Bøger i Ponderables serien i rækkefølge

Here is the essential guide to philosophy, an authoritative yet fun reference book and timeline on the compilation of human knowledge.

Here is the essential guide to physics, an authoritative reference book and timeline that examines the foundations upon which all scientific knowledge rests. Without physics, everything else-from astronomy to zoology-would be meaningless conjecture.

In 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev presented the world with the Periodic Table. It contained 63 elements, many more than the four--earth, water, fire, and air--established in the ancient world, but less than half the total in our modern table. Mendeleev believed there were many elements still to come. He was right. With over 300 illustrations, this essential guide to the Periodic Table, tracks the history of a powerful yet elegant tool that lays bare the building blocks of the Universe. The journey begins just as the first cities are forming, and follows the contributions made by philosophers, alchemists, industrialists, and great scientists as they gather force to create this masterpiece of accumulated knowledge. The story includes Democritus of ancient Greece who said that the four elements of nature must be made of atoms; otherwise our world is just an illusion, and the French aristocrat Antoine Lavoisier, who was the first to show that water is not an element at all. From the ancient Greek philosophers to the alchemist who boiled urine until it glowed in the dark, to the British inventor who described the powerful effect of electricity on a dead body to Mary Shelley (before she wrote Frankenstein) to the theologian who observed mice becoming unconscious when dangled over brewing beer, the discovery of the elements is a story with many chapters. The thoughts and deeds of great thinkers always make great stories and here are a hundred of the most significant. Each story relates a confounding puzzle that became a discovery and changed the way we see the world. We call these Ponderables.

Legend has it that the first magic square, where all lines and diagonals add up to the same figure, was revealed more than 2,000 years ago when a river turtle appeared to have ancient Chinese numerals inscribed on sections of its shell. Patterns are everywhere in nature, and counting, measuring, and calculating changes are as old as civilization itself, as are many of the theorems and laws of math. The Pythagorean Theorem was used to plot out fields for planting crops before Pythagoras was even born, but the story begins long before that, with tally marks on rock and bone surviving from the Stone Age. Here is the essential guide to mathematics, an authoritative reference book and timeline that explores the work of history's greatest mathematicians. From the genius of Pierre de Fermat, who said he knew the answers but rarely gave them up, to the fractal pattern discovered by Waclaw Sierpinski now used to plan the route a mailman takes, here are 100 landmark moments in this intensely rigorous discipline, seen through the eyes of the people who lived them. Glimpse the abstract landscape of infinite numbers and multi-dimensional shapes as you learn about the most famous math men of all. Pythagoras had a love of numbers so strong it led to a violent death. Then there is Fibonacci, whose guide for bookkeepers changed the way we add and Descartes, who took inspiration from a fly to convert numbers into shapes and back again, changing math forever. Over many centuries, great minds puzzled over the evidence and, step-by-step, edged ever closer to the truth. Behind every one of these breakthrough moments there's a story about a confounding puzzle that became a discovery and changed the way we see the world.

Hardcover with removable fold-out Timeline

Here is the essential guide to the human brain, an authoritative reference book and timeline that examines the three pounds of matter inside our heads that does all our thinking for us. The human brain has 100 billion nerve cells connected by thousands more to every corner of the body.