intro textbooks . com

From the author of the number one textbooks in physical science and liberal-arts physics comes the eagerly awaited new text, Conceptual Integrated Science. Using his proven conceptual approach, accessible writing, and fun and informative illustrations, Hewitt and his team of science experts have crafted an introductory textbook that focuses on the unifying concepts and real-life examples across physics, chemistry, earth science, biology, and astronomy.

The Sciences: An Integrated Approach has been used by over 100,000 students nationwide since it was published and is the leading text on the market for the integrated science course. Unlike any of its competitors, it fully integrates physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth sciences, and biology for students with little or no science background. Applauded by students and instructors for its easy-to-read style and detail appropriate for non-science majors, the fifth edition has thoroughly updated content bringing the most up-to-date coverage to the students in all five disciplines.

Professor Hazen is an apostle of science education for non-scientists, and he has few peers at rendering the most complex ideas simple, without being simplistic. He introduces great ideas of science in 60 lectures that explore the fundamental discoveries and principles of all of the physical and biological sciences—physics, genetics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, meteorology, thermodynamics, and more.

Did Newton "unweave the rainbow" by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says acclaimed scientist Richard Dawkins; Newton's unweaving is the key to much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved: the solution often is more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering deeper mysteries.

With the wit, insight, and spellbinding prose that have made him a best-selling author, Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, combining them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder.

Humanity left childhood and entered the troubled but productive world when it started to criticize its own certainties and weigh the worthiness of its most secure beliefs. Thus began that "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, the terms of civic and political life—the good, the better, the best. The debate continues, and one remains aloof to it at a very heavy price, for "the unexamined life is not worth living." This course of 60 lectures gives the student a sure guide and interpreter as the major themes within the Long Debate are presented and considered.

Science can't be free of philosophy any more than baseball can be free of physics." With this bold intellectual swing for the fences, philosopher Jeffrey L. Kasser launches an ambitious and exciting inquiry into what makes science science, using the tools of philosophy.

From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space.

Historically, all of the sciences were once united under the rubric of "natural science." Over time, they became fragmented and specialized. Nevertheless, Wilson argues that there is a genetic and neurological basis for knowledge and that all subjects of human inquiry can be reunited under the umbrella of "consilience."

The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience, a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws."

One of the best descriptions of the nature and implications of Darwinian evolution ever written. Dennett argues that Darwinian processes are the central organising force in the Universe. Dennett asserts that natural selection is a blind and algorithmic process which is sufficiently powerful to account for the generation and evolution of life including the ins and outs of human minds and societies.

Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature."

Over a decade ago, Richard Dawkins, who contributes a foreword to this book, coined the term "meme" for a unit of culture that is transmitted via imitation and naturally "selected" by popularity or longevity. Dawkins used memes to show that the theory known as Universal Darwinism, according to which "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities," applies to more than just genes. Now, building on his ideas, psychologist Blackmore contends that memes can account for many forms of human behavior that do not obviously serve the "selfish gene." For example, a possible gene-meme co-evolution among early humans could have selected for true altruism among humans: people who help others (whether or not they are related) can influence them and thus spread their memes.