Booklab

Featured Book: The Big Picture, by Sean Carroll. Do our lives have any significance in a universe of impersonal particles and forces and physical laws? That’s a big question – but a physicist with an eye on the big picture takes a shot at answering them. And on the nightstand: You Belong to the Universe, by Jonathon Keats; and Time Travel, by James Gleick.

Featured Book: The Gene, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The gene shapes who we are. While the science of genetics is still fairly young, it’s advancing at a breakneck speed. What will we do with this new knowledge?  And on the nightstand: Surfing Uncertainty, by Andy Clark; and Black Hole Blues, by Janna Levin.

Featured Book: Spooky Action at a Distance, by George Musser. Quantum entanglement is one of the strangest ideas in modern physics – and could end up changing the way we think about space and time. And on the nightstand: Why Information Grows, by César Hidalgo; and Inventology, by Pagan Kennedy.

Featured Book: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, by Lisa Randall. A physicist puts forward a bold idea about how the dinosaurs met their demise – and the role that an exotic kind of matter may have played. And on the nightstand:  The Brain, by David Eagleman; and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli.

Featured Books: Ada’s Algorithm, by James Essinger; and It Began with Babbage, by Subrata Dasgupta. Two new books look at the history of the computer – the invention that would usher in the modern age.

Two new books look at the history of our species, the rise of science, and how one puny primate conquered the planet: The Upright Thinkers, by Leonard Mlodinov; and Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari.

Featured Book: The Patient Will See You Now, by Eric Topol. Eric Topol says medicine itself has been sick for years – but he’s confident that we can use digital technology to improve the health care system. And on the nightstand:  On the Move, by Oliver Sacks; and The Clockwork Universe, by Edward Dolnick.

Featured Book: Mind Change, by Susan Greenfield. Digital technology is all around us, and there’s more of it every day. It’s changing the way we live our lives – and neuroscientist Susan Greenfield says it’s also affecting our brains. And on the nightstand: Invisible, by Philip Ball; and Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis.

Featured Book: The Island of Knowledge, by Marcelo Gleiser. Are there limits to what science can discover? Marcelo Gleiser says that no matter how far science progresses, there’s always something that’s unknowable. And on the nightstand:  Orfeo, by Richard Powers; and Why Does the World Exist? By Jim Holt.

Featured Book:  The Human Age, by Diane Ackerman. Human beings have completely transformed the planet, and even greater changes lie ahead.  According to Diane Ackerman, we must now harness human creativity and create the world we want to live in. And on the nightstand:  The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris; and Eureka! By Chad Orzel.

Featured Book:  Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom. Within a few decades, our computers could be smarter than we are.  According to Nick Bostrom, we should be afraid of where Artificial Intelligence may lead us. And on the nightstand:  Our Final Hour, by Martin Rees; and Tubes, by Andrew Blum.

Featured Book:  Colliding Worlds, by Arthur I. Miller. The art-science connection:  Over the last 50 years, the world of modern art has been completely transformed, Arthur I. Miller argues, because of the influence that modern science has had on art and artists. And on the nightstand:  Logicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou; and Only the Longest Threads, by Tasneem Zehra Husain.

Featured Book:  Consciousness and the Brain, by Stanislas Deheane. Stanislas Deheane tackles the problem of consciousness, and tells us how his own research is helping to explain how that three-and-a-half pound lump of squishy gray mater inside your head does what it does. And on the nightstand:  Time Reborn, by Lee Smolin; and The Idea Factory, by Jon Gertner.

Featured Book:  Our Mathematical Universe, by Max Tegmark. How many universes are there, anyway?  Physicist Max Tegmark says there could be an infinite number of them, and he argues the case in his latest book. And on the nightstand:  A Universe from Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss; and Me Myself and Why, by Jennifer Oullette.