Instability rules : the ten most amazing ideas of modern science Cover Image

Instability rules : the ten most amazing ideas of modern science / Charles Flowers.

Flowers, Charles, 1942- (Author).

Summary:

Publisher's description: A century of remarkable scientific discovery "We learned that the continents are forever slipping and sliding around the globe, like clothing on a teenager, and the mountains are forever rising, the oceans widening, the volcanoes stoking their furnaces for the next blast. "Our bodies are a fever of change as our minds perpetually rewire themselves and our genes make uncountable decisions, renewing or growing or misfiring to produce the runaway cancers that may kill us, initiating the instability of mortal decay ..." "Within tiny atomic universes, particles pop in and out of being, impossible as that may be to conceive, while atoms collide and meld, buzzing continually in their electrically charged states. "This, then, was the truth behind many of the defining discoveries of the twentieth century: existence is constant activity."

Record details

ISBN: 0471380423
Physical Description: xi, 228 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Publisher: New York : Wiley, [2002]
Copyright: ©2002

Content descriptions

General Note:

Includes index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Hubble and the expanding universe -- Einstein and the wonder of light -- Bohr and the puzzles of the quantum world -- Wegener and the dance of the continents -- Big bang, big crunch, and big bore -- Fermat, Godel, and fuzzy math -- Mendel, Watson, Crick, and the human genome -- Hominids, humans, and the search for origins -- Turing and the brain as computer, and vice versa -- Freud, the unconscious, and other views.