Showing titles in History & Philosophy

William Shakespeare found dozens of different ways to kill off his characters, and audiences today still enjoy the same reactions - shock, sadness, fear - that they did more than 400 years ago when these plays were first performed. But how realistic are these deaths, and did Shakespeare have the knowledge to back them up? Kathryn Harkup turns her discerning scientific eye to the Bard and the varied and creative ways his characters die.

Taking up Lenin's challenge to radically reconsider materialism in the wake of each big scientific discovery, and rejecting the recent vogue for giving a vague spiritualist spin to wave mechanics, Žižek embraces the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics with characteristic erudition and verve. Drawing on the central themes of the holographic universe, non-commutativity and the collapse of superpositions, Žižek evolves a quantum-inspired ontology which reinvents the historical materialism of Hegel and Heidegger...

For over two thousand years, from the Medieval Arabic world to the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, scientific progress has relied on different methods of establishing fact from fiction. Achieve logical perfection, the reasoning went, and you would be rewarded with ultimate, universal truth. But there is far more to proof than axioms, theories and laws: when demonstrating that a new medical treatment works, persuading a jury of someone's guilt, or deciding whether you trust a self-driving car or a financial transaction, the weighing up of evidence is far from simple.

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'Quirkology is stuffed with the kind of offbeat insight that people find irresistible' – The Times Ever wondered why bad musicians always win the Eurovision Song Contest, or how incompetent politicians get elected? You need some Quirkology in your life. While other scientists beaver away on...

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.

The Loch Ness monster: a creature that should have died out with the dinosaurs or a legend built on hoaxes and wishful thinking? Sir Peter Scott, internationally renowned naturalist and president of the World Wildlife Fund, was convinced that the monster existed. So were senior scientists at London's Natural History Museum and Chicago University; they lost their jobs because they refused to renounce their belief in the creature.

A contrarian scientist wrestles with the big questions that modern physics raises, and what physics says about the human condition Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes...

When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices - or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical.

The eagerly anticipated conclusion to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s three-part exploration of the origins of intelligence on Earth, which began with the bestselling Other Minds in 2018 and continued with Metazoa in 2020. The eagerly anticipated conclusion to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s three-part...

Chris and Chrissy Rouse, an experienced father-and-son scuba diving team, hoped to achieve widespread recognition for their outstanding but controversial diving skills. Obsessed and ambitious, they sought to solve the secrets of a mysterious, undocumented World War II German U-boat that lay...

At some point in the 1980s we gave up on the future. Before then, we imagined wonderful days to come, free from disease, work and want, in television series like Star Trek or events such as the 1939 Futurama World Fair. When we look ahead now, we tell dystopian stories of environmental collapse, zombie plagues and the end of civilisation. If it is true that we have to imagine the future before we build it, then this is deeply worrying. 

Utterly beautiful. Profoundly disconcerting. Quantum theory is quite simply the most successful account of the physical universe ever devised. Its concepts underpin much of the 21st-century technology that we now take for granted. But at the same time it has completely undermined our ability to make sense of the world at its most fundamental level.

God, the Science, the Evidence is the result of nearly four years of research involving over twenty scientists and renowned specialists. It presents the most up-to-date evidence for the existence of God. For more than four centuries, the combined discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Freud, and others, created the illusion that the Universe could be explained without a creator God. As a result, materialism became the dominant worldview by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Time One tackles mankind's most baffling question: How did the world begin? After challenging old thinking about forty-seven crucial scientific problems, Time One author Colin Gillespie solves forty-five of them and comes up with a strikingly simple answer to the most perplexing question of them all: How did the world begin?

Time One takes an iconoclastic look at contemporary physics, notably relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory.

In this grand poetic vision of the universe, Lawrence Krauss tells the dramatic story of the discovery of the hidden world that underlies reality - and our place within it. Reality is not what you think or sense - it’s weird, wild, and counterintuitive, and its inner workings seem at least as implausible as the idea that something can come from nothing. With his trademark wit and accessible style, Krauss leads us to realms so small that they are invisible to microscopes, to the birth and rebirth of light, and into the natural forces that govern our existence.

Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at ninety percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? What if everyone only had one soulmate? What would happen if the moon went away? In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators.