Terrific opportunity to get science fiction with good science at a bargain price

The German publisher Springer has an impressive set of science fiction titles written by scientists (with a few science fiction-related non-fiction) - the only problem with them is that they are usually priced like textbooks.

However, they currently have an unbelievably good value offer, running to 28 September 2016. They have three bundles of e-books, one with 6 titles, another with 12 and another with 16. Each bundle has a minimum price - and you can decide how your payment is spread between Springer and charity.

Remarkably, the 6 e-book bundle costs just $1 (around £0.76) - though you can pay as much more as you like, bearing in mind the charity contribution. Add another 6 e-books for a minimum of $8 (£6.06) or the full set of 16, which includes the chunkier non-fiction, for $15 (£11.36) or more.

The bundles include The Hunt for FOXP5, On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea, The Caloris Network and If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens...

This is a brilliant initiative and well worth supporting - plus you get lots of great reading for a bargain price. Click the image below to go to the Humble Book Bundle page.

by Brian Clegg

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The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically? Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

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