Science S Most Wanted

Science and technology have had more than their share of the good, the bad, and the bogus. Alfred William Lawson, the designer of the first airliner, believed that two types of creatures lived within the brain Menorgs, A which were the mental organizers responsible for all good things, and Disorgs, A which infect all cells with disorganization. Chonosuke Okamura collected and catalogued what he thought were tiny men and animals, all 1/100-inch long, which most geologists think are actually mineral grains. Peter Fong found that the expression happy as a clamA had a scientific basis when he tested the effects of Prozac on fingernail clams. The dashing figure of dinosaur hunter Roy Chapman Andrews was the model upon which Indiana Jones was based. Physician John Brinkley believed that consuming goat glands would restore youth and virility. In keeping with the format of the popular Most WanteduA Series, this new volume comprises sixty top-ten lists. These include worst ideas by great scientists, most unlikely inventors, greatest unsolved mysteries, most ridiculous attempts at flight, biggest hoaxes, most suppressed inventions, and top UFO sightings. Science's Most Wantedushows how throughout history, mankind has tried, often wildly unsuccessfully, to come to grips with lifeas biggest questions."

The long-awaited memoir by Fang Lizhi, the celebrated physicist whose clashes with the Chinese regime helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests Fang Lizhi was one of the most prominent scientists of the People's Republic of China; he worked on the country's first nuclear program and later became one of the world's leading astrophysicists. His devotion to science and the pursuit of truth led him to question the authority of the Communist regime. That got him in trouble. In 1957, after advocating reforms in the Communist Party, Fang -- just twenty-one years old -- was dismissed from his position, stripped of his Party membership, and sent to be a farm laborer in a remote village. Over the next two decades, through the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he was alternately denounced and rehabilitated, revealing to him the pettiness, absurdity, and horror of the regime's excesses. He returned to more normal work in academia after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, but the cycle soon began again. This time his struggle became a public cause, and his example helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests. Immediately after the crackdown in June 1989, Fang and his wife sought refuge in the U.S. embassy, where they hid for more than a year before being allowed to leave the country. During that time Fang wrote this memoir The Most Wanted Man in China, which has never been published, until now. His story, told with vivid detail and disarming humor, is a testament to the importance of remaining true to one's principles in an unprincipled time and place.

An accessible account of the work leading up to the monumental discovery of the Higgs boson, from one of the physicists who was there. Particle physics as we know it depends on the Higgs boson: It’s the missing link between the birth of our universe—as a sea of tiny, massless particles—and the tangible world we live in today. But for more than 50 years, scientists wondered: Does it exist? Physicist Jon Butterworth was at the frontlines of the hunt for the Higgs at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider—perhaps the most ambitious experiment in history. In Most Wanted Particle, he gives us the first inside account of that uncertain time, when an entire field hinged on a single particle, and life at the cutting edge of science meant media scrutiny, late-night pub debates, dispiriting false starts in the face of intense pressure, and countless hours at the collider itself. As Butterworth explains, our first glimpse of the elusive Higgs brings us a giant step closer to understanding the universe—and points the way to an entirely new kind of physics. Praise for Most Wanted Particle “Butterworth is an insider’s insider. His narrative seethes with insights on the project’s science, technology and “tribes,” as well as his personal (and often amusing) journey as a frontier physicist.” —Nature “A vivid account of what the process of discovery was really like for an insider.” —Peter Higgs, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics “If you want to know why the discovery of the Higgs boson matters, read this book!” —Brian Cox, author of Why Does E=mc2?

First published in 1989, this dictionary of the whole field of the physical sciences is an invaluable guide through the changing terminology and practices of scientific research. Arranged alphabetically, it traces how the meaning of scientific terms have changed over time. It covers a wide range of topics including voyages, observations, magnetism and pendulums, and central subjects such as atom, valency and energy. There are also entries on more abstract terms such as hypothesis, theory, induction, deduction, falsification and paradigm, emphasizing that while science is more than ‘organized common sense’ it is not completely different from other activities. Science’s lack of innocence is also recognized in headings like pollution and weapons. This book will be a useful resource to students interested in the history of science.

America's capital gets the Most Wanted™ treatment