Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible

Arthur C. Clarke · 256 pages

Quantum Supremacy

Michio Kaku · 352 pages

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Steven Johnson · 293 pages

"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepr

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Dava Sobel · 192 pages

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailo

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

K. Eric Drexler · 298 pages

The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World

Jenny Uglow · 608 pages

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick · 526 pages

From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Tur

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

Walter Isaacson · 560 pages

A scientific biography of Jennifer Doudna, a founder and co-developer of the CRISPR gene-editing mechanism, and an examination of what happened after CRISPR hit the marketplace.

The Future Is Now: Solving the Climate Crisis with Today's Technologies

Bob McDonald · 303 pages

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

Lewis Dartnell · 340 pages

"How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly

Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Norbert Wiener · 212 pages

Acclaimed one of the "seminal books ... comparable in ultimate importance to ... Galileo or Malthus or Rousseau or Mill", Cybernetics was judged by twenty-seven historians, economists, educators, and philosophers to be one of those books published during the "past four decades," which may have a substantial impact on public thought and action in the years ahead."--Saturday Review.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Geoffrey West · 479 pages

"From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleadi

How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery

Kevin Ashton · 325 pages

"Inspiring and empowering, this journey behind the scenes of humanity's greatest creations reveals the surprising way we make something new. What do Thomas Jefferson's ice cream recipe, Coca Cola, and Chanel No. 5 have in common? They all depended on a nineteenth-century African boy who, with a single pinch, solved one of nature's great riddles and gave birth to the multimillion-dollar vanilla ind

The Day the Universe Changed: How Galileo's Telescope Changed the Truth

James Burke · 353 pages

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon · 304 pages

Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone. In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R.

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers

John MacCormick · 219 pages

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Charles Petzold · 393 pages

What do flashlights, the British invasion, black cats, and seesaws have to do with computers? In CODE, they show us the ingenious ways we manipulate language and invent new means of communicating with each other. And through CODE, we see how this ingenuity and our very human compulsion to communicate have driven the technological innovations of the past two centuries. Using everyday objects an

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

George Johnson · 208 pages

The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are.

Henry Petroski · 288 pages

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

M. Mitchell Waldrop · 380 pages

"In a rented convent in Santa Fe, a revolution has been brewing. The activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics such as Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow, and pony-tailed graduate students, mathematicians, and computer scientists down from Los Alamos. They've formed an iconoclastic think tank called the Santa Fe Institute, and their radical idea is to create

The Ascent of Man

Jacob Bronowski · 448 pages

Traces the development of science and the discoveries that have made man unique among animal species.

Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World

Simon Garfield · 232 pages

Explains how English chemist William Perkin accidentally discovered a way to mass-produce color in a factory in 1856, and discusses how his discovery of the color mauve changed the fashion industry.

The Age of Spiritual Machines

Ray Kurzweil

The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder · 293 pages

"The Soul of a New Machine" is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Non-fiction and a Pulitzer Prize f