physics
Chaos: A Graphic Guide
If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, does it cause a tornado in Texas?
Chaos theory attempts to answer such baffling questions. The discovery of randomness in apparently predictable physical systems has evolved into a science that declares the universe to be far more unpredictable than we have ever imagined.
IIntroducing Chaos explains how chaos makes its presence felt in events from the fluctuation of animal populations to the ups and downs of the stock market. It examines the roots of chaos in modern maths and physics, and explores the relationship between chaos and complexity, the unifying theory which suggests...
Quantum Theory: A Graphic Guide
Quantum theory is one of science’s most thrilling, challenging and even mysterious areas. Scientists such as Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger uncovered bizarre paradoxes in the early 20th century that seemed to destroy the fundamental assumptions of ‘classical physics’ – the basic laws we are taught in school.
At the sub-atomic level, one particle seems to know what the others are doing, and according to Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, there is a limit on how accurately nature can be observed. And yet quantum theory explanations are amazingly accurate and...
Relativity: A Graphic Guide
What did Einstein mean by E=mc2?
How is a black hole formed?
What use is a fourth dimension?
It is now almost a century since Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity revolutionised our view of the universe. Famously complex, Einstein’s brilliant mathematics and physics are nonetheless magnificent, compelling descriptions of how our world works, and have been – with quantum theory – one of the two key strands of physics’ last 100 years.
This graphic guide to relativity plots a thrilling, visually accessible course through Einstein’s astounding vision of gravity as the...
Stephen Hawking: A Graphic Guide
‘An ideal introduction’ Independent
‘Astonishingly comprehensive … clearer than Hawking himself’ Focus
Stephen Hawking is the world-famous physicist with a cameo in The Simpsons on his CV, but outside his academic field his work is little understood. To the public he is a tragic figure – a brilliant scientist and author of the 9 million-copy-selling A Brief History of Time, and yet confined to a wheelchair and almost completely paralysed.
Hawking’s major contribution to science has been to integrate the two great theories of 20th-century physics – Einstein's General...