* How can sprinter Usain Bolt break his world record without running any faster?* Why do high-jumpers use the Fosbury Flop?* What's the best strategy for taking penalties in football?* What statistical advantage do left-handed boxers have over their right-handed opponents?* And did you know that gymnasts can experience stronger g-forces than roller-coaster designers are allowed to cr...

How do you begin to understand the concept of nothing?Where does it begin and where does it end?From the zeros of the mathematician to the void of the philosophers, from Shakespeare to the empty set, from the ether to the quantum vacuum, from being and nothingness to creatio ex nihilo, there is much ado about nothing at the heart of things.Recent exciting discoveries in astronomy are shown to shed new light on the nature of the vacu...

'If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.' John von NeumannMathematics can tell you things about the world that can't be learned in any other way. This hugely informative and wonderfully entertaining Brain Shot answers a few essential questions about existence. It unravels the knotty, clarifies the conundrums and sheds light into dark corners. From winning the lottery, financial investment ...

A leading cosmologist explains our current understanding of space and timeThere was immense excitement in the scientific community and among the general public when the COBE space probe sent back data that proved not only that the Big Bang had happened but also that it had happened at more or less exactly the time that astronomers had calculated. Barrow describes these finds and then goes on to explain how they allow us to reach back and shed light upon events at t...

'If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.' John von NeumannMathematics can tell you things about the world that can't be learned in any other way. This hugely informative and wonderfully entertaining Brain Shot answers a few essential questions about existence. It unravels the knotty, clarifies the conundrums and sheds light into dark corners. From winning the lottery, financial investment ...

What can maths tell us about sports?100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know About Sport sheds light on the mysteries of running, jumping, swimming and points scoring across the whole sporting spectrum. Whether you are a competitor striving to go faster or higher, or an armchair enthusiast wanting to understand more, this is a fascinating read with one hundred short pieces that range across a wide number of sports. Find out:* Wh...

“Where else does math become a romp, full of entertaining tricks and turns?”—Bryce Christensen, BooklistHave you ever considered why you always get stuck in the longest line? Why two’s company but three’s a crowd? Or why there are six degrees of separation instead of seven? In this hugely informative and endlessly entertaining book, John D. Barrow takes the most baffling of everyday phenomena and—with simple math, lucid explanations, and illustrations—expl...

The constants of nature are the numbers that define the essence of the Universe. They tell us how strong its forces are, and what its fundamental laws can do: the strength of gravity, of magnetism, the speed of light, and the masses of the smallest particles of matter. They encode the deepest secrets of the Universe and express at once our greatest knowledge and our greatest ignorance about the cosmos. Their existence has taught us the profound truth that Nature abounds with unseen regular...

What can maths tell us about art and design?Professor John D. Barrow has all the answers. In 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know About Maths and the Arts, he shows us that mathematics and the arts are not so far removed from each other. He takes us on a 100-step tour, guiding us through art forms as various as sculpture, literature, architecture and dance, and reveals what maths can tell us about the mysteries of the worlds of art and desi...

* Certain key images embody our understanding of life and the universe we inhabit. Some, like Robert Hooke's first microscopic views of the natural world, or the stunning images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, were made possible by our new technical capabilities.* Others, like the first graph, were breathtakingly simple but perennially useful. Vesalius's haunting pictures of the human anatomy w...

There is no more profound, enduring or fascinating question in all of science than that of how time, space, and matter began. Now John Barrow, who has been at the cutting edge of research in this area and has written extensively about it, guides us on a journey to the beginning of time, into a world of temperatures and densities so high that we cannot recreate them in a laboratory. With new insights, Barrow draws us into the latest speculative theories about the nature of time and the "inf...

‘A delight. Popular science doesn’t come much better than this’ IndependentEverything you might want to know about infinity - in history and all the way to today's cutting-edge science.Infinity is surely the strangest idea that humans have ever had. Where did it come from and what is it telling us about our Universe? Can there actually be infinities? Can you do an infinite number of things in a finite amount of time? Is the Univers...