James Gleick – författare

From one of the best writers on science, a remarkable portrait of Isaac Newton. The man who changed our understanding of the universe, of science, and of faith.Isaac Newton was the chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion; he effectively discovered gravity; he salvaged the terms ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘motion’ and ‘place’ from the haze of everyday language, standardized them and married them, each to the other, constructing an edifice that made knowledge a thing of substance: quantative and exact. Creation, Newton demonstrated, unfolds from simple rules, patterns iterated over unlimited distances.What Newton learned remains the essence of what we know. Newton’s laws are our laws. When we speak of momentum, of forces and masses, we are seeing the world as Newtonians. When we seek mathematical laws for economic cycles and human behaviour, we stand on Newton’s shoulders. Our very deeming the universe as solvable is his legacy.This was the achievement of a reclusive professor, recondite theologian and fervent alchemist. A man who feared the light of exposure, shrank from controversy and seldom published his work. In his daily life he emulated the complex secrecy in which he saw the riddles of the universe encoded. His vision of nature was of its time; he never purged occult, hidden, mystical qualities. But he pushed open a door that led to a new universe.

Uncover one of the most exciting frontiers of modern physics in this fascinating, insightful and accessible overview of Chaos theory.‘An exceedingly readable introduction to a new intellectual world’ ObserverFrom the turbulence of the weather to the complicated rythmns of the human heart, ‘chaos’ is at the centre of our day to day lives. Cutting across several scientific disciplines, James Gleick explores and elucidates the science of the unpredicatable with an immensely readable narrative style and flair.‘An awe-inspiring book. Reading Chaos gave me the sensation that someone had just found the light-switch’ Douglas Adams

Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012, the world's leading prize for popular science writing.We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code.In ‘The Information’ James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the ‘bit’, it is a fascinating account of the modern age’s defining idea and a brilliant exploration of how information has revolutionised our lives.

Richard Feynman was the most brilliant and influential physicist of our time. Architect of quantum theories, enfant terrible of the atomic bomb project, caustic inquisitor on the space shuttle commission, ebulent bongo-player and storyteller - Feynman played a bewildering assortment of roles in the science of the post-war era. A brilliant interweaving of Richard Feynman's colourful life and a detailed and accessible account of his theories and experiments.

AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself.Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological — the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilisations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture — from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges. He explores the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.

Time rules our lives. The frenetic purpose - more than we want to admit, is to save time. Think of one of those conveniences that best convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds: the microwave oven. In your hurry sickness, you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice. Do you stand at the microwave for that minute and a half? Or is that long enough to make a quick call or run in the next room to finish paying a bill? If haste is the gas pedal for the pace of our lives, then multi-tasking is overdrive. FASTER dissects with acute insight and mordant wit our unceasing daily struggle to squeeze as much as we can - but never enough - into the 1440 minutes of each day.Speed is the key strategy for saving time, and James Gleick shows us how in just about every area - from business cycle time to beeper medicine, from Federal Express to quick playback buttons on answering machines, from the pace of television to our growing need to do two things at once, how speed has become the experience we all have in common - it, more than the message, is what connects us.

From the New York Times bestselling author, a thrilling history of the telephone and how we fell in and out of love with a technology that changed not just the world, but changed us.'Charts our distance-compressing, time-shifting telephonic adventure with exceptional brio and subtlety' – Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth ExtinctionOne hundred and fifty years ago the telephone burst onto the world stage like magic, a supernatural instrument bringing voices from afar. Its invention has been celebrated as a triumph of individual ingenuity and vision, but was in fact a contest replete with bribery, fraud and speculation, and no one, not even its inventors, realised what it was good for or how ubiquitous it would become.Instantly, the ability to speak across vast distances began to transform every part of life: from business organization to military tactics, from news gathering to sex work. Along the way, the telephone changed human nature. As it settled into the background – in offices and on streets, on bedside tables and kitchen walls – people forgot how they ever lived without it.In The Telephone, bestselling author James Gleick reveals the continuous revolution sparked by its invention and the corrupt scheming and ruthless tactics of those who sought to make money from it, tracking the rise of the largest monopoly in history.As dial telephones, landlines, telephone books and telephone booths vanish into the past, he shows how this commonplace object irreversibly changed not only the world but who we are as human beings.'Gleick does what only the best science writers can do: take a subject of which most of us are only peripherally aware and put it at the center of the universe' – Time

From the New York Times bestselling author, a thrilling history of the telephone and how we fell in and out of love with a technology that changed not just the world, but changed us.'Charts our distance-compressing, time-shifting telephonic adventure with exceptional brio and subtlety' – Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth ExtinctionOne hundred and fifty years ago the telephone burst onto the world stage like magic, a supernatural instrument bringing voices from afar. Its invention has been celebrated as a triumph of individual ingenuity and vision, but was in fact a contest replete with bribery, fraud and speculation, and no one, not even its inventors, realised what it was good for or how ubiquitous it would become.Instantly, the ability to speak across vast distances began to transform every part of life: from business organization to military tactics, from news gathering to sex work. Along the way, the telephone changed human nature. As it settled into the background – in offices and on streets, on bedside tables and kitchen walls – people forgot how they ever lived without it.In The Telephone, bestselling author James Gleick reveals the continuous revolution sparked by its invention and the corrupt scheming and ruthless tactics of those who sought to make money from it, tracking the rise of the largest monopoly in history.As dial telephones, landlines, telephone books and telephone booths vanish into the past, he shows how this commonplace object irreversibly changed not only the world but who we are as human beings.'Gleick does what only the best science writers can do: take a subject of which most of us are only peripherally aware and put it at the center of the universe' – Time