Skip to main content

Authors - L

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z

M. D. Lachlan

Anna Lachowska (with Apoorva Khare)

R. A. Lafferty

Alex Lamb

Nick Lane

Philippa Lang

Charles Langmuir (with Wally Broecker)

  • How to Build a Planet ***
  • Graham Lappin

    Rich Larson

    Mark Lasbury

    Robert Laughlin

    J. L. Lawrence

    Eric Lax

    Cathy Lazere (with Dennis Shasha)

    James Le Fanu

    Ursula Le Guin

    Hervé Le Tellier (Trans. Adriana Hunter)

    Tom Lean

    Ann Leckie

    Leon Lederman (with Christopher Hill)

    Leon Lederman (with Dick Teresi)

    Jonah Lehrer

    Fritz Leiber

    Stanislaw Lem

    Michael Lemonick

    Armand Leroi

    Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon (with Will Rood and Ralph Edney)

    Richard Lester

    Hector Levesque

    Mark Levi

    Frank Levin

    Janna Levin

    Yasha Levine

    Dan Levitt

    Steven Levitt (with Stephen Dubner)

    Tim Lewens

    Mark Leyner (with Billy Goldberg)

    Gideon Lichfield (Ed.)

    Thomas Lin

    David Linden

    Grace Lindsay

    Martin Lindstrom

    Chris Lintott

    Chris Lintott (with Patrick Moore, Brian May)

    Lewis Little

    David Livingston

    Mario Livio

    Charles Lockwood

    William Bryant Logan

    Mun Keat Looi (with Colin Stuart)

    Jonathan Losos

    Rosaly Lopes (with Michael Carroll)

    Karen Lord

    David Love

    Catherine Loveday

    James Lovelock

    Pete Lunn

    Mark Lynas

    Comments

    Popular posts from this blog

    Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

    Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

    Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

    Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

    Deep Utopia - Nick Bostrom ***

    This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's  Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences  (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our appare