Bøker av Clifford Pickover

If we were to meet actual aliens from outer space, what would they look like? Noted author Clifford Pickover speculates on their appearance, biology, language, even their sex lives.

The road that leads from the Möbius strip — a common-sense-defying continuous loop with only one side and one edge, made famous by the illustrations of M.C. Escher — goes to some of the strangest spots imaginable. It takes us to where the purely intellectual enters our world: where our senses, overloaded with grocery bills, the price of gas, and what to eat for lunch, are expected to absorb really bizarre ideas. And no better guide to this weird universe exists than the brilliant thinker Clifford A. Pickover, the 21st century''s answer to Buckminster Fuller. From molecules and metal sculptures to postage stamps, architectural structures, and models of the universe, The Möbius Strip gives readers a glimpse of new ways of thinking and other worlds as Pickover reaches across cultures and peers beyond our ordinary reality. Lavishly illustrated, this is an infinite fountain of wondrous forms that can be used to help explain how mathematics has permeated every field of scientific endeavor, such as the colors of a sunset or the architecture of our brains; how it helps us build supersonic aircraft and roller coasters, simulate the flow of Earth''s natural resources, explore subatomic quantum realities, and depict faraway galaxies.

A Beginner''s Guide to Immortality is a celebration of unusual lives and creative thinkers who punched through ordinary cultural norms while becoming successful in their own niches. In his latest and greatest work, world-renowned science writer Cliff Pickover studies such colofrul characters as Truman Capote, John Cage, Stephen Wolfram, Ray Kurzweil, and Wilhelm Rontgen, and their curious ideas. Through these individuals, we can better explore life''s astonishing richness and glimpse the diversity of human imagination. Part memoir and part surrealistic perspective on culture, A Beginner''s Guide to Immortality gives readers a glimpse of new ways of thinking and of other worlds as he reaches across cultures and peers beyond our ordinary reality. He illuminates some of the most mysterious phenomena affecting our species. What is creativity? What are the religious implications of mosquito evolution, simulated Matrix realities, the brain''s own marijuana, and the mathematics of the apocalypse? Could we be a mere software simulation living in a matrix? Who is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Emanuel Swedenborg? Did church forefathers eat psychedelic snails? How can we safely expand our minds to become more successful and reason beyond the limits of our own intuition? How can we become immortal?

This marvelous volume takes the reader on a journey across the centuries as it explores eponymous physical laws-from Archimedes' Law of Buoyancy and Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Hubble's Law of Cosmic Expansion-whose ramifications have profoundly altered our everyday lives and our understanding of the universe.