits of the universe. Rich with anecdotes and accessible examples, it nimbly ranges over the tools and thought behind the world of modern physics, taking the mystery out of what is essentially a very human intellectual endeavor.

From the chief architect of the Pandora Radio’s Music Genome Project comes a definitive and groundbreaking examination of how your mind, body, and upbringing influence the music you love. In this sweeping and authoritative audiobook, Dr. Nolan Gasser - a composer, pianist, and musicologist, and the chief architect of the Music Genome Project, which powers Pandora Radio - breaks down what musical taste is, where it comes from, and what our favorite songs say about us.

We all know that without water we couldn't survive, and that sometimes a cup of coffee or a glass of wine feels just as vital. But do we really understand how much we rely on liquids, or the destructive power they hold? Set over the course of a flight from London to San Francisco, Liquid Rules offers listeners a fascinating tour of these formless substances, told through the language of molecules, droplets, heartbeats, and ocean waves.

This book is about science and how it works. It is about what it means for a paradigm to shift and what it really takes to shift it. And it is about the strange and unusual world of quantum physics and what it tells us about who we are. At the start of the 20th Century, a dramatic revolution in science occurred. Over the course of a few decades our most fundamental notions of time, space and consciousness were all being called into question. In undeniable ways, it became clear that the nature of reality is intimately interwoven with our experience of it.

Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores these questions and more - from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang.

Astronomy is the study of what you see in the sky. Physics is the study of how things work. Astrophysics is the study of how things in the sky work, from large objects to tiny particles. Astrophysics For Dummies breaks it all down for you, making this difficult but fascinating topic accessible to anyone. Tracking the topics covered in a typical undergraduate astrophysics class, this book will teach you the essential pieces to understanding our universe. Get ready to launch into outer space with this ever-changing branch of science.

Einstein's steadfast refusal to accept certain aspects of quantum theory was rooted in his insistence that physics has to be about reality. Accordingly, he once derided as spooky action at a distance the notion that two elementary particles far removed from each other could nonetheless influence each others propertiesa hypothetical phenomenon his fellow theorist Erwin Schrdinger termed quantum entanglement.

Navigating poverty, violence, and instability, a young James Plummer had two guiding stars - a genius IQ and a love of science. But a bookish nerd is a soft target, and James faced years of bullying and abuse. As he struggled to survive his childhood in some of the country’s toughest urban neighborhoods in New Orleans, Houston, and LA, and later in the equally poor backwoods of Mississippi, he adopted the persona of “gangsta nerd” - dealing weed in juke joints while winning state science fairs with computer programs that model Einstein’s theory of relativity.