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James
Gleick
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 Chaos
Heineman. Making a new
science. A concise history of the world of chaos: including fractals, the
butterfly effect. Few writers distinguish themselves by their ability to write
about complicated, even obscure topics clearly and engagingly. James Gleick, a
former science writer for the New York Times, resides in this exclusive
category. In Chaos, he takes on the job of depicting the first years of the
study of chaos--the seemingly random patterns that characterize many natural
phenomena.
This is not a purely technical book. Instead, it focuses as much
on the scientists studying chaos as on the chaos itself. In the pages of
Gleick's book, the reader meets dozens of extraordinary and eccentric people.
For instance, Mitchell Feigenbaum, who constructed and regulated his life by a
26-hour clock and watched his waking hours come in and out of phase with those
of his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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 Genius
Abacus. Biography of
Richard Feynman. For nearly 50 years, until his death in 1988, Richard
Feynman's work lay at the heart of the development of modern physics. Always
controversial, Feynman was the key physicist from his days as part of the
A-bomb-making team at Los Alamos in the early 1940s, until his discovery of the
reason for the Challenger space shuttle disaster 40 years later. The book
combines biography with an accessible account of his thought and its
context.
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 Faster
Random House. Presents a
study of the human fascination with time from a psychological, biological, and
cultural perspective, tracing the development of measuring time and exploring
ways in which we try to stretch our allotted time.
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 What
Just Happened
Abacus. We are quick to acknowledge that
our lives have been transformed by technology over the last ten years - that
virtual reality has become as permanent a fixture in our lives as material
reality; but the arrival of the electronic world over the last ten years was
not a single invention, nor a single event; it could not be encompassed in a
single moment. The last ten years can be characterized in three ways: the
speed, the hysteria and the remarkable range of devices, aspects, and larger
ramifications of what happened.
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