🧲 Books like this
Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age
Daniel J. Levitin · 304 pages
Complexity: A Guided Tour
Melanie Mitchell · 288 pages
What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive question
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
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
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.
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words
Randall Munroe · 64 pages
The creator of the webcomic "xkcd" uses line drawings and just ten hundred common words to provide simple explanations for how things work, including microwaves, bridges, tectonic plates, the solar system, the periodic table, helicopters, and other essential concepts.
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
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
Sean Carroll · 451 pages
A rising star in theoretical physics offers his awesome vision of our universe and beyond, all beginning with a simple question: Why does time move forward?Time moves forward, not backward-everyone knows you can't unscramble an egg. In the hands of one of today's hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other univers
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
Albert Einstein · 158 pages
The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. The work presumes a standard of education corresponding to that of a university matriculation examina
The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century
David Salsburg · 352 pages
Discusses how statistics have changed the field of science in the twentieth century, focusing on the theories and ideas of famous scientists and thinkers.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Oliver Sacks · 400 pages
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelli
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
Robert Wright · 496 pages
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like
Paul Bloom · 280 pages
In this fascinating and witty account, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom draws on insights from child development, philosophy, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to examine the science behind our curious desires, attractions, and tastes, covering everything from the animal instincts for sex and food to the uniquely human taste for art, music, and stories.
Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life
Len Fisher · 265 pages
The IgNobel Prize-winning author of How to Dunk a Doughnut draws on the science of game theory to explain how human beings cooperate in everyday life.
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Carlo Rovelli · 96 pages
An introduction to modern physics by a founder of the loop quantum gravity theory shares seven succinct lessons on topics ranging from general relativity and quantum mechanics to elementary particles and black holes.
Hyperspace
Michio Kaku · 359 pages
Are there other dimensions beyond our own? Is time travel possible? Can we change the past? Are there gateways to parallel universes? All of us have pondered such questions, but there was a time when scientists dismissed these notions as outlandish speculations. Not any more. Today, they are the focus of the most intense scientific activity in recent memory. In Hyperspace, Michio Kaku, author o
Bad Science
Ben Goldacre · 338 pages
Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating and informative journey through the world of Bad Science.When Dr Ben Goldacre saw someone on daytime TV dipping her feet in an 'Aqua Detox' footbath, releasing her toxins into the water, turning it brown, he thought he'd try the same at home. 'Like some kind of Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General', using his girlfriend's Barbie doll, he gently
The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity
Steven H. Strogatz · 336 pages
Many people take math in high school and promptly forget much of it. But math plays a part in all of our lives all of the time, whether we know it or not. In The Joy of x, Steven Strogatz expands on his hit New York Times series to explain the big ideas of math gently and clearly, with wit, insight, and brilliant illustrations. Whether he is illuminating how often you should flip your mattress
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics
Marcus du Sautoy · 351 pages
The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self
Anil Ananthaswamy · 312 pages
"In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, a tour of the latest neuroscience of schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's disease, ecstatic epilepsy, Cotard's syndrome, out-of-body experiences, and other disorders--revealing the awesome power of the human sense of self from a master of science journalism Anil Ananthaswamy's extensive in-depth interviews venture into the lives of individuals who offer perspective
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
Richard Feynman · 176 pages
The Brain: The Story of You
David Eagleman · 237 pages
"The dramatic story of the brain's role in creating our world, our experience of it, and ourselves; the basis for a PBS television series by the bestselling David Eagleman. How does a three pound mass of biological matter locked in the dark, silent fortress of the skull produce the extraordinary multi-sensory experience that comprises us, while also constructing reality and guiding us through the