IgNobel prizes : the annals of improbable research London : Orion, 2002 Marc Abrahams Science , Awards , Miscellanea Hardcover. 319 p. : ill., ports. ; 23 cm. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG
For 10 years the august scientists of Harvard University have scoured the world’s research establishments for the most bizarre and weird real-life scientific research.
The Ig Nobel Prize honours individuals whose achievements in science cannot or should not be reproduced. 10 prizes are given to people who have done remarkably bizarre things in science over the previous year. The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony is held in October. Prizes are awarded by genuine Nobel laureates.
The ‘Igs’ are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative and shine a grubby spotlight onto the weird corners of laboratories around the world.
PAST WINNERS: Peter Fong’s experiment in which he fed Prozac to clams (Ig Nobel Biology Prize, 1998) on the basis that if they chilled out more they’d taste better.
Harold Hillman’s report on ‘The Possible Pain Experienced during Execution by Different Methods’ (Ig Nobel Peace Prize, 1997)
Jerald Bain and Kerry Siminoski’s examination of The Relationship among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size (Ig Nobel Statistics Prize, 1998).
Masumi Wakita (Ig Nobel Psychology Prize, 1995) and their achievement in training pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet
Richard Seed (Ig Nobel Economics Prize, 1997) and his plan to clone himself and other human beings.
Ida Sabelis (Ig Nobel Biology 2000) for Magnetic resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal
The book will look behind the scenes of these landmark researchers and feature the weirdest research from a hundred years of science.
Reading the rocks : the autobiography of the earth Cambridge, MA : Westview Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group, c 2005 Marcia Bjornerud Geology Hardcover. x, 237 p. ; 22 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-226) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG
To many of us, the Earth’s crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated narratives, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation. For more than four billion years, in beach sand, granite, and garnet schists, the planet has kept a rich and idiosyncratic journal of its past.
Fulbright Scholar Marcia Bjornerud takes the reader along on an eye-opening tour of Deep Time, explaining in elegant prose what we see and feel beneath our feet. Both scientist and storyteller, Bjornerud uses anecdotes and metaphors to remind us that our home is a living thing with lessons to teach.
She opines how our planet has long maintained a delicate balance, and how the global give-and-take has sustained life on Earth through numerous upheavals. But with the rapidly escalating effects of human beings on their home planet, that cosmic balance is being threatened—and the consequences may be catastrophic.
Containing a glossary and detailed timescale, as well as vivid descriptions and historic accounts, Reading the Rocks is literally a history of the world, for all friends of the Earth.
Symmetry : a journey into the patterns of nature New York, NY : Harper, c 2008 Marcus du Sautoy Symmetry (Mathematics) Hardcover. “First published in Great Britain as Finding Moonshine in 2008 by Fourth Estate”, T.p. verso. 1st U.S. ed. and printing. 376 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [355]-359) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG
Symmetry is all around us. Our eyes and minds are drawn to symmetrical objects, from the pyramid to the pentagon. Of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world, this unique, pervasive phenomenon indicates a dynamic relationship between objects. In chemistry and physics, the concept of symmetry explains the structure of crystals or the theory of fundamental particles; in evolutionary biology, the natural world exploits symmetry in the fight for survival; and symmetry—and the breaking of it—is central to ideas in art, architecture, and music.
Combining a rich historical narrative with his own personal journey as a mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy takes a unique look into the mathematical mind as he explores deep conjectures about symmetry and brings us face-to-face with the oddball mathematicians, both past and present, who have battled to understand symmetry’s elusive qualities. He explores what is perhaps the most exciting discovery to date—the summit of mathematicians’ mastery in the field—the Monster, a huge snowflake that exists in 196,883-dimensional space with more symmetries than there are atoms in the sun.
What is it like to solve an ancient mathematical problem in a flash of inspiration? What is it like to be shown, ten minutes later, that you’ve made a mistake? What is it like to see the world in mathematical terms, and what can that tell us about life itself? In Symmetry, Marcus du Sautoy investigates these questions and shows mathematical novices what it feels like to grapple with some of the most complex ideas the human mind can comprehend.
Ice : the nature, the history, and the uses of an astonishing substance New York : Knopf, 2005 Mariana Gosnell Ice Hardcover. 1st ed. x, 560 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 523-535) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG
Like the adventurer who circled an iceberg to see it on all sides, Mariana Gosnell, former Newsweek reporter and author of Zero Three Bravo, a book about flying a small plane around the United States, explores ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance.
More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans. In nature it is found in myriad forms, from the delicate needle ice that crunches underfoot in a winter meadow to the massive, centuries-old ice that forms the world’s glaciers. Scientists theorize that icy comets delivered to Earth the molecules needed to get life started, and ice ages have shaped much of the land as we know it.
Here is the whole world of ice, from the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes. Mariana Gosnell writes about frostbite and about the recently discovered 5,000-year-old body of a man preserved in an Alpine glacier. She discusses the work of scientists who extract cylinders of Greenland ice to study the history of the earth’s climate and try to predict its future. She examines ice in plants, icebergs, icicles, and hail; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. She writes of the many uses humans make of ice, including ice-skating, ice fishing, iceboating, and ice climbing; building ice roads and seeding clouds; making ice castles, ice cubes, and iced desserts.
Ice is a sparkling illumination of the natural phenomenon whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in. It is a pleasure to read, and important to read—for its natural science and revelations about ice’s influence on our everyday lives, and for what it has to tell us about our environment today and in the future.
Measuring eternity : the search for the beginning of time New York : Broadway Books, 2001 Martin Gorst Earth Age, Geological time Hardcover. 1st Broadway Books ed. and printing. 338 p. : ill. ; 20 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [311]-313) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG
The untold story of the religious figures, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and mathematicians who, for more than four hundred years, have pursued the answer to a fundamental question at the intersection of science and religion: When did the universe begin?
The moment of the universe’s conception is one of science’s Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher, who lost his sight during the fifty years it took him to compose his Annals of all known history, now famous only for one date: 4004 b.c. Ussher’s date for the creation of the world was spectacularly inaccurate, but that didn’t stop it from being so widely accepted that it was printed in early twentieth-century Bibles. As writer and documentary filmmaker Martin Gorst vividly illustrates in this captivating, character-driven narrative, theology let Ussher down just as it had thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many before him. Geology was next to fail the test of time. In the eighteenth century, naturalist Comte de Buffon, working out the rate at which the earth was supposed to have cooled, came up with an age of 74,832 years, even though he suspected this was far too low. Biology then had a go in the hands of fossil hunter Johann Scheuchzer, who alleged to have found a specimen of a man drowned at the time of Noah’s flood. Regrettably it was only the imprint of a large salamander.
And so science inched forward via Darwinism, thermodynamics, radioactivity, and, most recently, the astronomers at the controls of the Hubble space telescope, who put the beginning of time at 13.4 billion years ago (give or take a billion). Taking the reader into the laboratories and salons of scholars and scientists, visionaries and eccentrics, Measuring Eternity is an engagingly written account of an epic, often quixotic quest, of how individuals who dedicated their lives to solving an enduring mystery advanced our knowledge of the universe.
Civilization and the Limpet Reading, Mass. : Perseus Books, c 1998 Martin Wells Marine animals Hardcover. First edition and printing. x, 209 p. ; 22 cm. Includes Index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG
Written during a long sea voyage from England through the Mediterranean, Civilization and the Limpet unveils many fascinating phenomena of undersea life. Wells captures with exquisite detail how limpets, like bees, navigate by the stars; how the brainless sea urchin makes a myriad of critical survival decisions every day; how “deserted islands” teem with an incredible abundance of animal life; and why deep-diving whales never get the bends. Elegant and finely crafted, Civilization and the Limpet will enlighten, amuse, and awe anyone interested in the natural world.
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