American historian and philosopher of science, a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of science in the 1960s. Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1949. But he later shifted his interest to the history and philosophy of science, which he taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which depicted the development of the basic natural sciences in an innovative way. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method. Rather, there are tAmerican historian and philosopher of science, a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of science in the 1960s. Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Harvard University in 1949. But he later shifted his interest to the history and philosophy of science, which he taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which depicted the development of the basic natural sciences in an innovative way. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method. Rather, there are two fundamentally different phases of scientific development in the sciences. In the first phase, scientists work within a paradigm (set of accepted beliefs). When the foundation of the paradigm weakens and new theories and scientific methods begin to replace it, the next phase of scientific discovery takes place. Kuhn believes that scientific progress—that is, progress from one paradigm to another—has no logical reasoning. Kuhn's theory has triggered widespread, controversial discussion across many scientific disciplines.

Thomas

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Daniel

Zygmunt Bauman was a world-renowned Polish sociologist and philosopher, and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. He was one of the world's most eminent social theorists, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity and one of the creators of the concept of “postmodernism”.Zygmunt Bauman was a world-renowned Polish sociologist and philosopher, and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. He was one of the world's most eminent social theorists, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity and one of the creators of the concept of “postmodernism”.

Zygmunt

James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.He was the McGraw DistinguishJames Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.Bibliography:1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )

Isaac

Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine.Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine.

Chuck

Steven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.He held the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research on elementary particles and physical cosmology was honored with numerous prizes and awards, including in 1979 the Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1991 the National Medal of Science. In 2004 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he was "considered by many to be the preeminent theoreticSteven Weinberg was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.He held the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research on elementary particles and physical cosmology was honored with numerous prizes and awards, including in 1979 the Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1991 the National Medal of Science. In 2004 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he was "considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today." He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society, as well as to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Weinberg's articles on various subjects occasionally appeared in The New York Review of Books and other periodicals. He served as consultant at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, President of the Philosophical Society of Texas, and member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus magazine, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the JASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees.

Steven

Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American author, neuroscientist, philosopher and podcast host. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Since September 2013, Harris has hosted the Making Sense podcast (originally titled Waking Up), in which he interviews guests, responds to critics, and discusses his views. In September 2018 Harris released a meditation app, Waking Up with Sam Harris.

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993. His research focuses on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. His book The Particle at the End of the Universe won the prestigious Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. Carroll lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette.

Sean

Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English-American author, philosopher, columnist, essayist, orator, journalist, and social critic. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays on culture, politics, and literature.

Christopher

Professor Richard Wesley Hamming, Ph.D. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1942; M.S., University of Nebraska, 1939; B.S., University of Chicago in 1937), was a mathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window (described in Section 5.8 of his book Digital Filters), Hamming numbers, sphere-packing (or hamming bound) and the Hamming distance.Hamming was a professor at the University of Louisville during World War II, and left to work on the Manhattan Project in 1945, programming one of the earliest electronic digital computers to calculate the solution to equations provided by the project's Professor Richard Wesley Hamming, Ph.D. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1942; M.S., University of Nebraska, 1939; B.S., University of Chicago in 1937), was a mathematician whose work had many implications for computer science and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Hamming matrix), the Hamming window (described in Section 5.8 of his book Digital Filters), Hamming numbers, sphere-packing (or hamming bound) and the Hamming distance.Hamming was a professor at the University of Louisville during World War II, and left to work on the Manhattan Project in 1945, programming one of the earliest electronic digital computers to calculate the solution to equations provided by the project's physicists. The objective of the program was to discover if the detonation of an atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere. The result of the computation was that this would not occur, and so the United States used the bomb, first in a test in New Mexico, and then twice against Japan. Later, from 1946 to 1976, he worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he collaborated with Claude Shannon. During this period, he was an Adjunct Professor at the City College of New York, School of Engineering. On July 23, 1976 he moved to the Naval Postgraduate School, where he worked as an Adjunct Professor until 1997, when he became Professor Emeritus. He died a year later in 1998.He was a founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery. His philosophy on scientific computing appears as preface to his 1962 book on numerical methods: The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.Awards:Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery, 1968.Fellow of the IEEE, 1968.IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, 1979.Member of the National Academy of Engineering, 1980.Harold Pender Award, University of Pennsylvania, 1981.IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, 1988.Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, 1994.Basic Research Award, Eduard Rhein Foundation, 1996.Certificate of Merit, Franklin Institute, 1996The IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, named after him, is an award given annually by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), for "exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems and technology", and he was the first recipient of this medal.Hamming discusses the use and potential of computers in the 1965 film Logic By Machine.

Richard

Paul Graham is an English-born American computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and essayist. He is best known for his work on Lisp, his former startup Viaweb, co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News.

Paul

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, is an independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and futurist who lives in Devon, England. He is known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, is an independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and futurist who lives in Devon, England. He is known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.

James

Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Adam M. Grant is an American psychologist and author who is currently a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania specializing in organizational psychology. He received academic tenure aged 28, making him the youngest tenured professor at the Wharton School.

Adam

Polish name: Mikołaj Kopernik. Polish astronomer and mathematician who, as a student, studied canon law, mathematics, and medicine at Cracow, Bologna, Rome, Padua, and Ferrara. Copernicus became interested in astronomy and published an early description of his "heliocentric" model of the solar system in Commentariolus (1512). In this model, the sun Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy was actually not exactly the center of the solar system, but was slightly offset from the center using a device invented by Ptolemy known as the equant point. The idea that the Sun Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy was the center of the solar system was not new (similar theories had been proposed by Aristarchus and Nicholas of Cusa), but Copernicus also workePolish name: Mikołaj Kopernik. Polish astronomer and mathematician who, as a student, studied canon law, mathematics, and medicine at Cracow, Bologna, Rome, Padua, and Ferrara. Copernicus became interested in astronomy and published an early description of his "heliocentric" model of the solar system in Commentariolus (1512). In this model, the sun Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy was actually not exactly the center of the solar system, but was slightly offset from the center using a device invented by Ptolemy known as the equant point. The idea that the Sun Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy was the center of the solar system was not new (similar theories had been proposed by Aristarchus and Nicholas of Cusa), but Copernicus also worked out his system in full mathematical detail. Even though the mathematics in his description was not any simpler than Ptolemy's, it required fewer basic assumptions. By postulating only the rotation of the Earth, Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy revolution about the sun, Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy and tilt of Earth's Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy rotational axis, Copernicus could explain the observed motion of the heavens. However, because Copernicus retained circular orbits, his system required the inclusion of epicycles. Unfortunately, out of fear that his ideas might get him into trouble with the church, Copernicus delayed publication of them.In 1539, Copernicus took on Rheticus as a student and handed over his manuscript to him to write a popularization of the heliocentric theory, published as Narratio Prima in 1540. Shortly before his death, Rheticus convinced Copernicus to allow publication of his original manuscript, and De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published in 1543. Copernicus proposed his theory as a true description, not just a theory to save appearances. Unlike Buridan and Oresme, he did not think that any theory which saved appearances was valid, instead believing that there could only be a single true theory. When the work was published, however, Andreas Osiander added an unauthorized preface stating that the contents was merely a device to simplify calculations.Copernicus adapted physics to the demands of astronomy, believing that the principles of Ptolemy's system were incorrect, not the math or observations. He was the first person in history to create a complete and general system, combining mathematics, physics, and cosmology. (Ptolemy, for instance, had treated each planet separately.) Copernicus's system was taught in some universities in the 1500s but had not permeated the academic world until approximately 1600. Some people, among whom John Donne and William Shakespeare were the most influential, feared Copernicus's theory, feeling that it destroyed hierarchal natural order which would in turn destroy social order and bring about chaos. Indeed, some people (such as Bruno), used Copernicus's theory to justify radical theological views.Before Copernicus formulated his theory of the solar system, astronomy in Europe had stagnated. After the Almagest had been translated into Latin, European astronomers such as the Austrian mathematician Georg von Peurbach and the German astronomer Regiomontanus proposed no new theories, attempting instead to refine the flawed system already laid out by Ptolemy. The astronomy textbook used for teaching was still The Sphere, the same book that had been in use since the 1200s. Rather than formulating new theories, astronomers had busied themselves in "saving appearances," which consisted of trying to patch it up Ptolemy's cumbersome and inaccurate model. Copernicus, however, wiped the slate clean in a single broad stroke, and proposed a fundamentally different model in which the planets all circled the Sun Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy in De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. While radically different from Ptolemy's model, Copernicus's heliocentric theory was hardly an original idea. 

Nicolaus

Michael Herschel Greger is an American physician, author, and professional speaker on public health issues, best known for his advocacy of a whole-food, plant-based diet, and his opposition to animal-derived food products.

Dr. Michael Greger

Brian

Human life is a staggeringly strange thing.  On the surface of a ball of rock falling around a nuclear fireball in the blackness of a vacuum, the laws of nature conspired to create a naked ape that can look up at the stars and wonder where it came from.  It is often thought that only humans can question their own existence, but what if this phenomenon exists in other animals? What is a human being? Objectively, nothing of consequence.  Particles of dust in an infinite arena, present for an instant in eternity.  Clumps of atoms in a universe with more galaxies than people.  And yet a human being is necessary for the question itself to exist, and the presence of a question in the universe—any question—is the most wonderful thing.  Questions require minds, and minds bring meaning. 

Brian Edward Cox OBE, FRS is an English physicist who serves as professor of particle physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.

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