Liška Bystrouška

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David Lindley

Few revolutions in science have been more far-reaching - but less understood - than the quantum revolution in physics. Everyday experience cannot prepare us for the strange phenomena of the subatomic world, where quantum effects become all important. Here, particles can look like waves, and vice versa; electrons seem to lose their identity and instead take on a shifting, unpredictable appearance that depends on how they are being observed; and a single photon may sometimes behave as if it could be in two places at once. In the world of quantum mechanics, uncertainty and ambiguity become not just unavoidable, but essential ingredients of science. But then comes an even more disturbing thought: When we look at the world around us, why do we not see the quantum weirdness that pervades its most fundamental structure? If the familiar world of everyday experience is built from ambiguous and unreliable subatomic ingredients, how can it be as solid, dependable, and predictable as we know it to be? David Lindley explains how physicists are finally beginning to find an answer to the most perplexing question of all: How does our Newtonian world arise from its quantum foundations? With that understanding, Lindley brings the quantum revolution full circle, showing how the familiar and trustworthy reality of the world around us is actually a consequence of the ineffable uncertainty of the subatomic quantum world - the world we can't see.

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Garry Wills

In his most provocative book yet, Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills asks the radical question: Why do we need priests? Author Wills spent five years as a young man at a Jesuit seminary and nearly became a priest himself. But after a lifetime of study and reflection, he now poses some challenging questions: Why do we need priests at all? Why did the priesthood arise in a religion that began without it and opposed it? Would Christianity be stronger without the priesthood, as it was at its outset? Meticulously researched, persuasively argued, and certain to spark debate, Why Priests? asserts that the anonymous Letter to Hebrews, a late addition to the New Testament canon, helped inject the priesthood into a Christianity where it did not exist, along with such concomitants as belief in an apostolic succession, the real presence in the Eucharist, the sacrificial interpretation of the Mass, and the ransom theory of redemption. But Wills does not expect the priesthood to fade entirely away. He just reminds us that Christianity did without it in the time of Peter and Paul with notable success.--From publisher description.

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Robert Nozick

In this highly original work, Robert Nozick develops new views on philosophy's central topics and weaves them into a unified philosophical perspective. It is many years since a major work in English has ranged so widely over philosophy's fundamental concerns: the identity of the self, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the question of why there is something rather than nothing, the foundations of ethics, the meaning of life. Writing in a distinctive and personal philosophical voice, Mr. Nozick presents a new mode of philosophizing. In place of the usual semi-coercive philosophical goals of proof, of forcing people to accept conclusions, this book seeks philosophical explanations and understanding, and thereby stays truer to the original motivations for being interested in philosophy. -- Description from (April 11, 2012).

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Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne H. Ehrlich

"From global warming to rain forest destruction, famine, and air and water pollution--why overpopulation is our #1 environmental problem"--Jacket subtitle.