The anthropologist Gregory Bateson has been called a lost giant of twentieth-century thought. In the years following World War II, Bateson was among the group of mathematicians, engineers, and social scientists who laid the theoretical foundations of the information age. In Palo Alto in 1956, he introduced the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. By the sixties, he was in Hawaii studying dolphin communication. Bateson’s discipline hopping made established experts wary, but he found an audi...

**From the bestselling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493—an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world.In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will...

Elon Musk: entrepreneur, visionary, and the most disruptive businessman of the 21st century. This unauthorized autobiography tells his story in his own words — from a bullied child in South Africa to the co-founder of PayPal, and the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company.What drives a man to bet everything — repeatedly — on the impossible?Musk speaks candidly a...

J. D. Bernal, known as 'Sage', was an extraordinary man and multifaceted character. A scientist of dazzling intellectual ability and a leading figure in the development of X-ray crystallography, he was a polymath, a fervent Marxist, and much admired worldwide. Although he himself never won a Nobel Prize, several of his distinguished students went on to do so, including Dorothy Hodgkin, Max Perutz, and Aaron Klug. Andrew Brown has had unprecedented access to Bernal's papers and diaries, and...

Tubby Vielle briefly mentions his schooldays, falling in love with his future wife when he was 15 years old and the effect the Great Depression and fear of starvation in 1931 had on his future. He describes his flying training at the RAF College, Cranwell, his experience as a fighter pilot at Biggin Hill in 1934 and his two years as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm at the time of the Abyssinian war. He explains his several narrow escapes from being killed – due to his amazingly good luck which...

Includes:•Charles River Editors original biography of Johannes Kepler•David Brewsters biography of Kepler from The Martyrs of Science•Kepler by Walter W. BryantWe do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in or...

The Real Thing is the first official biography of Ian McTaggart Cowan (1910–2010), the “father of Canadian ecology.” Authorized by his family and with the research support and participation of the University of Victoria Libraries, Briony Penn provides an unprecedented and accessible window into the story of this remarkable naturalist. From his formative years roaming the mountains around Vancouver looking for venison to his last years finishing the voluminous and authoritative

Investigative journalist Richard Byrne Reilly has published the first biography of Peter Thiel, the controversial billionaire and contrarian behind some of the world's most powerful and disruptive technology companies. "Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life," an unauthorized microbiography published as an eBook, illuminates the world view of the man who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, became both the first outside investor in Facebook and the first institutional investor in the newly-legal...

The wide-ranging and delightful history of celebrated plant breeder Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden in early twentieth- century AmericaAt no other time in history has there been more curiosity or concern about the food we eat-and genetically modified foods, in particular, have become both pervasive and suspect. A century ago, however, Luther Burbank's blight-resistant potatoes, white blackberries, and plumcots-a plum-apricot hybrid-were celebrate...

Sono i VISIONARI della rivoluzione digitale che con i loro prodotti hanno completamente modificato, nell’ultimo decennio, il nostro modo di vivere.Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Linus Torvalds, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jimmy Wales, Dannis Crowley, Jack Dorsey, Chad Hurley, David Filo, Jerry Yang e Don Valentine.Le loro aziende sono Apple, Pixar, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Yahoo! ...

More famous in his day than Einstein or Edison, the troubled, solitary genius Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945) was the American father of rocketry and space flight, launching the world's first liquid-fuel rockets and the first powered vehicles to break the sound barrier. Supported by Charles Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim, through fiery, often explosive, experiments at Roswell, New Mexico, he invented the methods that carried men to the moon. Today, no rocket or jet plane can fly without usin...

He and his team are sent to Cairo in 1979 to plan the modernization of Egypts phone service. Phone service at that point is bad. Most of the time there is no dial tone. They think their work can be accomplished in about nine months, but Willis Culpepper of USAID tells them Schedules dont mean a thang here in Egypt. They learn that ARENTO wants technology transfer, plus system redesign, so the nine months will stretch to a year or two. Working with the Egyptians, they see the sorry state of...