Resultados de "Boris Kriger" en Todas las categorias

A Quaker schoolmaster who could not tell a scarlet geranium from its leaves, and who believed until his dying day that the fluid in his own eyeball was tinted blue, gave chemistry the one thing it had been missing for two thousand years. It was not the atom. Atoms were free. Democritus had them...

A Greek poet left behind a single line about a fox and a hedgehog. Twenty-six centuries later, an Oxford professor who had watched a man torn apart by a crowd in Petrograd turned that line into the most famous classification in modern thought, then spent the rest of his life insisting he had...

In the year 1148, a fanatical army rode into Cordoba and gave its Jews a simple choice: convert, leave, or die. Among the families who fled was a thirteen-year-old boy named Moses, son of Maimon. He would spend the rest of his life answering a harder question than the one the conquerors had...

In 1954, in a shared suite at the Princeton Graduate College, a graduate student with a taste for sherry and science fiction started teasing two friends about the absurd things they had just said regarding quantum mechanics. Three years later he had a doctorate, a published paper, and a theory...

A young woman finished a doctoral thesis in 1925 and answered the oldest question anyone has ever asked about the sky: what are the stars made of? Her answer was hydrogen. Overwhelmingly, almost comically, hydrogen, with a generous helping of helium and a rounding error of everything else...

He invented the theory of mind that dominated the twentieth century, and then he spent a decade dismantling it. He argued that the world is one fixed thing waiting to be described, and then he argued that nobody could coherently believe such a thing. He built a logic for quantum mechanics and...

For half a century, readers have been told that Jorge Luis Borges was the great dissolver, the writer who proved that reality is only language and that behind every word waits nothing but another word. This book argues the opposite. Borges was not the man who erased the world. He was its...

In 1927 a Belgian priest published a paper showing that the universe is expanding, calculated how fast, and printed the number. Four years later he translated the paper into English himself — and quietly deleted the paragraph with the number in it. He thought it had been superseded. It cost...

Seven hundred years ago, in a drafty lecture hall, a Franciscan whom everyone had written off as a slow boy picked up the sharpest instrument the medieval mind ever forged and began cutting reality at joints no one else could see. John Duns Scotus lost the great argument of his age to the...

This book tells the story of that argument and of the man who found it. Anselm of Canterbury was a runaway son from the Alps who became the most beloved teacher of his age, a monk dragged weeping to an archbishopric he did not want, an exile who stood against two kings of England, and the...

He is the second most translated author on the planet, and he is famous for something he never claimed to do.For a century and a half, Jules Verne has been graded as a prophet — points for the submarine, points for the moon shot, a forgiving shrug for the hollow earth. It is a strange way to...

This book begins with a simple physical law and follows it far beyond its usual domain. Ohm’s law, often taught as a practical rule of electrical engineering, is here treated as a structural statement about reality itself. Resistance is not presented as an obstacle to be eliminated, but as the...

Nobody read him. Not one of his discoveries entered science through him. Every single one had to be found again, from scratch, by people who had never heard his name.This is a book about what that costs — and about the method that produced the discoveries in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci...

A linguist steps off a boat onto an unmapped shore. A rabbit runs past. A native speaker points and says a single word: gavagai. The linguist writes in a notebook, with reasonable confidence, the translation rabbit. And in that moment of reasonable confidence, as Willard Van Orman Quine...

Everything in the world runs one way. Coffee cools, glass shatters, memory reaches backward and never forward. In the last decades of the nineteenth century one Viennese physicist tried to explain that one-way world using nothing but particles obeying laws that work perfectly well in reverse. He...

For millennia, the North Star has stood as humanity’s ultimate emblem of constancy—the unmoving nail around which the night turns, guiding ancient caravans, ocean-going caravel fleets, and fugitives walking toward freedom. Yet almost every element of that legendary reputation collapses under...

Eighty years after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry vanished over the Mediterranean, his small book about a boy with golden hair, a single rose, and a fox who taught him what the word "tame" really means continues to outsell almost every other work of literature on Earth. It is read by children who...

He swam in the Danube with a flotilla of geese who were convinced he was their mother, and he was right about something enormous: that behavior is inherited the way a bone is inherited, that it can be compared across species, and that the categories we think with were shaped long before anyone...

Nobody in the ancient world left behind more of himself than Marcus Tullius Cicero. Speeches, letters, treatises, private grumbles, public boasts, jokes at dinner parties recorded for posterity — the paper trail is so vast that we know his moods better than we know those of most politicians...

Everything in the heavens turns. Moons wheel around planets, planets around stars, stars around the bright hubs of their galaxies, and galaxies around one another in gravitational waltzes so slow that a single step outlasts a mountain range. Rotation is the most ordinary fact in the sky. Yet by...