The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides

An engaging new history of the Royal Society of London, the club that created modern scientific thoughtFounded in 1660 to advance knowledge through experimentally verified facts, The Royal Society of

A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligenceCorrelation is not causation. This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why

How the study of causality revolutionized science and the world "Correlation does not imply causation." This mantra has been invoked by scientists for decades. But today, that taboo is dead. The caus

Borderline personality disorder, autism, narcissism, psychosis, Asperger's: All of these syndromes have one thing in common--lack of empathy. In some cases, this absence can be dangerous, but in other

The author of The Science of Everyday Life probes some of the mysteries of everyday life, including mosquitoes, baby-holding, skipping stones, Marvel comics, and "six degrees of separation," among oth

Humor, like pornography, is famously difficult to define. We know it when we see it, but is there any way to figure out what we really find funny? In this fascinating investigation into the science of

In this, the first full-length study of the Directorate of Science and Technology, Jeffrey T. Richelson walks us down the corridors of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and through the four deca

Philosopher and scientist Thomas Metzinger argues that neuroscience’s picture of the “self” as an emergent phenomenon of our biology and the attendant fact that the “self”

Do all questions have answers? How much can we know about the world? Is there such a thing as an ultimate truth?To be human is to want to know, but what we are able to observe is only a tiny portion o

"Do all questions have answers? How much can we know about the world? Is there such a thing as an ultimate truth? To be human is to want to know, to understand our origins and the meaning of our lives

In the early twentieth century, affection between parents and their children was discouraged?psychologists thought it would create needy kids, and doctors thought it would spread infectious disease. I

Consider the complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awesome to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell at a stroke, or to realize that it evolved with

We live immersed in thought. But do we actually know what a thought is? To answer this question, psychology professor Charles Fernyhough draws on everything from neuroscience to literary history to gr

Psychologists and philosophers have long grappled with the mysteries of dreaming, and now-thanks largely to recent innovations in brain imaging -neuroscientists are starting to join the conversation.

For the past 500 years, gamblers-led by mathematicians and scientists-have been trying to figure out how to pull the rug out from under Lady Luck. In The Perfect Bet, mathematician and award-winning w

Since it was first published in 1993, Creating Minds has served as a peerless guide to the creative self. Now available as a paperback reissue with a new introduction by the author, the book uses port

The medieval Catholic Church, widely considered a source of intolerance and inquisitorial fervor, was not anti-science during the Dark Ages?in fact, the pope in the year 1000 was the leading mathemati

The medieval Catholic Church, widely considered a source of intolerance and inquisitorial fervor, was not anti-science during the Dark Ages—in fact, the pope in the year 1000 was the leading mat

We’re used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self e

The strange, disquieting, and sometimes delicious story of humanity’s love affair with meatIn Meathooked, Marta Zaraska explores what she calls the meat paradox.” Scientific journals overflow with rep

Focused specifically on seven influential individuals--Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi--born between 1856 and 1894 under the influence of Western European culture, this

Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries. In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the sev

Inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert's pursuit of the fundamental rules of mathematics, some of the most brilliant minds of the generation came tog

From economic meltdowns to how people cooperate, there is much about the human world that eludes our understanding. John Miller, a leading expert in the computational study of complex adaptive systems

From roulette tables to racetracks, a fascinating look at how science and math are taking Lady Luck down a peg