David Bodanis
Goodreads Author
Born
Chicago, The United States
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September 2016
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E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation
69 editions
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published
2000
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Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World
35 editions
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published
2005
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Passionate Minds
14 editions
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published
2006
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Einstein's Greatest Mistake
26 editions
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published
2016
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The Secret House: The Extraordinary Science of an Ordinary Day
12 editions
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published
1986
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Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean
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The Secret Family: Twenty-Four Hours Inside the Mysterious World of Our Minds and Bodies
5 editions
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published
1997
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The Secret Garden: Dawn to Dusk in the Astonishing Hidden World of the Garden
3 editions
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published
1993
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The Body Book: A Fantastic Voyage to the World Within
4 editions
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published
1984
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The Ten Commandments: The Hidden History of the Truths We Live By
8 editions
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published
2012
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“An optimist was someone who believed that however complicated or random or odd a stretching curve might seem, if we had enough insight then we could understand the simple guiding principle from which it actually came. The concept then spread from mathematics to mean anyone who believes that such an optimal path can open up in life.”
― Passionate Minds
― Passionate Minds
“The watcher’s eyes are likely to swivel forward in a sequence of stately turns as the screen’s pixel glows: each quarter-ounce mass of eyeball tugged by six flat muscles, in a glissando slide within the slippery fat lining the orbital cavity. The eye blinks, the widened pupils are in position, and the incoming electromagnetic waves roar in. Ripping through the thin layer of the cornea, they decelerate slightly, with their outermost edges forming a nearly flat plane as they travel inward, carrying the as-yet-undetected signal from the screen deep into the waiting human. The waves continue through the liquid of the aqueous humor and on to the gaping hole of the pupil. The human may have squinted to avoid the glare, but human reflexes work at the rate of slow thousandths of a second and are no match for these racing intruders. The pupil is crossed without obstruction. The stiff lens just below focuses the incoming waves even more, sending them into the inland sea of the jellylike vitreous humor deeper down in the eye. A very few of the incoming electric waves explode against the organic molecules in their way, but most simply whirl through those soft biological barriers and continue straight down, piercing the innermost wrapping of the eyeball, till they reach the end-point of their journey: the fragile, stalklike projection from the living brain known as the retina. And deep inside there, in the dark, barely slowed from their original 670 million mph, the waves splatter into the ancient, moist blood vessels and cell membranes, and something unexpected happens. An electric current switches on.”
― Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World
― Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World
“E=mc2 is even better than the best poetry: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.”
― E=mc²
― E=mc²
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