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The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work
W. Daniel Hillis · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe 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 Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
Simon Singh · 402 pages
In his first book since the bestselling *Fermat's Enigma*, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisit
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
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.
Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
John MacCormick · 219 pages
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
Edward Dolnick · 398 pages
Quantum Computing Since Democritus
Scott Aaronson · 369 pages
Written by noted quantum computing theorist Scott Aaronson, this book takes readers on a tour through some of the deepest ideas of maths, computer science and physics. Full of insights, arguments and philosophical perspectives, the book covers an amazing array of topics. Beginning in antiquity with Democritus, it progresses through logic and set theory, computability and complexity theory, quantum
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
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
Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact
Steven Kotler · 284 pages
An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise
John Robinson Pierce · 305 pages
A New Kind of Science
Stephen Wolfram · 1,197 pages
17 Equations that Changed the World
Ian Stewart · 342 pages
Linked: The New Science of Networks
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi · 294 pages
A cocktail party. A terrorist cell. Ancient bacteria. An international conglomerate. All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, the nations foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previoulsy thought. Grasping
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes · 886 pages
Here for the first time, in rich, human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly -- or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the brig
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
The Ascent of Man
Jacob Bronowski · 448 pages
Traces the development of science and the discoveries that have made man unique among animal species.
Einstein: His Life and Universe
Walter Isaacson · 704 pages
The first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. Biographer Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk--a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate--became the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom an
Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible
Arthur C. Clarke · 256 pages
The Day the Universe Changed: How Galileo's Telescope Changed the Truth
James Burke · 353 pages
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