Paul Parsons (1)Rezensionen

This breaks down so many important concepts of quantum physics into easily digestible snippets. I definitely recommend as a starting point and reference for anyone interested in quantum theory. The pictures are a nice add but some of them do not really add to the understanding of the theory and I think some of them could have been a little more clear in what was trying to be shown

This is a faboo reference book which isn't really meant to be read from cover-to-cover for most people. Every element up through atomic #100 has a one page describing it and a picture. The description page lists some basic info like melting and boiling points along with the etymology of both the name and the symbol, how it was discovered, ores it's found in, uses (if any) of the element, and some other interesting information about it. The picture is either of a pure sample, an ore sample from which it can be isolated, or in the case of the high atomic # elements, the equipment used to create it.

Four elements are unnamed in the book but that's only because they were recently named and the book has a 2013 copyright. It also has a glossary and an index. The only negative I can find is a nitpick and is a personal one for me. I dislike those circle electron valence shell diagrams!

As I wrote above, this is a great reference book for anyone from a youngster interested in chemistry to chemistry instructors or just anyone who wants to know more about elements. You can use it to look up a specific element or just randomly dip into it. What really sells it and makes it interesting to me is:

1) Nice, thick paper which makes it durable.
2) Low price which makes it easily accessible to more people.
3) The awesome pictures!

This book goes right into my go-to section for chemistry bookshelves!

Fantastic book! If you love Doctor Who and science, you may not be able to put this down. (Even if you've read it 3 times already.)

More thought provoking and mind expanding stuff. I learn new things and increas my faith and awe with each of these 30 second books!

If you like Doctor Who and have ever wondered just how the wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff works, or whether any of the alien races and technological achievements portrayed on the show could actually exist, this is the book for you. There are over 20 chapters, each discussing a different scientific concept. I particularly liked the discussions of the Slitheen and Sontarans, among other aliens. The physics chapters seemed interesting, but physics and string theory and multiverses are a bit of a dead zone in my brain, so they did not hold my attention very well. Those with more experience or knowledge of physics will probably find those chapters more enjoyable than I did. I'd recommend this to fans of New Who especially; a lot of references are made to Nine and Ten, so anyone who hasn't seen these episodes might receive mild spoilers.½

A very intriguing reference to "the 50 most thought-provoking theories in Science." Containing a series of brief synopses of some very interesting and indeed thought-provoking theories from the more well known Theory of Relativity, Laws of Motion, and Global Warming; to the lesser known (at least to me) Out of Africa theory, Gaia theory, and the Small World hypothesis (which is now a study I wish to be a part of).

This book is an excellent reference for some pretty big ideas that can be delved into with more depth for those interested. There is even a list of resources including books, magazines/articles, and websites the reader can visit for more information.

Definitely worth it for the armchair scientist.

This is a lighthearted but thought provokingly credible attempt to look at the scientific plausibility and feasibility of phenomena seen in Doctor Who, such as faster than light travel, regeneration, Dalek and Cybermen development, the Eye of Harmony, E-Space, sonic screwdrivers, etc. Some of these are reasonable extrapolations of current or near future science, some based on real world theoretical concepts, others flat out impossible. Good fun and one can learn a fair bit as well. 4/5

Su vida, sus teorías y su influencia.

Format designed to be dipped into, with each page giving a very brief overview of a section within a section. Lots of fun graphics, little snippets of interest, and on the whole the items were well written and highly accessible - especially the first one by Michael Brooks. But for some of the articles, I thought it was just too brief to give you any flavour at all of what was written, and I was left frustrated. Perhaps this format would work better focusing on a tighter field than all scientific theories?

This is a brief review, NOT of this book, but of the format: three minutes . . . . I laughed at first: how ridiculous, I thought. Stephen Hawking in three-minute "sound bites," reduced to print.

But wait a minute. I am NOT a physicist. Even Hawking's popular science books are well beyond me. I could/would never devote three hours to a book by or about him, much less the time and effort it would take me to decipher a serious work. However, as I discovered years ago , if I want to learn something about a topic about which I know next to nothing, the best thing I can do is to go to the children's collection in the nearest public library. Good children's books, even those for pre-kindergarten children, are accurate and succinct. Furthermore, they are likely to be simpler, clearer, more comprehensible, and more engaging than any adult encyclopedia, handbook, or book meant for popular consumption. (Books on such topics designed for popular consumption all too often are intended, not for reading, but for library shelves or coffee tables or the "gotta-read-this-someday" stack in the bathroom -- in other words, they are published to be bought but not to be read.)

These "3-minute" books have come up with a format that serves the same purpose as well-written chilldren's books. They too can be accurate and must be succinct. For the person who simply wants to be "culturally literate," to have a general understanding of topics referred to in the news and bounced around in intellectual circles, such a presentation is exactly what is needed: simple but accurate, clear but interesting.

This book is divided into three sections (life, theories, influence), each with twenty 3-minute pages -- adding up to a total of three hours. I've checked them out; they are almost exactly that. Each 3-minute page has a title, three one-minute paragraphs with subheadings, a 3-second summary, cross references, and a brief, pithy quotation.

Now this particular book, I must admit, is not particularly well-done. It's jumpy, repetitious, and a bit haphazard. But it's the format I'm reviewing, and I must tell you that, in spite of its somewhat amateurish writing, this book has kept me engaged and has left me a bit better informed than I was before purchasing it. The three one-minute paragraphs could sometimes be more closely related, the relationships among them clearer; the 3-second briefs are just window dressing, of little or no value. The full-page illustrations facing each 3-minute page are attractive, well-designed, colorful and delightful, sometimes even informative, but they are not necessary to the format.

I must confess that, though I have read the first three pages of the "theories" section is this book -- devoted to Einstein's special relativity, general relativity, and black holes -- I don't understand any of these concepts better than I did to begin with. In fact, I've read them three times each, determined to comprehend. Oh, I have the vocabulary, terms I can use as if I were knowledgeable, but I have only the vaguest notion of what they mean.

Black holes, for instance, are such intense centers of gravity that if you fell over the edge into one, you would be turned into spaghetti. Wow! But just exactly what gravity is and how it gets intensified in these centers is still beyond me. So I can throw around the term, but be no more knowledgeable than I was before.

As a whole, however, the format is genuinely commendable. I would love to see similar books on Freud, Jung, quantum physics, Michael Foucault, John Dewey, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Norbert Wiener, Steve Jobs, igor Stravinsky, Frank Gehry, Allen Ginsberg, post-structuralism, Noh drama, ballet, Wagner, Verdi, DNA, and many, many more topics.

So for the format four and a half stars; for this book as an example -- well maybe one and a half.½

The title of this book almost seems like a bit of an oxymoron, given that we're talking about a TV show whose iconic technobabble catchphrase is "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow," in cheerful denial of the fact that neutrons don't have a polarity, and whose technology largely tends to be of the "indistinguishable from magic" kind. But while you could doubtless write a whole book on the bad science of Doctor Who, this one takes an entirely different approach. Instead, it focuses on tying various ideas used by the TV series into real-world scientific concepts (although often very speculative ones) and technologies that are at least being considered as future possibilities by real-world scientists. So we get answers to questions like, "What use would it be to have two hearts?" and "Is time travel theoretically possible?" and "Could you make a screwdriver a little more sonic?" Alien death rays and stun weapons lead to descriptions of cutting-edge military technology, the Cybermen serve as a jumping-off point to talk about cybernetic implants, a chapter on the Daleks features a discussion about genetic engineering, and so on. There's even an odd bit about what happens in your brain when you get scared of the monsters on your TV set and hide behind the sofa.

Unsurprisingly, it's all pretty simplified and superficial. And I don't think it's nearly as good a book as, say, The Physics of Star Trek, perhaps partly because Star Trek at least pretends to take its science seriously, even if it fudges a lot of things and gets a lot wrong, so there's more to sink your teeth into there. But it is fairly pleasant, and it may be a fun read for Who fans who have some curiosity about real-world science but not a lot of knowledge.½

Don’t think this is Science for Dummies or that simply because it is bite-sized an explanation is easy to swallow: if you dropped science before Matric, this is not the right place to pick it up again.

If however you’re just a bit rusty on xenotransplants, magneto hydrodynamics, abiogenesis, quarks and the like, and want a quick 100 word précis to bring you back up to speed, Science 1001 is probably just the book you need.

As long as you are not misled into thinking that this is Science 101, you will find explanations ranging over the entire spectrum from physics to chemistry, biology and space – even social and applied science. A brilliant book – for boffins.

Basic sketches of pieces of physics, biology, chemistry, planetology, cosmology, etc, all hung on the many hooks provided by the epic BBC science-fiction show _Doctor Who_. All periods of the show are covered -- from 1963 to 2010, and all eleven incarnations of the Doctor so far. It occurs to me that, if it were directed only at evolution deniers and other anti-knowledge types, one might be tempted to approve of the Daleks' mantra of "Seek! Locate! Exterminate!" A fun read.