Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Peter Scott-Morgan

Peter, a brilliant scientist, is told that he will lose everything he loves. 
 
His husband. His family. His friends. His ability to travel the world. All will be gone. 
 
But Peter will not give up. He vows that this will not be the end and instead seeks a completely new beginning . . . 
 
Peter has Motor Neurone Disease, a condition universally considered by doctors to be terminal. It will destroy his nerve cells and he is told that within an average of two years, it will take his life too. 
 
But, face-to-face with death, he decides there is another way. Using his background in science and technology, he navigates a new path, one that will enable him not just to survive, but to thrive. 
 
This is the astonishing true story behind the primetime Channel 4 documentary, about Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan who will become the first person to combine his very humanity with artificial intelligence and robotics to become a full Cyborg. His discovery means that his terminal diagnosis is negotiable, something that will rewrite the future. And change the world. 
 
By embracing love, life and hope rather than fear, tragedy and despair he will become Peter 2.0.

Peter 2.0

The Human Cyborg

Frank Close

'Trinity' was the codename for the test explosion of the atomic bomb in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. This exceptional book - Trinity - tells the story of the bomb's metaphorical father, Rudolf Peierls; his intellectual son, the atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, and the ghosts of the security services in Britain, the USA and USSR. 
 
Against the background of pre-war Nazi Germany, the Second World War and the following Cold War, the book traces how Peierls brought Fuchs into his family and his laboratory, only to be betrayed. It describes how Fuchs became a spy, his motivations and the information he passed to his Soviet contacts, both in the UK and after he went with Peierls to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944. Frank Close is himself a distinguished nuclear physicist: uniquely, the book explains the science as well as the spying. Fuchs returned to Britain in August 1946 and became central to the UK's independent effort to develop nuclear weapons. Close describes the febrile atmosphere at Harwell, the nuclear physics laboratory near Oxford, and the charged relationships which developed there, and shows how - despite mistakes made by both MI5 and the FBI - the net gradually closed around Fuchs, building an intolerable pressure which finally cracked him. 
 
The Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device in August 1949, far earlier than the US or UK expected. In 1951, the US Congressional Committee on Atomic Espionage concluded, 'Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of nations'. This book is the most comprehensive account yet published of these events, and of the tragic figure at their centre.

Trinity

The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History

Ronald L Mallett

Bruce Henderson

Ron Mallett was just 10 when his father died suddenly. Devastated, he found solace in the science fiction of H.G. Wells, believing that if he could build a time machine, he could go back into the past, warn his father and perhaps save his life. 
Ronald Mallett is now a professor of theoretical physics. Remarkably, this working-class African American boy from the Bronx stuck with his vision, overcoming poverty and prejudice in the pursuit of his obsession. This is the story of his extraordinary journey of self- and scientific discovery. With simple language and elegant metaphor he lays out his theories and presents the reader with what is an actual blue print for a time machine.A dramatic and compelling memoir, it is also a brilliant introduction to a riveting but generally baffling subject, and a truly inspirational account of astonishing achievement.

The Time Traveller

One Man's Mission To Make Time Travel A Reality

Henry Becquerel’s accidental discovery, in Paris in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age. 
 
Destroyer of Worlds is the story of how pursuit of this hidden source of nuclear power, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere. 
 
The story spans decades and continents, moving from Becquerel to Ernest Rutherford, the Cambridge-based, New Zealand scientist who first split the atom, expands to include Enrico Fermi in Rome, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin and the Joliot-Curies in Paris, leading to the appearance of Robert Oppenheimer before climaxing with increasingly horrifying developments in the USA and USSR. The roles of three remarkable women – Lise Meitner, Ida Noddack and Irene Curie – are re-evaluated, and there are new insights into the work of Ettore Majorana, Fermi’s mercurial but brilliant assistant, who mysteriously disappeared in 1938, possibly after foreseeing the explosive power of nuclear energy. Above all, this is a story of how knowledge is often advanced by personal convictions and relationships, an indeed by chance, in a remarkable way.

Destroyer of Worlds

The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965

Carlo Rovelli

In June 1925, twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg, suffering from hay fever, had retreated to the treeless, wind-battered island of Helgoland in the North Sea in order to think. Walking all night, by dawn he had wrestled with an idea that would transform the whole of science and our very conception of the world. 
 
In Helgoland Carlo Rovelli tells the story of the birth of quantum physics and its bright young founders who were to become some of the most famous Nobel winners in science. It is a celebration of youthful rebellion and intellectual revolution. An invitation to a magical place. 
 
Here Rovelli illuminates competing interpretations of this science and offers his own original view, describing the world we touch as a fabric woven by relations. Where we, as every other thing around us, exist in our interactions with one another, in a never-ending game of mirrors. 
 
A dazzling work from one of our most celebrated scientists and master storyteller, Helgoland transports us to dizzying heights, reminding us of the many pleasures of the life of the mind.

Helgoland

The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics

The Sunday Times bestseller

Colin Bruce

Learning the basic laws of physics - mechanics, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics - can be a struggle. But when that master of deduction, Sherlock Holmes, leads the way, those difficult concepts become crystal clear. Colin Bruce brings Holmes, Dr. Watson, Professor Challenger of Lost World fame, and other favourite Conan Doyle characters to life to solve a Baker Street dozen baffling science mysteries: Murder on a royal train - divers dead of heatstroke at the bottom of an icy sea - a mysterious lady whose brilliance is matched only by her evil - an epidemic of insanity among the world's top scientists. Bruce works out the apparent paradoxes of special relativity and quantum theory in visual and logical terms. The effect is extremely lucid, and very entertaining for the armchair scientist in all of us.

The Strange Case Of Mrs Hudson's Cat

or Sherlock Holmes Solves the Einstein Mysteries

David Christian

Every second of our lives - whether we're looking both ways before crossing the street, celebrating the birth of a baby, or moving to a new city - we must cope with an unknowable future. How do we do this? And how do we, like most living organisms, manage this impossible challenge quite well... at least most of the time? 
 
David Christian, historian and bestselling author of Origin Story, is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past. But with Future Stories, he casts his sharp analytical eye forward, offering an introduction to the strange world of the future, and a guide to what we think we know about it at all scales, from the predictive mechanisms of single-celled organisms and tomato plants to the merging of colossal galaxies billions of years from now. 
 
Drawing together science and history, philosophy and theology from a huge range of places and times, Christian explores how we prepare for uncertain futures, including the future of human evolution, artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, and more. By linking the study of the past much more closely to the study of the future, we can begin to imagine what the world will look like in the next hundred years and consider solutions to the biggest challenges facing us all.

Future Stories

A user's guide to the future

Katie Mack

You're going to die. The Earth will, one day, be toast. So too, our Sun will eventually shine its last. But what's next? 
 
The End of Everything is a unique exploration of the destruction of the cosmos. Drawing on cutting edge technology and theory, as well as hot-off-the-presses results from the most powerful telescopes and particle colliders, astrophysicist Katie Mack describes how small tweaks to our incomplete understanding of reality can result in starkly different futures. Our universe could collapse in upon itself, or rip itself apart, or even - in the next five minutes - succumb to an inescapable expanding bubble of doom. 
 
This fascinating, witty story of cosmic escapism examines a beautiful but unfamiliar physics landscape while sharing the excitement a leading astrophysicist feels when thinking about the universe and our place in it. Amid stellar explosions and bouncing universes, Mack shows that even though we puny humans have no chance of changing how it all ends, we can at least begin to understand it.

The End of Everything

(Astrophysically Speaking)

John D. Barrow

This is a book about universes. It tells a story that revolves around a single extraordinary fact: that Albert Einstein's famous theory of relativity describes a series of entire universes. Not many solutions to Einstein's tantalising universe equations have ever been found, but those that have are all remarkable. Some describe universes that expand in size, while others contract. Some rotate like a top, while others are chaotically unpredictable. Some are perfectly smooth, while others are lumpy. Some permit time travel into the past. Only a few allow life to evolve within them; the rest, if they exist, remain unknown and unknowable to conscious minds. 
 
Here, in The Book of Universes, we are confronted with the most fantastic and far-reaching speculations within the entire realm of science.

The Book of Universes

Philip Ball

Serving the Reich tells the story of physics under Hitler. While some scientists tried to create an Aryan physics that excluded any ‘Jewish ideas’, many others made compromises and concessions as they continued to work under the Nazi regime. Among them were world-renowned physicists Max Planck, Peter Debye and Werner Heisenberg. 
 
After the war most scientists in Germany maintained they had been apolitical or even resisted the regime: Debye claimed that he had gone to America in 1940 to escape Nazi interference in his research; Heisenberg and others argued that they had deliberately delayed production of the atomic bomb. 
 
In a gripping exploration of moral choices under a totalitarian regime, here are human dilemmas, failures to take responsibility and three lives caught between the idealistic goals of science and a tyrannical ideology.

Serving the Reich

The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler

Matthew Stanley

In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British astronomer, opened a letter written by an obscure German professor named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until then Einstein's masterpiece of time and space had been trapped behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown. 
 
Einstein's name is now synonymous with 'genius', but it was not an easy road. He spent a decade creating relativity and his ascent to global celebrity owed much to against-the-odds international collaboration, including Eddington's globe-spanning expedition of 1919 - two years before they finally met. We usually think of scientific discovery as a flash of individual inspiration, but here we see it is the result of hard work, gambles and wrong turns. 
 
Einstein's War is a celebration of what science can offer when bigotry and nationalism are defeated. Using previously unknown sources and written like a thriller, it shows relativity being built brick-by-brick in front of us, as it happened 100 years ago.

Einstein's War

How Relativity Conquered Nationalism and Shook the World

Michio Kaku

This is the story of a quest: to find a Theory of Everything. Einstein dedicated his life to seeking this elusive Holy Grail, a single, revolutionary 'god equation' which would tie all the forces in the universe together, yet never found it. Some of the greatest minds in physics took up the search, from Stephen Hawking to Brian Greene. None have yet succeeded. 
 
In The God Equation, renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku takes the reader on a mind-bending tour through this epic journey: a mystery that has fascinated him for most of his life. He guides us through the key debates in modern physics, from Newton's law of gravity to the latest developments in string theory. It is a tale of dazzling breakthroughs and crushing dead ends, illuminated by Kaku's clarity, storytelling flair and infectious enthusiasm. 
 
The object of the quest is now within sight: we are closer than ever to achieving the most ambitious undertaking in the history of science. If successful, the Theory of Everything could both unlock the deepest mysteries of space and time, and fulfil that most ancient and basic of human desires - to understand the meaning of our lives.

The God Equation

The Quest for a Theory of Everything

James Gleick

Uncover one of the most exciting frontiers of modern physics in this fascinating, insightful and accessible overview of Chaos theory. 
 
‘An exceedingly readable introduction to a new intellectual world’ Observer 
 
From the turbulence of the weather to the complicated rythmns of the human heart, ‘chaos’ is at the centre of our day to day lives. Cutting across several scientific disciplines, James Gleick explores and elucidates the science of the unpredicatable with an immensely readable narrative style and flair. 
 
‘An awe-inspiring book. Reading Chaos gave me the sensation that someone had just found the light-switch’ Douglas Adams

Chaos

Richard Dawkins

Dave McKean

What are things made of? 
What is the sun? 
Why is there night and day, winter and summer? 
Why do bad things happen? 
Are we alone? 
 
Throughout history people all over the world have invented stories to answer profound questions such as these. Have you heard the tale of how the sun hatched out of an emu's egg? Or what about the great catfish that carries the world on its back? Has anyone ever told you that earthquakes are caused by a sneezing giant? These fantastical myths are fun - but what is the real answer to such questions? 
 
The Magic of Reality, with its explanations of space, time, evolution and more, will inspire and amaze readers of all ages - young adults, adults, children, octogenarians. Teaming up with the renowned illustrator Dave McKean, Richard Dawkins answers all these questions and many more. In stunning words and pictures this book presents the real story of the world around us, taking us on an enthralling journey through scientific reality, and showing that it has an awe-inspiring beauty and thrilling magic which far exceed those of the ancient myths. 
 
We encounter rainbows, our genetic ancestors, tsunamis, shooting stars, plants, animals, and an intriguing cast of characters in this extraordinary scientific voyage of discovery. Richard Dawkins and Dave McKean have created a dazzling celebration of our planet that will entertain and inform for years to come.

The Magic of Reality

How we know what's really true

Lori Oliwenstein

Robert Winston

Accompanying the major new BBC documentary series, Superhuman explores the human bodys astonishing ability to heal, renew and regenerate itself. In recording the before, during and after of radical operations on real people it introduces us to the pioneering efforts of medical teams and alerts us to the ethical issues that new medical advances raise. Over six chapters Superhuman addresses significant developments within six key medical areas: cancer, infection, transplantation, trauma, repair and reproduction. Acknowledging the debt modern physicians owe to yesterday Superhuman begins by investigating the human bodys innate abilities to heal itself. And, as we gladly launch ourselves into an age of biotechnology, it questions whether we might now use all the information available to us to comprehend finally how our bodies work? If we can achieve that, perhaps becoming superhuman is truly within our reach. Chapter one introduces us to the trauma surgeons who have discovered that the shock that follows trauma can prove beneficial in saving the body and the brain. Chapter two chronicles the astonishing technology now being used in medical transplants and the contentious issues these processes excite. Should technology continue to develop apace how are doctors and patients to choose between using an artificial limb created specifically for a patient, a human limb grown from the patients own genetic information, or the alternative solutions offered by the animal kingdom? And is intervention of true benefit to the patient if it requires a lifetime of immuno-suppressing drugs? The recent successes of the Human Genome Project have dissolved the boundaries of regeneration with made-to-order organs no longer beyond our limits. Chapter three presents the scientists responsible for engineering human tissue from materials found in the body and outlines how they might help us might claim our lost powers of regeneration. Chapter four relates how we are faring in the battle against the old enemy cancer and tells how experts in this field are trying to regain control of the cancer cells that turn against us. Chapter five explains how we strive to combat the threats we all face living in a modern world teeming with globetrotters who share one feature we're all potential contagion-carriers. Superhuman goes on to inform of the dangers of pushing too far to eradicate infectious disease from our lives completely. Chapter six spotlights an area of considerable debate that will possibly alter the course of human evolution fertility and genetic manipulation. Superhuman discusses both the advantages and the dangers of new technologies in this area, arguing that they have many positive applications and that often the hazards are overstated, solely through fear. In an attempt never to lose sight of our humanity while inviting the superhuman in us all to work, Superhuman encourages a holistic approach to medicine and an open forum for the discussion of the future of medical science.

Superhuman

John Gribbin

The quantum computer is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Pioneering physicists are on the brink of unlocking a new quantum universe which provides a better representation of reality than our everyday experiences and common sense ever could. The birth of quantum computers – which, like Schrödinger’s famous ‘dead and alive’ cat, rely on entities like electrons, photons or atoms existing in two states at the same time – is set to turn the computing world on its head. 
 
In his fascinating study of this cutting-edge technology, John Gribbin updates his previous views on the nature of quantum reality, arguing for a universe of many parallel worlds where ‘everything is real’. Looking back to Alan Turing’s work on the Enigma machine and the first electronic computer, Gribbin explains how quantum theory developed to make quantum computers work in practice as well as in principle. He takes us beyond the arena of theoretical physics to explore their practical applications – from machines which learn through ‘intuition’ and trial and error to unhackable laptops and smartphones. And he investigates the potential for this extraordinary science to create a world where communication occurs faster than light and teleportation is possible.

Computing with Quantum Cats

From Colossus to Qubits

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