Jack Cohen – författare

With the spectacular developments in technology accompanying and aiding scientific research over the past few decades, postgraduate students are often encouraged to focus more on generating data than to utilize their most sophisticated piece of equipment: their mind.Stop Working & Start Thinking, Second Edition aims to encourage young researchers to think more clearly about their experiments, from experimental design to data interpretation. This new edition builds on the success of the first edition, with new material throughout and a new chapter on measurement interpretation, including an examination of cryptic assumptions.This book is essential reading for postgraduates who wish to put the mastery back into their M.Sc. and the philosophy back into their PhDs.

With the spectacular developments in technology accompanying and aiding scientific research over the past few decades, postgraduate students are often encouraged to focus more on generating data than to utilize their most sophisticated piece of equipment: their mind.Stop Working & Start Thinking, Second Edition aims to encourage young researchers to think more clearly about their experiments, from experimental design to data interpretation. This new edition builds on the success of the first edition, with new material throughout and a new chapter on measurement interpretation, including an examination of cryptic assumptions.This book is essential reading for postgraduates who wish to put the mastery back into their M.Sc. and the philosophy back into their PhDs.

In the ''fantasy'' universe of the phenomenally bestselling Discworld series, everything runs on magic and common sense. The world is flat and million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten. Our world seems different - it runs on rules, often rather strange ones. Science is our way of finding out what those rules are. The appeal of Discworld is that it mostly makes sense, in a way that particle physics does not. The Science of Discworld uses the magic of Discworld to illuminate the scientific rules that govern our world.When a wizardly experiment goes adrift, the wizards of Unseen University find themselves with a pocket universe on their hands: Roundworld, where neither magic nor common sense seems to stand a chance against logic. The Universe, of course, is our own. And Roundworld is Earth. As the wizards watch their accidental creation grow, we follow the story of our universe from the primal singularity of the Big Bang to the Internet and beyond. Through this original Terry Pratchett story (with intervening chapters from Cohen and Stewart) we discover how puny and insignificant individual lives are against a cosmic backdrop of creation and disaster. Yet, paradoxically, we see how the richness of a universe based on rules, has led to a complex world and at least one species that tried to get a grip of what was going on.

Roundworld is in trouble again, and this time it looks fatal. Having created it in the first place, the wizards of Unseen University feel vaguely responsible for its safety. They know the creatures who lived there escaped the impending Big Freeze by inventing the space elevator - they even intervened to rid the planet of a plague of elves, who attempted to divert humanity onto a different time track. But now it''s all gone wrong - Victorian England has stagnated and the pace of progress would embarrass a limping snail. Unless something drastic is done, there won''t be time for anyone to invent spaceflight and the human race will be turned into ice-pops. Why, though, did history come adrift? Was it Sir Arthur Nightingale''s dismal book about natural selection? Or was it the devastating response by an obscure country vicar called Charles Darwin, whose bestselling Theology of Species made it impossible to refute the divine design of living creatures? Either way, it''s no easy task to change history, as the wizards discover to their cost. Can the God of Evolution come to humanity''s aid and ensure Darwin writes a very different book? And who stopped him writing it in the first place?

The fourth book in the Science of Discworld series, and this time around dealing with THE REALLY BIG QUESTIONS, Terry Pratchett’s brilliant new Discworld story Judgement Day is annotated with very big footnotes (the interleaving chapters) by mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen, to bring you a mind-mangling combination of fiction, cutting-edge science and philosophy.Marjorie Daw is a librarian, and takes her job – and indeed the truth of words – very seriously. She doesn’t know it, but her world and ours – Roundworld – is in big trouble. On Discworld, a colossal row is brewing…The Wizards of Unseen University feel responsible for Roundworld (as one would for a pet gerbil). After all, they brought it into existence by bungling an experiment in Quantum ThaumoDynamics. But legal action is being brought against them by Omnians, who say that the Wizards’ god-like actions make a mockery of their noble religion.As the finest legal brains in Discworld (a zombie and a priest) gird their loins to do battle – and when the Great Big Thing in the High Energy Magic Laboratory is switched on – Marjorie Daw finds herself thrown across the multiverse and right in the middle of the whole explosive affair. As God, the Universe and, frankly, Everything Else is investigated by the trio, you can expect world-bearing elephants, quantum gravity in the Escher-verse, evolutionary design, eternal inflation, dark matter, disbelief systems – and an in-depth study of how to invent a better mousetrap.