How Old is Time?: Short Stories from Science, History and Philosophy – Amazon.com
CONTENTS
ATOMS
How old is time? 11
Conquering absolute zero 16
In search of the perfect machine 21
Baby pictures of the universe 26
How the universe was made 30
The beginnings of quantum physics 35
The Tao of science 39
A particle that wasn’t there 44
BRAIN
The biology of ethics 51
How pleasure works 56
Thinking about alternatives 60
Why does digital music only make sense to a human ear? 64
Humans are co-operative creatures 69
What really causes addiction? 74
The power of ignorance and uncertainty 78
The biology of watching 83
The winner brain 88
How to build an artificial brain 92
Signing with numbers 97
LIFE
Do genes have memory? 103
The Gaia hypothesis 109
When nature falls silent 114
How would the world look like without fossil fuels? 119
CRISPR – biotechnology of the future 123
The placebo effect: how does it work? 128
Medicine: does the end justify the means? 133
What helps doctors make decisions? 137
Unusual theories about our senses 142
Food is more than a war between good and bad 146
SOCIETY
A third sex? 153
The psychology of terrorism and radicalization 158
The dilemma of a travelling salesman 163
Strangers in their own land 168
Social physics 173
The second machine age 178
What makes a good teacher? 183
The secret formula for making a hit 188
The new generation of cyber warriors 192
The Supreme Court’s sentencing algorithm 197
Why do we need privacy? 202
The battle for the Internet 206
Stories about money 211
How scientific journals became a lucrative business 216
Driverless cars – how do they work? 221
HISTORY
How logic was born from the crisis of Athenian democracy 229
The dangerous blend of love and logic 234
Hollywood star and military inventor 240
The world’s most important scientist meets world’s most famous philosopher 245
The American physicist who taught the Japanese about quality 250
How a philosopher helped a scientist get a Nobel Prize 255
Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison and the clash of the rich 258
The real Albert Einstein 262
Countess Ada of Lovelace – pioneer of computer science 267
A dangerous mathematical theory 272
