science
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...
Fractals: A Graphic Guide
Fractal Geometry is the geometry of the natural world – animal, vegetable and mineral. It’s about the broken, wrinkled, wiggly world – the uneven shapes of nature, unlike the idealized forms of Euclidean geometry. We see fractals everywhere; indeed we are fractal!
Fractal Geometry is an extension of classical geometry. Using computers, it can make precise models of physical structures - from ferns to galaxies. Fractal geometry is a new language. Once you speak it, you can describe the shape of cloud as precisely as an architect can describe a house. Introducing Fractals traces the historical development of this...
Mind & Brain: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Mind & Brain examines a profound and mysterious puzzle: How do the three pounds of electric sponge stowed in the top of your head allow you to experience enchantment in front of an evening landscape, and then make you remember the shopping, say ‘Damn!’ and head off to the supermarket?
To put it another way, how does the biological tissue that makes up the brain give rise to the activities that our culture refers to as ‘the mind’?
This book explains what the sciences have to say about planning and action, language, memory, attention, emotions and vision. It traces the historical...
Psychology: A Graphic Guide
What is psychology? When did it begin? Where did it come from? How does psychology compare with psychiatry and psychotherapy? Is it scientific?
Introducing Psychology answers all these intriguing questions and more, explaining what the subject has been in the past and what it is now.
Nigel C. Benson skilfully explains the main schools of thought and the sections within psychology, including Introspection, Bio-psychology, Psychoanalysis, Behaviourism, Comparative (Animal) Psychology, Cognitive Approaches (such as the Gestalt movement), Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology and Humanism. The key figures covered...
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...
Statistics: A Graphic Guide
From the medicine we take, the treatments we receive, the aptitude and psychometric tests given by employers, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear to even the beer we drink, statistics have given shape to the world we inhabit.
For the media, statistics are routinely ‘damning’, ‘horrifying’, or, occasionally, ‘encouraging’.
Yet, for all their ubiquity, most of us really don’t know what to make of statistics. Exploring the history, mathematics, philosophy and practical use of statistics, Eileen Magnello – accompanied by Borin Van Loon’s intelligent graphic...
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...
Darwin: A Graphic Guide
‘Miller and Van Loon have brought to life an important chapter of scientific history … a real achievement.’ New Scientist
Progress in genetics today would not have been possible without Darwin’s revolution, but the mysterious man who laid the rational basis for undermining belief in God’s creation was remarkably timid. He spent most of his life in seclusion, a semi-invalid, riddled with doubts, fearing the controversy his theories might unleash.
In this brilliantly lucid book – a classic originally published in 1982 – Jonathan Miller unravels Darwin’s life and his...
Time: A Graphic Guide
What is time? The 5th-century philosopher St Augustine famously said that he knew what time was, so long as no one asked him.
Introducing Time tackles this question and dares to go where Augustine would not. It traces the history of time from Augustine's suggestion that there is no time, to the flowing time of Newton, the conventional time of Poincaré, the static time of Einstein, and then back, full circle, to the idea that there is no time in quantum gravity.
Along the way, many puzzling questions are raised. For instance, is time a fourth dimension similar to space or does it 'flow' in some sense? And if it...