A guide for reading and gifting for science readers
It’s our mission to publish books at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design that challenge and empower our readers. To help you uncover your next big idea, we’ve crafted a guide for reading and gifting that’s bursting with titles that exemplify the MIT Press: intellectual daring content, rigorous scholarly standards, a rich interdisciplinary focus, and beautiful distinctive designs.
Read on to discover new science books, and explore even more big ideas in our full guide.
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The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal by Chris French
Ghostly encounters, alien abduction, reincarnation, talking to the dead, UFO sightings, inexplicable coincidences, out-of-body and near-death experiences. Are these legitimate phenomena? If not, how should we go about understanding them? In this fascinating book, Chris French investigates paranormal claims to discover what lurks behind this “weird shit.” French provides authoritative, evidence-based explanations for a wide range of superficially mysterious phenomena, and then goes further to draw out lessons with wider applications to many other aspects of modern society where critical thinking is urgently needed.
Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt by Anna Von Mertens
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of about 100,000 light years—a figure we can calculate because of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921), who spent decades studying glass plate photographs of the night sky. Visual artist and researcher Anna Von Mertens’s Attention Is Discovery is a fascinating portrait of this remarkable woman who laid the foundation for modern cosmology, as well as an exploration of the power of looking and its revelatory role at the center of scientific discovery. Ushering us into the scientific community of women who worked alongside Leavitt, now known as the Harvard Computers, Von Mertens describes the inventive methodologies Leavitt devised to negotiate the era’s emerging photographic technology.
Father Nature: The Science of Paternal Potential by James K. Rilling
We all know the importance of mothers. They are typically as paramount in the wild as they are in human relationships. But what about fathers? In most mammals, including our closest living primate relatives, fathers have little to no involvement in raising their offspring—and sometimes even kill the offspring sired by other fathers. How, then, can we explain modern fathers with the capacity to be highly engaged parents? In Father Nature, James Rilling explores how humans have evolved to endow modern fathers with this potential and considers why this capacity evolved in humans.
Serendipity: The Unexpected in Science by Telmo Pievani
How many times have we looked for something and found something else? A partner, a job, an object? The same thing often happens to scientists: they design an experiment and discover the unexpected, which usually turns out to be very important. This fascinating phenomenon is called serendipity, which takes its name from the mythical Serendip, a place from which, according to a Persian fable, three princes set off to explore the world, making chance discoveries along the way. In Serendipity, the award-winning author of Imperfection Telmo Pievani returns to weave a compelling story about the unexpected in science and its fascinating role in our understanding of the world.