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What the Luck?

We underestimate the importance of luck in our lives. We think too highly of the golfer who wins the British Open and, if he loses the next tournament, we speculate that he slacked off. Although the winner is surely an excellent golfer, good luck in how the ball bounced and how it rolled afterwards outside of the golfer’s control also played an important role. An insufficient appreciation of chance can wreak all kinds of mischief not only in sports, but also education, medicine, business, politics and elsewhere. Perfectly natural, random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the meaningless.

Freakonomics showed how economic calculations can explain seemingly counter-intuitive decision-making. Thinking, Fast and Slow, helped readers identify a host of small cognitive errors that can lead to miscalculations and irrational thought. In What the Luck? statistician and author, Gary Smith, sets himself a similar goal, and explains – in clear, understandable, and witty prose – how a statistical understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives.

Build Your Own Time Machine

There is no physical law to prevent time travel nothing in physics to say it is impossible. So who is to say it can’t be done? In Build Your Own Time Machine, acclaimed science writer Brian Clegg takes inspiration from his childhood heroes, Doctor Who and H. G. Wells, to explain the nature of time. How do we understand it and why measure it the way we do? How did the theories of one man change the way time was perceived by the world? Why wouldn’t H. G. Wells’s time machine have worked? And what would we need to do to make a real one?

Build Your Own Time Machine explores the amazing possibilities of quantum entanglement, superluminal speeds, neutron star cylinders and wormholes in space. Brian Clegg applies the most famous of Einstein’s theories, special and general relativity, to explain the real science of time travel and discover how possible it really is.

The Physics Of Superheroes

If superheroes stepped off the comic book page, could they actually work their wonders in a world constrained by the laws of physics? How strong would Superman have to be to ‘leap tall buildings in a single bound’? Could Storm of the ‘X-Men’ possibly control the weather?

James Kakalios provides an engaging and witty commentary while introducing the reader to classical and cutting-edge concepts in physics, including:

  • what Superman’s strength can tell us about the Newtonian physics of force, mass, and acceleration;
  • what villains like Electro and Magneto tell us about electricity and magnetism;
  • how Iceman’s powers show the principles of thermal dynamics;
  • what the Human Top can tell us about angular momentum;
  • why physics professors gone bad are the most dangerous evil geniuses… and more!

Amazing Story Quantum Mechanics

In the pulp magazines and comics of the 1950s, it was predicted that the future would be one of gleaming utopias, with flying cars, jetpacks, and robotic personal assistants. Obviously, things didn’t turn out that way. But the world we do have is actually more fantastic than the most outlandish predictions of science fiction from the mid-20th century. The internet, mobile phones and MRI machines have changed the world in unimaginable ways.

In The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics, James Kakalios explains the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and nuclear energy through speculative science fiction, space adventures, graphic novels and films that have led to technological innovations – breakthroughs that will make possible a future beyond our wildest imaginings. 

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