On Gaia tests whether the hypothesis holds up to scientific scrutiny. Spiritual groups that hope to attract your interest may exhort you to “Be a part of something bigger than yourself!”
But James Lovelock would tell you that you can already check that off your to-do list. In the early 1970s, Lovelock—with the help of Lynn Margulis—developed the Gaia Hypothesis, which views the Earth and its ecosystems as resembling a sort of superorganism. Lovelock was working for NASA at the time, developing instruments that would aid the Viking landers in looking for signs of life on Mars, so he was thinking about how life interacts with its environment on a planetary scale. And Margulis was famed for her ideas about symbiosis. This intellectual background led to the idea that organisms are not just passive inhabitants riding a big rock that determined whether they lived or died. That evaluation is tricky, because the Gaia Hypothesis has continuously morphed since Lovelock first proposed it. However, there’s also the matter of whether “Gaia” could come about. Scientists create collection of essays about the subject of Nothing.
Paperback explores light bulbs, vacuums, dark energy and birth of timeIt stands ahead of autobiographies by Miranda Hart and footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic at No 4 in Sunday Times paperback non-fiction bestseller list By Larisa Brown Published: 02:00 GMT, 16 December 2013 | Updated: 09:23 GMT, 16 December 2013 Sorted: The ultimate present for the person who has everything is a book about nothing What Christmas present do you choose for the person who has everything?
A book of nothing, of course. Scientists have joined together to write a book about why nothing is the key to understanding absolutely everything. Human Evolution - An Illustrated Introduction, ... 7 Must-Read Books on Time. By Maria Popova What the second law of thermodynamics has to do with Saint Augustine, landscape art, and graphic novels.
Time is the most fundamental common denominator between our existence and that of everything else, it’s the yardstick by which we measure nearly every aspect of our lives, directly or indirectly, yet its nature remains one of the greatest mysteries of science. Last year, we devoured BBC’s excellent What Is Time? And today we turn to seven essential books that explore the grand question on a deeper, more multidimensional level, spanning everything from quantum physics to philosophy to art. It comes as no surprise to start with A Brief History of Time — legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s 1988 masterpiece, which is commonly considered the most important book in popular science ever published and one of our 10 essential primers on (almost) everything.
Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending: The Illustrated Theory of Everything: Steven Hawking. Stephen Hawking is widely believed to be one of the world’s greatest minds, a brilliant theoretical physicist whose work helped reconfigure models of the universe and define what’s in it.
Imagine sitting in a room listening to Hawking discuss these achievements and place them in historical context; it would be like hearing Christopher Columbus on the New World. Hawking presents a series of seven lectures—covering everything from big bang to black holes to string theory—that capture not only the brilliance of Hawking’s mind but his characteristic wit as well. Of his research on black holes, which absorbed him for more than a decade, he says, “It might seem a bit like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar.”
Hawking begins with a history of ideas about the universe, from Aristotle’s determination that the Earth is round to Hubble’s discovery, more than 2,000 years later, that the universe is expanding. Science. Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society: Bill Bryson. Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, with original contributions from "a glittering array of scientific writing talent" (Sunday Observer) including Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, Richard Holmes, Martin Rees, Richard Fortey, Steve Jones, James Gleick, and Neal Stephenson, among others, this incomparable book tells the spectacular story of science and the international Royal Society, from 1660 to the present.
Seeing Further is also gorgeously illustrated with photographs, documents, and treasures from the Society's exclusive archives. On a damp weeknight in November three hundred and fifty years ago, a dozen men gathered in London. After hearing an obscure twenty-eight-year-old named Christopher Wren lecture on the wonders of astronomy, his rapt audience was moved to create a society to promote the accumulation of useful—and fascinating—knowledge.