Showing results for "John" in Science & Technology

John Dee was one of the greatest scientific minds of his time, but also one of the most controversial. He was a learned man in fields as varied as mathematics and astronomy, centuries before they became formalized fields of study, but he is better remembered for performing magic and alchemy. Instead of astronomy, he became renowned across England for astrology, and he was one of the country’s most notorious occult writers during his life.

Brought to you by Penguin. An exhilarating new biography of John von Neumann: the lost genius who invented our world The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the...

The continuing story of the man who created Alton Towers big rides. The book takes over from where his previous best-selling book "Creating my own Nemesis" left off. As well as describing behind the scenes details of subsequent rides such as "Wicker Man", "The Curse at Alton Manor" and "Nemesis Reborn", the book discusses the origins and history of rollercoasters, dark rides, log flumes and other theme park attractions.

John Cairncross was among the most damaging spies of the 20th century. A member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring, he leaked highly sensitive documents from Bletchley Park, MI6, and the Treasury to the Soviet Union...Based on newly released archival materials, this biography will be the first to cover the life and espionage of this singularly important spy.

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The story of the unlikely friendship between the two physicists who fundamentally recast the notion of time and history In 1939, Richard Feynman, a brilliant graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. A lifelong friendship and...

Charles Darwin: the man who discovered evolution? The man who killed off God? Or a flawed man of his age, part genius, part ruthless careerist who would not acknowledge his debts to other thinkers? In this bold new life - the first single volume biography in twenty-five years - A. N. Wilson, the...

Plague and pestilence have both fascinated and terrified humanity from the very beginning. Societies and individuals have struggled to make sense of them, and more importantly, they’ve often struggled to avoid them. Before the scientific age, people had no knowledge of the microbiological agents - unseen bacteria and viruses - which afflicted them, and thus, the maladies were often ascribed to wrathful supernatural forces.

His face is instantly recognisable. His name is shorthand for genius. Today, he's a figurehead as much as a man, symbolic of things larger than himself: of scientific progress, of the human mind, even of the age. But who was Einstein really? The Nobel Prize-winning physicist who discovered relativity, black holes and E = mc2, dined with Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood and was the inspiration for element 99, Albert Einstein was also a high school dropout with an FBI file 1,400 pages long. In this audiobook, Samuel Graydon's writing brings history's most famous scientist back to life.

This fascinating and inspiring biography of John Haynes - the man behind Haynes manuals - looks ‘under the bonnet’ at his extraordinary life, and his legacy to the motoring world. This is the story of how one man’s vision and enthusiasm gave a small enterprise in rural Somerset a global footprint.  

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing". In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world.

Drawn from hours of conversations between Mark Eglinton and John McAfee in 2019, No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes provides startling insight into the extraordinary life of one of America's genuine renegades. McAfee shares his life story, providing revelatory details on the abusive father who shot himself when John was a young boy; the life-changing LSD overdose in St Louis, during which he was nearly convinced by voices in his head to try to kill his first wife and daughter; the unexpected government clearance that led to him working on CIA dark programs.

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of the Powell’s career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual expulsion from the Geological Survey.

The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: Rocket Scientist Killed in Pasadena Explosion. The man known as Jack Parsons, a maverick rocketeer who helped transform a derided sci-fi plotline into actuality, was at first mourned as a scientific prodigy. But reporters soon uncovered a more shocking story: Parsons had been a devotee of the city’s occult scene.

A “well-researched and very readable new biography” (The Wall Street Journal) of “the Thomas Edison of guns,” a visionary inventor who designed the modern handgun and whose awe-inspiring array of firearms helped ensure victory in numerous American wars and holds a crucial place in world...

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. The famous English naturalist tells his life story, in his own words. From his birth, to the famed Voyage of the Beagle, to the Origin of Species, to his marriage and family and finally to his theories of life itself.

An electrifying biography of one of the most extraordinary scientists of the twentieth century and the world he made. The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear...

On February 20, 1962, John Glenn became a national star. That morning at Cape Canaveral, the small-town boy from Ohio took his place atop a rocket and soared into space. The Last American Hero is a stunning examination of the layers that formed the man: a hero of the Cold War, a two-time astronaut, a veteran senator, a devoted husband and father, and much more.  

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

Sixty years ago, cars and airplanes were still deathtraps waiting to happen. Today, both are safer than ever, thanks in part to one pioneering air force doctor’s research on seatbelts and ejection seats. The exploits of John Paul Stapp (1910–1999) come to thrilling life in this biography of...