Recommendations based on "You Are the Universe"
Based on your reading history, we think you will also enjoy the following books.
By James Stewart
**THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER**a comic about dinosaurs navigating the complexities of life, togetherincluding exclusive, never-seen-before, bonus comicsa wistful, honest and highly relatable account of modern life.dinosaur therapy is a book of cartoons for grown-ups from the very successful web comic @dinosaurcouch.in each comic, dinosaur characters grapple with questions around the meaning of life and mental health, trying to make sense of the world and cope with their own place in it.James Stewart's book 'Dinosaur Therapy' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 16-08-2021.
By Stanislas Dehaene
"Brings together the cognitive, the cultural, and the neurological in an elegant, compelling narrative. A revelatory work."--Oliver Sacks, M.D.The act of reading is so easily taken for granted that we forget what an astounding feat it is. How can a few black marks on white paper evoke an entire universe of meanings? It's even more amazing when we consider that we read using a primate brain that evolved to serve an entirely different purpose. In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene, author of How We Learn, explores every aspect of this human invention, from its origins to its neural underpinnings. A world authority on the subject, Dehaene reveals the hidden logic of spelling, describes pioneering research on hiw we process languages, and takes us into a new appreciation of the brain and its wondrous capacity to adapt.
By WALLACE-WELLS DAVID
**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**'An epoch-defining book' Matt Haig'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this' David Sexton, Evening StandardIt is worse, much worse, than you think.The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.
By Chris Impey
The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home.Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars. Worlds without End is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search for planets with the potential to host life.With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in 1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what’s behind this accelerating progress, what’s next, and what it might mean for humanity’s future.The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the definition of habitability to the changing shape of space exploration—as it expands beyond the interests of government to the pursuits of private industry—Worlds without End shows us the science, on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.
By John McWhorter
“An essay in origins … as theoretical as Hawking and Gorst in trying to see into the deep past. McWhorter is a clear and witty writer.”— Harper’sIn the first book written for the layperson about the natural history of language, linguistic professor John McWhorter ranges across linguistic theory, geography, history, and pop culture to tell the fascinating story of how thousands of very different languages have evolved from a single, original source in a natural process similar to biological evolution.There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment. Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.
By Brian Greene
From the world-renowned physicist, co-founder of the World Science Festival, and best-selling author of The Elegant Universe comes this utterly captivating exploration of deep time and humanity's search for purpose. Brian Greene takes readers on a breathtaking journey from the big bang to the end of time and invites us to ponder meaning in the face of this unimaginable expanse. He shows us how, from its original orderly state the universe has been moving inexorably toward chaos, and, still, remarkable structures have continually formed: the planets, stars, and galaxies that provide islands in a sea of disorder; biochemical mechanisms, including mutation and selection, animate life; neurons, information, and thought developed into complex consciousness which in turn gave rise to cultures and their timeless myths and creativity. And he describes, as well, how, in the deep reaches of the future, the nature of the universe will threaten the existence of matter itself. Through a series of nested stories Greene provides us with a clearer sense of how we came to be, a finer picture of where we are now, and a firmer understanding of where we are headed. Taken together, it is a completely new perspective on our place in the universe and on what it means to be human
By Stephen C. Meyer
The New York Times bestselling author of Darwin’s Doubt and Intelligent Design scholar presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology. In 2004, Stephen C. Meyer, one of the preeminent scientists studying the origins of life, ignited a firestorm of media and scientific controversy when a biology journal at the Smithsonian Institution published his peer-reviewed article advancing the theory of Intelligent Design. Then, in his two bestselling books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, he helped unravel a mystery that Charles Darwin did not address: how did life begin? and offered further scientific proof to bolster his arguments on the history of life and our origins, concluding that life was designed.In those previous books, Meyer purposely refrained from attempting to answer questions about “who” might have designed life. Now, in The Return of the God Hypothesis, he brings his ideas full circle, providing a reasoned and evidence-based answer to the ultimate mystery of the universe, drawn from recent scientific discoveries in physics, cosmology, and biology. Meyer uses three scientific points to refute popular arguments put forward by the “New Atheists” against the existence of God:The evidence from cosmology showing that the material universe had a beginning.The evidence from physics showing that, from the beginning, the universe was been “finely tuned” to allow for the possibility of life.The evidence from biology showing that since the universe came into being, large amounts of genetic information present in DNA must have arisen to make life possible.In analyzing the evidence from these three fields, Meyer reveals how the data support not just the existence of an intelligent designer of some kind—but the existence of a theistic creator.
By Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby
How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
By Jack Challoner
An accessible and engaging guide to the atom, the smallest, most fundamental constituent of matter.Until now, popular science has relegated the atom to a supporting role in defining the different chemical elements of the periodic table. In this book, Jack Challoner places the atom at center stage. The Atom investigates the quest to identify the smallest, most fundamental constituents of matter—and how that quest helps us to understand what everything is made of and how it all works. Challoner covers a wide range of topics—including the development of scientific thinking about atoms and the basic structure of atoms; how atomic interactions account for the familiar properties of everyday materials; the power of the atomic nucleus; and what the mysterious quantum realm of subatomic particles can tell us about the very nature of reality. Illustrated in color throughout, The Atom offers clear answers to questions we have all pondered, as well as some we have never even dreamed of. It describes the amazing discoveries scientists have made about the fundamental building blocks of matter—from quarks to nuclear fission to the “God particle”—and explains them accessibly and concisely. The Atom is the engaging and straightforward introduction to the topic that we didn't get in school.
By James Stewart
a comic about dinosaurs finding meaning, together from the international bestselling team behind dinosaur therapy, @dinosaurcouch including exclusive, never-before-seen bonus comics posing questions such as ‘do I exist?’, ‘how should I live?’, ‘what is beauty?’ in each comic, dinosaur characters explore how to exist in the modern world and meditate on what it means to ‘live well’. suitable for grown-ups.