Feb 11
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Subliminal | Leonard Mlodinow

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior © 2012 Pantheon Books: Random House 260 pages Mlodinow has a knack for delving into specific fields of science that do not receive a lot of attention and popularizing them. He did this with randomness in The Drunkard’s Walk, and now he’s back with Social Neuroscience in Subliminal. The [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Dec 31
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The Universe Within | Neil Turok

The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos © 2012 Anansi Press 292 pages I love scientists who make physics comprehensible. After hearing Neil Turok interviewed on Quirks & Quarks, I knew that I needed to read his Massey Lectures. In The Universe Within, Turok covers every scale imaginable. He is equally at home explaining quantum mechanics and [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Jun 04
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The 4% Universe | Richard Panek

The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality © 2011 Mariner Books: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt xviii+297 pages It turns out physicists and astronomers are not exempt from the squabbles and power-struggles of office politics. That’s Panek’s take-away in The 4 Percent Universe. It’s sad, really. I [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Mar 19
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The Drunkard’s Walk | Leonard Mlodinow

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives © 2008 Vintage (Random House) xi+252 The Drunkard’s Walk is science writing at its best. You start with someone who knows what their talking about. Mlodinow has a PhD in physics from the Berkeley and teaches at Caltech. If that’s not enough for you, he co-wrote A [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Dec 05
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For the Love of Physics | Walter Lewin

For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge Of Time – A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics © 2011 Free Press: Simon & Schuster xvi+302 pages Like a lot of people, I was introduced to Walter Lewin through his compelling physics lectures from MIT, which are freely available [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Oct 31
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The Shallows | Nicholas Carr

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains © 2011, 2010 W. W. Norton & Company 280 pages Have you ever tried to read a book—the sort of book you could lose yourself in only a few years ago—only to find yourself fidgety and distracted? That symptom, described by Carr and attested to [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Jan 24
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Denialism | Michael Specter

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives © 2009 Penguin 304 pages Michael Specter is one frustrated and fiery man. He’s fed up with people’s mistrust of science and affection for homey remedies. Take the latest raw milk craze, for example. Before pasteurization, milk was a major source [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Jan 17
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River out of Eden | Richard Dawkins

River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View Of Life (Science Masters Series) © 1995 Basic Books: Perseus 172 pages I don’t know why I keep torturing myself by reading Dawkins. I’m a believer in Jesus with a serious love and respect for the sciences. Dawkins would assume that my faith in God undermines my ability [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Sep 25
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The Grand Design | Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow

The Grand Design ©2010 Bantam Books 198 pages Physics is one of those fields where you can’t rely on information you learned a decade ago. In The Grand Design, Hawking & Mlodinow lay out the current state of physics with an eye towards the holy grail: the Theory of Everything. Unless physics is your field, [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley
Jan 29
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The Selfless Gene | Charles Foster

The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin © 2009 Thomas Nelson 283 pages The Selfless Gene is a side-splitting call for moderation. Foster contends that it’s possible to believe in God without sticking your head in the sand when it comes to science. In pursuit of this belief, he disarms and jabs young earth [...]

Author: Stephen Barkley