Books by Richard Panek
The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes
Describes the commonalities in the scientific methods pioneered by Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, citing how their applications of non-traditional methods opened up unprecedented intellectual landscapes and founded the sciences of cosmology and psychoanalysis. 20,000 first printing.
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The Trouble With Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet
What is gravity? Nobody knows—and just about nobody knows that nobody knows. How something so pervasive can also be so mysterious, and how that mystery can be so wholly unrecognized outside the field of physics, is one of the greatest conundrums in modern science. But as award-winning author Richard Panek shows in this groundbreaking, mind-bending book, gravity is a cold case that’s beginning to heat up.
In The Trouble with Gravity, Panek invites the reader to experience this ubiquitous yet elusive force in a breathtakingly new way. Gravity, Panek explains, structures not only our bodies and our physical world, but also our minds and culture. From our very beginnings, humans’ conceptions of gravity have been inextricably bound to our understanding of existence itself. As we get closer and closer to solving the riddle of gravity, it is not only physics that is becoming clearer. We are also getting to know ourselves as never before.
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The Trouble With Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet
"A thoughtful meditation on the mythic, cultural, philosophical and, yes, scientific implications of what happens when a wet potato or a crystal vase slips from your hand."—Billy Collins
A mind-bending exploration of gravity, the universe's greatest mystery.
What is gravity? Nobody knows—and just about nobody knows that nobody knows. How something so pervasive can also be so mysterious, and how that mystery can be so wholly unrecognized outside the field of physics, is one of the greatest conundrums in modern science. But as award-winning author Richard Panek shows in this groundbreaking book, gravity is a cold case that we are closer to cracking than ever—and whose very investigation has yielded untold truths about the cosmos and humanity itself.
Part scientific detective story, part metaphysical romp, The Trouble with Gravity is a revelation: the first in-depth, accessible study of this ubiquitous, elusive force. Gravity and our efforts to understand it, Panek reveals, have shaped not only the world we inhabit, but also our bodies, minds, and culture. Its influence can be seen in everything from ancient fables to modern furniture, Dante’s Inferno to the pratfalls of Laurel and Hardy, bipedalism to black holes. As we approach the truth about gravity, we should also be prepared to know both our universe and ourselves as never before.
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Pillars of Creation: How the James Webb Telescope Unlocked the Secrets of the Cosmos
The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming the universe right before our eyes—and here, for the first time, is the inside account of how the mission originated, how it performs its miracles of science, and what its revolutionary images are revealing.
Pillars of Creation tells the story of one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of civilization, a $10 billion instrument with a staggeringly ambitious goal: unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. Award-winning science writer Richard Panek stands us shoulder to shoulder with senior scientists as they conceive the mission, meet decades-long challenges to bring it to fruition, and, now, use its unprecedented technology to yield new discoveries about the origins of our solar system, to search for life on planets around other suns, and to trace the growth of hundreds of billions of galaxies all the way back to the birth of the first stars. The Webb telescope has captured the world’s imagination, and Pillars of Creation shows how and why—including through sixteen pages of awe-inspiring, full-color photos.
At once a testament to human ingenuity and a celebration of mankind’s biggest leap yet into the cosmos, Panek’s eye-opening book reveals our universe as we’ve never seen it before—through the lens of the James Webb Space Telescope, a marvel that is itself a pillar of creation.
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$29.00
The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed
by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek
In The Autistic Brain, New York Times bestselling author Temple Grandin "has reached a stunning level of sophistication about herself and the science of autism" (The New York Review of Books).
Winner of a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Nonfiction Book
Temple Grandin may be the most famous person with autism, a condition that affects 1 in 88 children. Since her birth in 1947, our understanding of it has undergone a great transformation, leading to more hope than ever before that we may finally learn the causes of and treatments for autism.
Weaving her own experience with remarkable new discoveries, Grandin introduces the advances in neuroimaging and genetic research that link brain science to behavior, even sharing her own brain scan to show which anomalies might explain common symptoms. Most excitingly, she argues that raising and educating kids on the autism spectrum must focus on their long-overlooked strengths to foster their unique contributions.
The Autistic Brain brings Grandin’s singular perspective into the heart of the autism revolution.
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The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
“Fascinating . . . One of the most important stories in the history of science.”— Washington Post
In recent years, a handful of scientists has been racing to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown.
Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of how scientists reached this cosmos-shattering conclusion. In vivid detail, he narrates the quest to find the “dark” matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy that make up 96 percent of the universe. This is perhaps the greatest mystery in all of science, and solving it will bring fame, funding, and certainly a Nobel Prize. Based on hundreds of interviews and in-depth, on-site reporting, the book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have redefined science and reinvented the universe.
“A lively new account of twentieth-century (plus a little twenty-first-century) cosmology . . . The book is as much about how the science got done as about the science itself.”—Salon
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The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
The epic, behind-the-scenes story of an astounding gap in our scientific knowledge of the cosmos.
In the past few years, a handful of scientists have been in a race to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every planet, star, and galaxy. The rest96 percent of the universeis completely unknown.
Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of how scientists reached this conclusion, and what theyre doing to find this "dark" matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy. Based on in-depth, on-site reporting and hundreds of interviewswith everyone from Berkeleys feisty Saul Perlmutter and Johns Hopkinss meticulous Adam Riess to the quietly revolutionary Vera Rubinthe book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fueled their search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe.
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