Cosmic Anger

Biography of Abdus Salam, the first citizen of Pakistan to win a Nobel Prize, who was nevertheless branded as a heretic and excommunicated from his home country, where his achievements are often overlooked, even besmirched. Instead, he acted out his dreams on an wider stage, as a citizen of the world.

Rage, resentment, envy, jealousy, and hatred— these emotions seem to dominate our times. They rule our highways, our workplaces, our homes, and our hearts. In this provocative book of essays, writer Garret Keizer considers anger in all its baffling forms. Poignantly aware of his own temper, and of his ties to a religion that glorifies meekness, the author looks at anger as a paradox in our struggle to remain human in the midst of an infuriating world. Interweaving personal anecdotes, mythological stories, sacred texts, and Keizer's insightful observations, The Enigma of Anger will prove a welcome companion for anyone who has ever wrestled with wrath-or wished to make better use of it.

These dialogues between Robert Aitken Roshi, one of the first American-born Zen masters, and Brother David Steindl-Rast, the Roman Catholic monk and hermit, took place during a week-long retreat the two old friends undertook in 1991 in a remote part of the island of Hawaii. Their aim was to approach the dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity in a fresh way, one that takes as its starting point a comparison of the personal experiences of the dialoguers—as a Buddhist and as a Christian, respectively—rather than abstract concepts. The result is the discovery of a surprising amount of common ground—the kind of shared experience that forms a solid foundation for further dialogue.

This ethical context is a productive frame of reference for interpreting the strange artificiality of Senecan tragedy, the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds, events, and people are literary constructs. In Troades for example Achilles' ghost and its vengeance is represented both as an inexorable dramatic reality and the creature of a fabula to be dismissed as a malignant fiction."--BOOK JACKET.

In honor of one of the most prolific and exciting scientists of the second half of the last century, a memorial meeting was organized by the Institute of Advanced Studies at Nanyang Technological University for Professor Abdus Salam's 90th Birthday in January 2016. Salam believed that "scientific thought is the common heritage of all mankind" and that the developing world should play its part, not merely by importing technology but by being the arbiter of its own scientific destiny. That belief saw him rise from humble beginnings in a village in Pakistan to become one of the world's most original and influential particle physicists, culminating in the 1979 Nobel Prize (shared with Glashow and Weinberg) for contributions to electroweak unification, which forms an integral part of the Standard Model. The book collected the papers presented at this memorable event which saw many distinguished scientists participating as speakers to reflect on Prof Salam's great passion for the science and achievements.

We are living in a Golden Age of physics. With the mind of a scientist and the skill of a journalist, bestselling author and renowned physicist Frank Close gives us an insider's look at one of the most inspiring - and challenging - scientific breakthroughs of our time: the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. About 40 years ago, 3 brilliant, yet little-known scientists made breakthroughs that later inspired the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva: a 27-kilometre-long machine which has already cost $10 billion, taken 20 years to build and now promises to reveal how the universe itself came to be. The Infinity Puzzle is the inside story of those 40 years of research, breakthrough and endeavour. The work of Peter Higgs, Gerard 't Hooft and James Bjorken is explored here, played out across the decades against a backdrop of high politics, low behaviour and billion-dollar budgets. In The Infinity Puzzle, eminent physicist and award-winning author Frank Close writes from within the action and draws upon his close friendships with those involved.

The Golden Yoke is a remarkable achievement. It is the first elaboration of the legal, cultural, and ideological dimensions of precommunist Tibetan jurisprudence, a unique legal system that maintains its secularism within a thoroughly Buddhist setting. Layer by layer, Rebecca Redwood French reconstructs the daily operation of law in Tibet before the Chinese invasion in 1959. In the Tibetans' own words, French identifies their courts, symbols, and personnel and traces the procedures for petitioning and filing documents. There are stories here from judges, legal conciliators, and lay people about murder, property disputes, and divorce. French shows that Tibetan law is deeply embedded in its Buddhist culture and that the system evolved not from the rules and judgments but from what people actually do and say. In what amounts to a fully developed cosmology, she describes the cultural foundation that informs the system: myths, notions of time and conflux, inner morality, language patterns, rituals, use of space, symbols, and concepts. Based on extensive readings of Tibetan legal documents and codes, interviews with Tibetan scholars, and the reminiscences of Tibetans at home and in exile, this generously illustrated, elegantly written work is a model of outstanding research. French combines the talents of a legal anthropologist with those of a former law practitioner to develop a new field of study that has implications for other judicial systems, including our own.