検索キーワード： 歴史・哲学

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were - and still are. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book.

Brought to you by Penguin Our world is full of patterns. If you pour milk into your tea and give it a stir, you'll see a swirl, a spiral of two fluids, before the two liquids mix completely. The same pattern is found elsewhere too. Look down on the Earth from space, and you'll find similar...

In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.

Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don't? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength - and the greatest reason we can trust it. 

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Imagine an AI diagnoses cancer before a doctor can. It saves lives. Yet at the same moment, another AI decides which news you see – and which you don't. Is that progress? Or control? An algorithm that, like an invisible conductor, directs billions of...

*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* America's favorite astrophysicist has written the most entertaining and universally appealing book of his stellar career: a practical guide for dealing with Alien visitors, an exploration of how it might happen, and a cultural history of our fascination with...

Brought to you by Penguin. Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future: The Inventions that will Transform our Lives is a hypothetical journey through the next 100 years of scientific innovation, as told by the scientists who are making it happen. We all wish we could predict the future, but most of us...

READ BY THE AUTHOR An insightful look at the science of explanation, using psychology, philosophy, and stories to reveal surprising truths about how we make sense of ourselves and the world Humans are explanation-seeking creatures. We wonder why there’s traffic, why a friend behaved a certain...

In Grace in All Simplicity, listeners will delight in Cahn and Quigg's engaging prose and see how the infinite and the infinitesimal are joined. Today, physicists and astronomers are exploring distances from a billionth of a billionth of the human scale to the entire cosmos, and contemplating...

Want to know how AT&T's Bell Labs developed semiconductor technology - and how its leading scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand how radio and television work - and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and early graves? Conquering the Electron offers these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place. 

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story...

Featuring a special introduction written for the audiobook edition and read by the author A Radio 4 Book Club Selection. The ultimate eye-opening journey through time and space, A Short History of Nearly Everything is the biggest-selling popular science book of the 21st century and has sold over...

In alternating chapters, Thich Nhat Hanh and his monastic student, Brother Spirit – a Cambridge University-trained mathematician and composer – share their insights on how Zen techniques can be used to enhance mental clarity, intuition and focus, essential qualities for achieving significant...

A forensic toxicologist reveals how nature may be out to get you—and how humans have harnessed its poisons, for good and evil. When we think about “toxins” today, we’re most likely to think of human-made pollutants; by contrast, what is “natural” feels safe. But as forensic...

WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD 2011 WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2011 ‘Profound, eloquent and searching’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘Essential reading’ INDEPENDENT ‘Masterly’ GUARDIAN ‘Extraordinary’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Riveting, audacious and now more urgent...

This book is a philosophical journey into the heart of uncertainty. From ancient myths of the abyss to modern science, from entropy to fractals, from Michel Serres’s poetics of noise to the digital floods of our age, Pursuing Chaos asks whether knowledge is possible without illusions—and whether truth can survive without rhetoric.

The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.

Science is the basis of our assumptions about ourselves and our world, from ideas about our evolutionary past to our conceptions of the vast expanses of space and the smallest particles of matter. In this panoramic book, acclaimed historian of science Peter Dear uncovers the roots of such beliefs, revealing how they constitute a natural philosophy that has been developed and refined over the course of centuries—and how the world as we have come to know it was by no means inevitable.

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI.

Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-19th century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately - childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared - they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.