Frontiers of Fundamental Physics

Jonathan Weiner

Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality

In this fast-paced, sure-to-astonish scientific adventure, a Pulitzer Prize-winning popular science writer asks, Has the long-sought secret of eternal youth at last been found?

Lisa Randall

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

The universe has many secrets. It may hide additional dimensions of space other than the familier three we recognize. There might even be another universe adjacent to ours, invisible and unattainable . . . for now. Warped Passages is a brilliantly readable and altogether exhilarating journey that tracks the arc of discovery from early twentieth-century physics to the razor's edge of modern scientific theory. One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lisa Randall provides astonishing scientific possibilities that, until recently, were restricted to the realm of science fiction. Unraveling the twisted threads of the most current debates on relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity, she explores some of the most fundamental questions posed by Nature—taking us into the warped, hidden dimensions underpinning the universe we live in, demystifying the science of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond our own.

Matt Ridley

The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture

"Bracingly intelligent, lucid, balanced--witty, too. . . . A scrupulous and charming look at our modern understanding of genes and experience." -- Oliver Sacks Armed with extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley turns his attention to the nature-versus-nurture debate in a thoughtful book about the roots of human behavior. Ridley recounts the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. With the decoding of the human genome, we now know that genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain, they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues, and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will.