Skip to main content

Authors - P

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z


Antonio Padilla

Ra Page

Stephanie Pain

Abraham Pais

Mark Pallen

Douglas Palmer

Stephen Palmer

Tim Palmer

Alexei Panshin

Richard Panek

Giorgio Parisi

Jason Parisi (with Justin Ball)

Michael Alan Park

Silvia Park

Andew Parker

Matt Parker

John Parrington

Paul Parsons

Heinrich Pässe

William Patrick (with John Cacioppo)

Gregory S. Paul

Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Sophie Pavelle

Tony Peake

Fred Pearce

Iain Pears

Robin Pemantle (with Julian Gould)

George Pendle

Robert Penn

Eliot Peper

Delia Perlov (with Alex Vilenkin)

John Perry (with Jack Challoner)

Peter Pesic

Jonas Peters (with Nicolai Meinhausen)

Sam Peters

Carolyn Collins Petersen

Andrew Petto (with Laurie Godfrey)

Patricia Pierce

Alexis Mari Pietak

Telmo Pievani (trans. Michael Gerard Kenyon)

Orrin Pilkey (with Rob Young)

Stephen Pincock

Adolfo Plasencia

Robert Plomin

Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl (with Cyril Kornbluth)

John Polkinghorne

Henry Pollack

Michael Pollan

Justin Pollard

Andrew Pontoon

Antonino del Popolo

Roy Porter (with William Bynum)

Stefanie Posavec (with Miriam Quick)

William Poundstone

Emmanuelle Pouydebat (trans. Erik Butler)

Richard Powers

Thomas Povey

Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett (with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)

Tim Pratt

Diana Preston

Louisa Preston

Frans Pretorius (with Steven Gubser)

Christopher Priest

John Prior

Joel Primack (with Nancy Ellen Abrams)

Lawrence Principe

David Prothero

Donald Prothero

Oliver Pugh (with Brian Clegg)

Oliver Pugh (with Tom Whyntie)

Robert Michael Pyle

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more