Product Description

What is life about? How are men and women different? How did the universe begin? We all ponder these questions from time to time but some scientists spend their lives investigating them. Are they anywhere near finding answers? In this exciting new book, leading scientific thinkers address twenty of the really big questions that people have been asking for hundreds of years. The contributors include John Sulston, who led the British side of the Human Genome Project and who offers his views on whether we can ever end disease; Susan Greenfield, Oxford University professor of pharmacology, who describes what she thinks is a thought; John Barrow, Cambridge professor of mathematical sciences, who tells us what is time; and American psychologist David Buss, who suggests why we fall in and out of love. Their answers are each put into context by more general commentaries discussing the differing views of other leading contemporary scientists and looking at how people have tackled the question in the past. The result is a breathtaking tour of scientific thought through the ages and a peek at some of the most cutting-edge and controversial research today. Packed with fascinating insights, it shows how science is investigating problems that affect us all on a large scale and suggests that we are closer to finding solutions to some of life's big questions than we might think.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #855695 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Review
This book takes 20 of the most-pondered questions and sets about them in a scientific but comprehensible way. These questions are age-old ones: what is time? Does God exist? What makes us fall in and out of love? Is it right to interfere with nature? Each question is discussed by a renowned scientist and specialist in that particular field, who also describes how other scientists and thinkers past and present have dealt with them and how certain patterns of analysis have served to further modern scientific reasoning. This helps the reader to understand a few of the basic complexities inherent in such investigations. The trillion-dollar questions regarding God's existence and what life is actually about are intelligently debated, giving the reader a clearer and more informed way of thinking about the issues. Obviously this book is unable to give precise answers but it does reassure the inquisitive reader that it is not futile to wonder about such things when scientists have devoted their lives to elucidating them. This is a book that will appeal to most people and while it may not be able to give crystal clear and satisfying solutions, it certainly provides a multitude of insights into the nature of these fundamental mysteries and why and how we wonder about them. Highly recommended. (Kirkus UK)

Synopsis
What is life about? How are men and women different? How did the universe begin? We all ponder these questions from time to time but some scientists spend their lives investigating them. Are they anywhere near finding answers? In this exciting new book, leading scientific thinkers address twenty of the really big questions that people have been asking for hundreds of years. The contributors include John Sulston, who led the British side of the Human Genome Project and who offers his views on whether we can ever end disease; Susan Greenfield, Oxford University professor of pharmacology, who describes what she thinks is a thought; John Barrow, Cambridge professor of mathematical sciences, who tells us what is time; and American psychologist David Buss, who suggests why we fall in and out of love. Their answers are each put into context by more general commentaries discussing the differing views of other leading contemporary scientists and looking at how people have tackled the question in the past. The result is a breathtaking tour of scientific thought through the ages and a peek at some of the most cutting-edge and controversial research today.

Packed with fascinating insights, it shows how science is investigating problems that affect us all on a large scale and suggests that we are closer to finding solutions to some of life's big questions than we might think.

From the Publisher
Popular science at its best.