Skip to main content

Authors - Y & Z

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


Kit Yates

Glen Yeffeth

Donald Yeomans

Ed Yong

Merry Youle

Josh Young

Rob Young (with Orrin Pilkey)

Nicolas Yunes (with Clifford Will)

  • Is Einstein Still Right? - black holes, gravitational waves, and the quest to verify Einstein's greatest creation ***

    • George Zaidan

    Paul Zak

    Jan Zalasiewicz

    Jan Zalasiewicz (with Mark Williams)

    A Zee

    Roger Zelazny

    Oscar Zarate (with J. P. McEvoy)

    Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz (with Roger Highfield)

    John Zerilli et al

  • A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence ****

    • Carl Zimmer

    Robert Zimmerman

    Hans Zinsser

    Lewis Ziska

    Robert Zubrin

    Marlene Zuk

    Gary Zukav

    Jason Zweig

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    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

    The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

    This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
    Post a Comment
    Read more

    Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

    In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
    Post a Comment
    Read more