If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezar Yudkowsky and Nate Soares AI (so-called) has been invading our lives stealthily for several years. Its power increases exponentially (or faster) by the month, the week and possibly even the day. It brings many benefits to humanity; nearly all machines do that. There have always been negative …
Category: Science
Black Holes
by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw A Review 'Black holes are perfect for learning about physics because understanding them requires pretty much all of it.' 'What happens at the singularity of a black hole is beyond current understanding.' Sometimes you think you know quite a lot about a subject, only to find, after reading another …
Science and Humanity
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli 'There are absolute masterpieces which move us imtensely: Mozart's Requiem; Homer's Odyssey; tha Sistine Chapel; King Lear.... Einstein's jewel, the general theory of relativity, is a masterpiece of this order.' Published around the same time as his book Reality is not what it seems, Seven Brief Lessons …
Helgoland
by Carlo Rovelli translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell 'In my own attempts to make sense of quanta for myself, I have wandered among the texts of philosophers in search of a conceptual basis with which to understand the strange picture of the world provided by this incredible theory. In doing so, I have …
A Life on Our Planet
by David Attenborough A Review There can be few people around the world who have not heard of David Attenborough. He has been involved in nature broadcasting for around seventy of his ninety-four* years. During this time, he has probably seen more of the planet than anyone else alive today. This book, A Life on …
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir 'I think my job is to solve the Petrova problem . . . . in a small lab, wearing a bedsheet toga, with no idea who I am, and no help other than a mindless computer and two mummified roommates.' In Project Hail Mary, Dr Ryland Grace is a thirty-something high school …
In Black and White
The Joys of the Grand Piano [Perfection of Art and Science] by Andrew G. Lockhart I have two confessions to make: I love pianos, most pianos; I hate digital keyboards. When mankind has spent three centuries designing and building a product that is, at once, delightful to look at, a joy to play and …
The Order of Time
by Carlo Rovelli A Review 'Things are transformed one into another according to necessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time.' [Anaximander c. 570 BCE] This delightful little book makes us look again at many of the concepts we take for granted. In childhood, we learn to think of reality …
Brave New World
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan A Review 'We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world ..... such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradiction. We may be confronting a boundary condition.' I was delighted to learn in yesterday's news that a portrait of …
Conscious!
Emily Eternal by MG Wheaton 'I sweep across the world like the break of dawn.' Emily Eternal combines cutting edge technology, speculative science and scientific fantasy in a racy thriller that doubles as a crazy love story. At the same time, it digs into the human psyche searching for answers to age-old questions. Does free …
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