Magic Universe
A Grand Tour of Modern Science
Published on 13. October 2005
978-0-19-162235-9 (ISBN)
Description
This is a marvellously engaging tour covering the whole of modern science, from transgenic crops to quantum tangles. Written by one of the most experienced and well-known names in science writing, it is also assuredly reliable science. Although arranged for convenience and quick reference as a collection of topics in alphabetical order, it is very different from any conventional encyclopedia. Each topic tells a story, making the book eminently browsable. Packed with information, yet carrying its immense learning lightly, this is a book that would appeal to anyone with the slightest interest in how the world works.
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01/2006
Oxford University Press
€21.03
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Person
Nigel Calder is a long-established and widely known science writer, and a former Editor of New Scientist.
Content
- INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the spider's web
- Over 130 articles, from...
- ALCOHOL: Genetic revelations of when yeast invented booze
- ALTRUISM AND AGGRESSION: Looking for the origins of those human alternatives
- ANTIMATTER: Does the coat that Sakharov made really explain its absence?
- ARABIDOPSIS: The modest weed that gave plant scientists the big picture
- ASTRONAUTICS: Will interstellar pioneers be overtaken by their grandchildren?
- BERNAL'S LADDER: Pointers
- BIG BANG: The inflationary Universe's sleight-of-hand
- BIODIVERSITY: The mathematics of co-existence
- BIOLOGICAL CLOCKS: Molecular machinery that governs life's routines
- BIOSPHERE FROM SPACE: 'I want to do the whole world'
- BITS AND QUBITS: The digital world and its looming quantum shadow
- BLACK HOLES: The awesome engines of quasars and active galaxies
- BRAIN IMAGES: What do all the vivid movies really mean?
- BRAIN RHYTHMS: The mathematics of the beat we think to
- BRAIN WIRING: How do all those nerve connections know where to go?
- BUCKYBALLS AND NANOTUBES: Doing very much more with very much less
- ...to...
- SMALLPOX: The dairymaid's blessing and the general's curse
- SOLAR WIND: How it creates the heliosphere in which we live
- SPACE WEATHER: Why it is now more troublesome than in the old days
- SPARTICLES: A wished-for superworld of exotic matter and forces
- SPEECH: A gene that makes us more eloquent than chimpanzees
- STARBURSTS: Galactic traffic accidents and stellar baby booms
- STARS: Hearing them sing and sizing them up
- STEM CELLS: Tissue engineering, natural and medical
- SUN'S INTERIOR: How sound waves made our mother star transparent
- SUPERATOMS, SUPERFLUIDS AND SUPERCONDUCTORS: The march of the boson armies
- SUPERSTRINGS: Retuning the cosmic imagination
- TIME MACHINES: The biggest issue in contemporary physics?
- TRANSGENIC CROPS: For better or worse, a planetary experiment has begun
- TREE OF LIFE: Promiscuous bacteria and the course of evolution
- UNIVERSE: 'It must have known we were coming'
- VOLCANIC EXPLOSIONS: Where will the next big one be?
