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The Light of Other
Days Now he joins forces with Stephen Baxter -- the John W. Campbell Award-winning author of The Time Ships and Voyage, called by Time Out "the most credible heir to the hard SF tradition previously monopolized by Clarke and Asimov" -- for a spectacular novel about nothing less than the transformation of humanity itself. The Light of Other Days tells the tale of what happens when a brilliant, driven industrialist harnesses the cutting edge of quantum physics to enable people everywhere, at trivial cost, to see one another at all times: around every corner, through every wall, into everyone's most private, hidden, and even intimate moments. It amounts to the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy -- forever. Then, as society reels, the same technology proves able to look backwards in time as well. Nothing can prepare us for what this means. It is a fundamental change in the terms of the human condition. The Light of Days is the science-fiction event of the season...and a worthy addition to the shelf of Clarke's best work.
Zero: The Biography
of a Dangerous Idea With wonderfully engaging science writing, author Charles Seife traces the origins and history of the number zero. In the Middle Ages it took center stage on the battleground among religious clerics, who had to choose between the idea that God created the universe out of nothing and the prevailing theory that the planets revolved around the sun. During the scientific revolution, the fact that zero causes equations to explode gave mathematicians fits. For centuries, cavemen counting sheep or Egyptians calculating the area of farmland flooded by the Nile didn't need it. With numerical systems designed to measure things in the real world, there wasn't much need for an integer signifying nothing. As numerical systems became more abstract, the number zero became a useful tool. But to Greek philosophers, who imagined that the universe was a finite shell made up of ringed spheres that made music as they moved, the idea of nothingness was heretical. It questioned the existence of God, and they avoided dealing with zero. Scribes in India were more comfortable with the concept of nothingness, Seife writes. In Hinduism, spiritual enlightenment means leaving behind the body and becoming a part of the infinite soul. Zero also became a part of that culture's numeric system, which formed the basis of the Arabic system we use today. As trade and banking demanded more efficient tallying systems, the Christian world gave up on Roman numerals and adopted the numbers we recognize, including zero. With prose geared towards those of us who slept our way through high school physics, Seife traces its influence on the scientific revolution that followed the dark ages. As mathematicians invented calculus, algebra, projective geometry, and set theory, they were forced to reckon with the quirky things that number did to their equations. When you divide one by zero, the answer is infinity. Certain equations reach a point where a function blows up or a mathematical curve starts behaving wildly as it approaches a number. But over time, as math became more abstract, they learned to explain and embrace the bizarre behavior of zero. The concepts of zero and infinity have been equally useful and paradoxical tools in describing the laws of nature. They converge in the existence of black holes, a single point so dense it bends the continuum of space and time so dramatically that nothing escapes once it falls in. Scientists have debated whether the universe will expand into infinity, dying an icy death, or collapse in on itself, leaving nothing behind. Weaving together ancient drama and up-to-date science, ZERO is a fresh and engaging read for historians, philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, or anyone willing to bend their mind around the questions of being, nothingness and the end of the world as we know it.
Moment of Truth Attorney Jack Newlin comes home one evening to find his wife, Honor, dead on the floor of their elegant dining room. Convinced that he knows who killed her--and determined to hide the truth--Jack decides to make it look as though he did it. Staging the crime scene so that the evidence incriminates him, he then calls the police. And to hammer the final nail in his own coffin, he hires the most inexperienced lawyer he can find, a reluctant rookie by the name of Mary DiNunzio, employed at the hot Philadelphia firm of Rosato & Associates. Unfortunately for Jack, hiring Mary may turn out to be his only mistake. Though inexperienced, Mary doubts Jack's confession and begins to investigate the crime. She finds that instead of having a guilty client who is falsely proclaiming his innocence, she has an innocent client who is falsely proclaiming his guilt. Her ethics and instincts tell her she can't defend a man who wants only one thing--to convict himself. Or can she? Smarter, gutsier, and more determined than she has any right to be, Mary decides to stick with the case. With help from the most unexpected sources, she sets out to prove what really happened--because as any lawyer knows, a case is never as simple as it seems. And nothing is ever certain until the final moment of truth.
Genome: Following in the tradition of James Gleick's Chaos, Matt Ridley vividly brings to light the most profound scientific discovery of the century--the mapping of the human genome. In charmingly witty and lucid prose, Ridley describes what the human genetic code is, how it works, and demonstrates how this newfound knowledge will affect medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, business, politics, and our own lives. Genome is divided into 23 chapters, one for each chromosome, each of which tells the story of a particular gene and how it affects an individual: from intelligence and personality to disease and sexual behavior. Examining a scientific achievement on par with--and with as many dire implications as--the splitting of the atom, Genome makes clear who we humans are--and where we may be going. A former editor of the Economist, Matt Ridley is the author of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature and The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. He lives in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, with his wife and two children.
Bridget Jones: The
Edge of Reason |
