(Part 3) Top products from r/askscience

My main hobby is reading textbooks, so I decided to go beyond the scope of the question posed. I took a look at what I have on my shelves in order to recommend particularly good or standard books that I think could characterize large portions of an undergraduate degree and perhaps the beginnings of a graduate degree in the main fields that interest me, plus some personal favorites.

Neuroscience: Theoretical Neuroscience is a good book for the field of that name, though it does require background knowledge in neuroscience (for which, as others mentioned, Kandel's text is excellent, not to mention that it alone can cover the majority of an undergraduate degree in neuroscience if corequisite classes such as biology and chemistry are momentarily ignored) and in differential equations. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology were used in my classes on cognition and learning/memory and I enjoyed both; though they tend to choose breadth over depth, all references are research papers and thus one can easily choose to go more in depth in any relevant topics by consulting these books' bibliographies.

General chemistry, organic chemistry/synthesis: I liked Linus Pauling's General Chemistry more than whatever my school gave us for general chemistry. I liked this undergraduate organic chemistry book, though I should say that I have little exposure to other organic chemistry books, and I found Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis to be very informative and useful. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to take instrumental/analytical/inorganic/physical chemistry and so have no idea what to recommend there.

Biochemistry: Lehninger is the standard text, though it's rather expensive. I have limited exposure here.

Mathematics: When I was younger (i.e. before having learned calculus), I found the four-volume The World of Mathematics great for introducing me to a lot of new concepts and branches of mathematics and for inspiring interest; I would strongly recommend this collection to anyone interested in mathematics and especially to people considering choosing to major in math as an undergrad. I found the trio of Spivak's Calculus (which Amazon says is now unfortunately out of print), Stewart's Calculus (standard text), and Kline's Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach to be a good combination of rigor, practical application, and physical intuition, respectively, for calculus. My school used Marsden and Hoffman's Elementary Classical Analysis for introductory analysis (which is the field that develops and proves the calculus taught in high school), but I liked Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis (nicknamed "Baby Rudin") better. I haven't worked my way though Munkres' Topology yet, but it's great so far and is often recommended as a standard beginning toplogy text. I haven't found books on differential equations or on linear algebra that I've really liked. I randomly came across Quine's Set Theory and its Logic, which I thought was an excellent introduction to set theory. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica is a very famous text, but I haven't gotten hold of a copy yet. Lang's Algebra is an excellent abstract algebra textbook, though it's rather sophisticated and I've gotten through only a small portion of it as I don't plan on getting a PhD in that subject.

Computer Science: For artificial intelligence and related areas, Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach's text is a standard and good text, and I also liked Introduction to Information Retrieval (which is available online by chapter and entirely). For processor design, I found Computer Organization and Design to be a good introduction. I don't have any recommendations for specific programming languages as I find self-teaching to be most important there, nor do I know of any data structures books that I found to be memorable (not that I've really looked, given the wealth of information online). Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is considered to be a gold standard text for algorithms, but I haven't secured a copy yet.

Physics: For basic undergraduate physics (mechanics, e&m, and a smattering of other subjects), I liked Fundamentals of Physics. I liked Rindler's Essential Relativity and Messiah's Quantum Mechanics much better than whatever books my school used. I appreciated the exposition and style of Rindler's text. I understand that some of the later chapters of Messiah's text are now obsolete, but the rest of the book is good enough for you to not need to reference many other books. I have little exposure to books on other areas of physics and am sure that there are many others in this subreddit that can give excellent recommendations.

Other: I liked Early Theories of the Universe to be good light historical reading. I also think that everyone should read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

I'm assuming you're looking for things geared toward a layman audience, and not textbooks. Here's a few of my personal favorites:

Sagan

Cosmos: You probably know what this is. If not, it is at once a history of science, an overview of the major paradigms of scientific investigation (with some considerable detail), and a discussion of the role of science in the development of human society and the role of humanity in the larger cosmos.

Pale Blue Dot: Similar themes, but with a more specifically astronomical focus.


Dawkins

The Greatest Show on Earth: Dawkins steers (mostly) clear of religious talk here, and sticks to what he really does best: lays out the ideas behind evolution in a manner that is easily digestible, but also highly detailed with a plethora of real-world evidence, and convincing to anyone with even a modicum of willingness to listen.


Hofstadter

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: It seems like I find myself recommending this book at least once a month, but it really does deserve it. It not only lays out an excruciatingly complex argument (Godel's Incompleteness Theorem) in as accessible a way as can be imagined, and explores its consequences in mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience, but is also probably the most entertainingly and clearly written work of non-fiction I've ever encountered.


Feynman

The Feynman Lectures on Physics: It's everything. Probably the most detailed discussion of physics concepts that you'll find on this list.

Burke

Connections: Not exactly what you were asking for, but I love it, so you might too. James Burke traces the history of a dozen or so modern inventions, from ancient times all the way up to the present. Focuses on the unpredictability of technological advancement, and how new developments in one area often unlock advancements in a seemingly separate discipline. There is also a documentary series that goes along with it, which I'd probably recommend over the book. James Burke is a tremendously charismatic narrator and it's one of the best few documentary series I've ever watched. It's available semi-officially on Youtube.

Well, excited-state calculations aren't that easy. Neglecting magnetic interactions doesn't really simplify things much - they're normally neglected in QC calculations (except for heavy elements where SO-coupling becomes significant).

One idea is that you might try repeating (and perhaps improving on) Pekeris calculations on helium from the 60's, which are fairly well-known. The drawback here is that like Hylleraas method (which he built on), it's not going to tell you much about current methods in 'real world' use. But it's almost certainly the best trade-off for programming simplicity versus accuracy.

If you're more interested in learning something that might be of practical use, then a Hartree-Fock implementation is certainly the best starting point for any atomic/molecular calculation. Nearly all quantum-chemical methods build directly on H-F, so even if you want to do something more accurate, you'll need to start with HF. Szabo and Ostlund is pretty good for HF and post-HF methods, and has Fortran sources to a basic HF program in it. (Despite it's name though, it's a bit dated and doesn't deal with DFT methods at all). So you could start with a basic HF program, and if you still really want to do excited states after that, the simplest more accurate method would be to move to Configuration Interaction. Specifically, you could do a CI-Singles calculation to get the excited states. (at that level, we're talking errors of ~ 1 eV, so you might understand why magnetic interactions are negligible!) If you're really ambitious you could go on and go to higher CI levels.

But if your goal is to learn quantum mechanics rather than quantum chemistry, I wouldn't go too far with it. I'd expect an understanding of the HF method (although not necessarily its practical implementation) to be necessary for a good grounding in QM. And I'd expect any grad student in Q-chem to be able to write an implementation. But going from a basic Hartree-Fock program to a more sophisticated one, and from a HF program to a CI program can take quite a bit of work, very little of which consists of learning any new physics. For someone who knows the HF method well, you could pretty much summarize the entire theory behind CI in five words: "Linear expansion in Slater determinants."

Disclaimer: I am an engineer, not a physicist, biologist, etc.

I've always been partial to Feynman's writings when it comes to non-technical discussions of physics. Six Easy Pieces is a great place to start, and if you enjoy it, you can try out Six Not So Easy Pieces. QED is a very accessible book on quantum electrodynamics. Don't let the complex-sounding title fool you--Feynman makes this subject very easy to understand for the layperson.

I really enjoyed reading Relativity for the Million by Martin Gardner, although it's been quite a while since I read it. Gardner is a great author, and this book is perfect for the interested layperson. If you enjoy puzzles, check out his other books. If you want to get a little more technical, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory by Einstein is a good choice.

If you're up for a challenge and willing to commit to a bit of study, I recommend The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose.

As far as magazines go, I've found that Science News keeps me up-to-date on the latest developments in science without getting mired in the details of subjects that I may not be familiar with.

Not much, the nice thing for upper math courses is they do a good job of building up from bare bones. If you have some linear algebra and a multivariable calc course you should be good. The big requirement is however mathematical maturity. You should be able to read, understand, and write proof.

A very basic intro to proofs course is usually taught to first year math students, this covers set notations, logic, and some basic proof techniques. A common reference is "How to prove it: a structured approach", I learned from Intro to mathematical thinking. The latter isn't as liked, it does seem to cover some material that I think should be taught early. A lot of classical number theory and algebra, for example fundamental theorem of arithmetic, and Fermat's little (not last) theorem are proven. Try to find a reference for that stuff if you can.

It's really important to do a proof based linear algebra class. It helps build the maturity I mentioned and will make life easier with topology. But even more importantly teaching linear algebra in a more abstract way is important for a physics undergrad as it can serve as a foundation for functional analysis, the theory upon which quantum mechanics is built. And in general it is good to stop thinking of vectors as arrows in R^n as soon as possible. A great reference is Axler's LADR.

Again not strictly required, but it helps build maturity and it serves as a good motivation for many of the concepts introduced in a topology class. You will see the practical side of compact sets (namely they are closed and bounded sets in R^(n)), and prove that using the abstract definition (which is the preferred one in topology). You will also prove some facts about continuous functions which will motivate the definition of continuity used in topology, and generally seeing proofs about open sets will show you why open sets are important and why you may wish to look at spaces described only by their open sets (as you will in topology). The reference for real analysis is typically Rudin, but that can be a little tough (I'm sorry, I can't remember the easier book at the moment)

Edit: I will remove this as it doesn't meet the requirements for an /r/askscience question, we usually answer questions about the science rather than learning references. If you feel my answer wasn't comprehensive enough feel free to ask on /r/math or /r/learnmath

Oh, I have a bunch of recommendations.

First, I really think you should read Elkhonon Goldberg's The New Executive Brain. Goldberg was the student of neuropsychology legend Alexander Luria. He was also a good friend of Oliver Sacks, whose books are both informative and highly entertaining (try The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat).

I also think Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence is a great read. This book focuses on the neocortex.

I think you'll also appreciate Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Sapolsky is a great storyteller. This book is a pretty good primer on stress physiology. Stress affects the brain in many ways and I'm sure this book will be very eye-opening to you!

More suggestions:

The Age of Insight and In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel are good. The Tell-Tale Brain and Phantoms of the Brain by Ramachandran are worth checking out. If you are interested in consciousness, you should check out Antonio Damasio and Michael Graziano. And Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman.

If you're up for a challenge I recommend Olaf Sporn's Networks of the Brain and Buzsáki's Rhythms of the Brain.

You might try here: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=fact&restrict_sr=on

and then ctr+F for "evolution" for a few previous instances of this question, or here:


http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=evolution+fact&sort=top&restrict_sr=on

or other variations thereupon.

Anyways, we don't make a habit of letting these questions out all that often, as they never really do well, and when they do attract attention it's mostly people who don't really understand evolution all that well, trying to explain evolution to people who definitely don't understand it that well, and it just never really winds up being productive (while those of us who do know something about evolution squirm in agony at even attempting to undue all the damage this whole "fact vs theory" thing in a somewhat concise manner).

I'm keeping it spammed (you could also try searching in /r/evolution), but my honest suggestion would be to have her read something like Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, if she's willing to (and perhaps you could sit down and read it yourself first, to be able to give it an honest recommendation). Alternatively Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth is supposed to be good (I haven't read it myself), although Coyne's writing style might be more appealing for the non-academic, and some people are allergic to Richard Dawkins, for obvious reasons if you know who he is.

What's her angle. Presumably she is of the faithful? If that's really her angle, then you might be hard pressed to convince her with a short paragraph or two that I could provide.

Looking on their website it seems as if they do not let outside people borrow from their library, sorry :(.

I know many libraries have "partnerships" for the lack of a better word, where if you try to borrow a book from the library, and they don't have it, they will request it from somewhere else they are partnered with and get it for you.

Some ideas of books:

For my undergraduate astrophysics class I used - Foundations of Astrophysics by Ryden and Peterson, ISBN13: 978-0-321-59558-4

I have also used (more advanced, graduate level) - An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll and Ostlie, ISBN13: 978-0-805-30402-2

There are plenty of other undergraduate text books for astrophysics, but those are the only two I have experience with.

Some other books that may be just fun reads and aren't text books:

A Brief History of Time - Hawking

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Feynman

Random popular science books:

Parallel Worlds - Kaku (or anything else by him Michio Kaku)

Cosmos - Sagan

Dark Cosmos - Hooper

or anything by Green, Krauss, Tyson, etc.

Videos to watch:

I would also suggest, if you have an hour to burn, watching this video by Lawrence Krauss. I watched it early on in my physics career and loved it, check it out:

Lawrence Krauss - A Universe From Nothing

Also this video is some what related:

Sean Carroll - Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time

Hope you enjoy!

Edit: Formatting.

> do you mean that they are man-made tools to help picture and calculate and predict?

Yes.

> once we figured out that light is the oscillation of the EM field, that proved to us that fields are actually a real physical... thing.

That's definitely not the case (the second part.) In fact the experiments of Michelson and Morley are usually cited as definitive proof that it's not a real, physical thing.

> If you don't feel confident answering, are there any books you would refer me to?

Check out Feynman's books "6 Not-So-Easy Pieces" and "QED". QED is the one more relevant to this discussion. I would also recommend Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality if you have a lot of spare time and are willing to keep up with it properly.

Are you taking an intro to physics course as an undergraduate? If so, and if you are interested enough to take more coursework on physics, try taking an EMags (Electromagnetic Fields) class in the EE or physics department. 20th century physics (relativity) and a couple of QM (Quantum Mechanics) classes would be helpful as well. After you take a couple of EM and QM courses, you'll really appreciate how god damn hard it is to have any sort of "intuition" about physics, and how important it is to just treat the math like math.

There is a great book titled "Power Sex and Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life" by Nick Lane. it opens with a history of the discovery of the mitochondria, and the steps taken to understand what it does and how.

In general, for most things we discovered about biology before the advent of modern genetics or even an understanding of what a gene was there were a few common attributes that made something microscopic easier to study.

First, is there a lot of it in a tissue? We have really good purification techniques now, not to mention the ability to take pretty much any genetically encoded protein and convert a yeast or bacteria cell into a little factory to make grams of our protein, but in the early days of discovery, you needed a natural source with lots of your protein of interest (like hemoglobin in blood).

Second does your protein/molecule/organelle have a color? when you get right down to the cellular level, so much of what there is to study is transparent. Even chemical purification techniques that were available typically resulted in a white or yellowish powder. But for some things, and this is especially true for mitochondria and chloroplasts, there is a very distinct color. Mitochondria are packed with molecules called cytochromes which give them a very distinctive orange/red/brown color.

For most scientist all it takes is an observation of something interesting, a tiny thread that they can start tugging on. After that its incremental test after incremental test, gathering information one step at a time until the puzzle is solved...or as solved as possible

The Turing machine answer is a fantastic theoretical one, but if you want to see a practical answer for "how do you build a computer (like most people would think of a computer) from scratch", which seems to be what you were looking for when you wrote this:

> What is going on at the lowest level? How are top-level instructions translated into zeroes and ones, and how does that make the computer perform an action?

...then this book is a fantastical down-to-earth, extremely approachable first read for such things (and designed such that you don't need *any* prior knowledge to start reading it).

Seriously, if you want to dive a little bit deeper, I highly recommend it.


edit: seems someone already recommended Code. Still, can't give it enough praise. Or The Elements of Computing Systems (TECS) which a (only *slightly*) more technical read designed around building everything that a computer "is", piece by piece...

Edit2: And as for "what's going on with the Minecraft ALU", TECS is a good read there as well, since the machine described in that book is what I based the ALU on. Also, the fact that Minecraft can simulate logic gates is what links the "real world" and the "minecraft world" together, because logic gates are all you need to build any computer (that's how Minecraft can let you build Turing Complete devices)

Salt goes back before recorded history, since it is vital to our biology. You can read an anecdotal history of how it has influenced world affairs in "Salt: A World History", which is a fun read.

Black pepper almost certainly rose to prominence on the European table as a status symbol, since all of it was brought overland from India via the silk road until the opening of sea trade routes around the Cape of Good Hope in the 16th century. It is useful for flavoring preserved foods (as part of the cooking/preservation process) and as medicine, and these aspects drove trade even to the extent of motivating Vasco da Gama's quest for a sea route to India at the end of the 15th century.

For Cosmology, check out Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It is a fantastic book and a favorite of many astronomy, cosmology enthusiast. It was also produced into a TV series which you can watch online for free. It's a bit dated, as it came out in the 80's, but still a fantastic read and very good for a layman understanding of a lot of science.

I haven't found any of it online after a quick check, but there's been some of research on the subject. This is a thesis and huge source of information on it, but I can't find the text anywhere. There's some more and newer research, but unfortunately it seems that the Russians care the most about this, and they don't care to translate.

But it's all nicely summarized by primatologist and generally awesome bearded man Dr. Robert Sapolsky in his book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and mentioned in this talk which is worth a view.

What are you trying to be? Have one book just slightly deeper than Greene's book, or actually learn theoretical physics to say become a theoretical physicist or at least understand it?

If the former, it will be difficult as there's a lot of things that might be tacitly assumed that you know about more basic physics. However, a very good intro to Quantum Mechanics is Shankar. I'd also look into Foster and Nightingale's relativity book for a brief introduction to special (read Appendix A first) and general relativity. Maybe after both try A. Zee intro to QFT if you want to learn more about QFT. If you want to learn about phenomenological particle physics, say look at Perkins. Also it may help to have a book on mathematical physics, such as Boas or Arfken. (Arfken is the more advanced book, but has less examples). Also it may help to get a basic modern physics book that has very little math, though I can't think of any good ones.

If the latter than you will have to learn a lot. Here's advice from Nobel Laureate theoretical physicist Gerardus t'Hooft.

For a non-mathematical but no-nonsense book about quantum field theory, I'd recommend

• Feynman: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
  
  For a surprisingly good summary of the development of quantum mechanics, and also an account of a very interesting man's life:
  
  
• Graham Farmelo: The Strangest Man: The Life of Paul Dirac
  
  And the now-standard textbook for my field (the start of which is suitable someone at a mid to high level of their undergraduate studies)
  
  
• Peskin and Schroeder: Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

We DON"T know that, its just every time we check on them (do experiments) the results come out that in such a way that makes us think that the laws that we have deduced from previous experiments still hold true. The interesting thing about scientific paradigms is that we do something, then see a result and then try to come up with an explination of why that result happened, the better our explanation explains the result and explains other results and survives repeated testing the better our explanation is to determining how the world really works, from which we can do things that build on our explanation.

This in the end does allow false assumptions to exist in science (think phlogistion chemistry) but as the field of science requires more complicated and complicated excuses for why different events happened, they are replaced with a new paradigm that explains the physical world differently.

In the end we may find at some point down the road something that scientists believe an unquestionable rule of physics is actually incorrect because it cannot explain X,Y, or Z but a new explanation comes forth and explains the stuff the first law explained and X,Y, or Z, in a better, cleaner way.

To read more I suggest : The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083

Please everyone, read this book.
It is written conversationally and with very simple mathematics, but is extremely thorough in explaining most of the WTF?! bits of relativity.

Also Einstein had a great sense of humor.

No problem, glad you find it interesting. If you want to know more, Steve Strogatz's Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos is a good place to start and is generally very accessible. It talks about how to tell what regions of phase space are stable vs unstable, for example, and how chaos arises out of all of this. Overall it is a good read and has a lot of interesting examples (as is typical of a lot of his books).

For more on the Hamiltonian mechanics in particular (albeit at a more advanced level), the classic text is Goldstein's Classical Mechanics. Its definitely more dense, but if you can push through it and get at what the math is saying its a really interesting subject. For example, in principle, you can do a coordinate transformation where you decouple all the generalized momentum - coordinate pairs and do a sort of modal analysis on a system where you would never be able to do so otherwise (these are called action-angle variables)

If you want to learn serious mathematics, start with a theoretical approach to calculus, then go into some analysis. Introductory Real Analysis by Kolmogorov is pretty good.

As far as how to think about these things, group theory is a strong start. "The real numbers are the unique linearly-ordered field with least upper bound property." Once you understand that sentence and can explain it in the context of group theory and the order topology, then you are in a good place to think about infinity, limits, etc.

Edit: For calc, Spivak is one of the textbooks I have heard is more common, but I have never used it so I can't comment on it. I've heard good things, though.

A harder analysis book for self-study would be Principles of Mathematical Analysis by Rudin. He is very terse in his proofs, so they can be hard to get through.

> about the acceleration you will get from big bombs out of the atmosphere.

Is not correct. They intended to use relatively small yield "pulse units" (they preferred to not use the word bomb). These were to be about 1-2 kilotons. Not even up the Fat Man or Little Boy yields. And even smaller, like 200 tons in initial take off from earth's surface.

A good read is the book "Project Orion" by George Dyson.

>Nuclear explosions have somewhat different effects out of an atmosphere

The propulsion was going to be from the plasma of the bomb casing hitting the pusher plate and the ablation of the oil layer pumped onto it. They were even planning on nuclear shaped charges to focus as much of this plasma toward the pusher plate as possible.

So, scattered across the world, there are salt deposits. These are normally form where the ocean water gets trapped and then evaporates, like a tidal region by the sea. However there are also large salt formations left from really ancient oceans that have evaporated entirely, like the salt flats in the southwest part of the US.

There is a great book called Salt which discusses this in great detail. His thesis is that these salt formations lead to the first groups of humans which stopped being nomadic and settled in one place. It is definitely worth the read.

Things are a bit different for hearing, but the "such and unexplored area" feeling will be the same. For reference, this is what science is.

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

OH, also read Thomas Khun's, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions only 200 pages, and you'll probably get the point around page 50. Best book on human knowledge ever.

The Way Things Work is pretty awesome.

It's also a great book :)

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene

Here is a good book about the people who study Darwin's Finches in the Galapagos. The researchers have documented the birds evolving very quickly in response to droughts and floods on the island. It's fascinating!

Read "The Beak of the Finch," two species hybridized and essentially gave rise to a third species. The book talks about the research and discoveries of Peter and Rosemary Grant, both highly respected biologists. http://www.amazon.com/Beak-Finch-Story-Evolution-Time/dp/067973337X

Just want to mention that pop sci (which everything you mentioned is) and an actual rigorous study of physics are two very very different things. The romantic image of physics you get from those kind of programs is very different then what is actually involved in learning physics.

I would suggest getting more familiar with the mathematics (calculus, statistics, linear algebra) before diving into the actual physics.

Having the math first will make it much easier to see the actual physics behind the equations instead of sitting there trying to figure out the math and physics at the same time.

To that end I would suggest having Boas mathematical methods next to you at all times during your early studies. Its at about a sophomore (college) level but is easily accessible to most anyone with a basic mathematics background.

(http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Physical-Sciences-Mary/dp/0471198269)

Other than that watch Kahn academy or the MIT online courses.

I've always liked Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne.

I thought it was around 20% c from the book for the Orion Project max speed. Did you read the book?

http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805059857/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449250466&sr=1-1&keywords=orion+project

Looks like most websites reference 10% of c as the max speed. Wish I still had the book to look up what the scientists calculations were.

For computational chemistry:

You will need to have a solid understanding of Quantum Chemistry. The two commonly used books for this is the following...

Quantum Chemistry: 6th ed. by Levine

Modern Quantum Chemistry by Szabo.

Honestly don't worry too much about the newest edition of Levine. I've been using the 5th edition and not much has changed. Szabo is published by Dover so its dirt cheap.

For actual computational chemistry, Cramer does a decent job.

The way I thought of time travel isn't so much ripping someone from spacetime at a certain point and plopping them back in at another point. Although I remember reading about how it can be done with wormholes, but I would imagine if we had artificial wormholes for this sort of thing, they'd be anchored and your destination would be wherever it's anchored to. It was this article in the Daily Mail.

If time travel is possible, I would imagine it's more like speeding through time rather than "teleporting" in time. Before I continue, I want to emphasize that the ideas I'm putting forth is based on spacetime being an intertwined "entity".

If we were to simply speed through time, we'd still be in the same location we started (with a margin of error). This does assume that we can't travel faster than the speed of light (assuming that it's still a constant), and general relativity had determined that gravity's influence moves about just as fast as light. With those assumptions, gravity will keep you anchored to the planet. Since you were already moving to begin with in relation to spacetime and you're still influenced by your environment to some degree, it should stand to reason you're going to be on that same patch of ground you were on when you started (assuming you've stood still the entire trip).

With that idea though, you're still in danger of coming back to normal time speed inside a concrete wall (or whatever material they choose to make their buildings out of by that point). However, tectonic shifts would only be an issue if the fault opened up right below you. As for mountain forming, you should be...relatively okay depending on how far in time you go. The earth itself should be pushing up on you. That's if you were to stand in one place the entire time.

Now, if you were to teleport through time (without the help of wormholes), I would imagine you'd be able to control WHERE in spacetime you end up.

I'm not a physicist, so I'm sure there are holes in my logic somewhere...but this was a realization that occurred to me when I was reading The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Don't read Feynman. While it's extremely dense and good, it's also very unconventional and hard to understand if you don't know where it's going already.
I'd suggest Griffiths or Zee's Nutshell. While both are technically textbooks, i think you can read them very well without necessarily understanding all calculations.
Of course, those are damn expensive so you should better look for them in a library.

There seems to be some fuzziness around that term. The text I used defines a strange attractor as an attractor with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This is clearly not the same definition used by the wikipedia page.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Computing-Systems-Principles/dp/0262640686

This text book goes through building a computer starting at logic gates and going all the way to building a CPU and writing a compiler. It might take a while to get through, but after you do you will have a really good understanding of how computers work.

If you are looking for resources to help you learn electronic structure theory, I recommend the textbook by Szabo and Ostlund here.

Griffiths > Eisberg > Sakurai > Zee > Peskin

Peres and Ballentine offer a more quantum information oriented approach, read em after Griffiths.

Shankar before Sakurai, after Griffiths.



In that order. Your best bet though, is to find the appropriate section in the nearest university library, spend a day or two looking at books and choose whatever looks most interesting/accessible. Be warned, it seems that everyone and their cat has a book published on quantum mechanics with funky diagrams on the cover these days. A lot of them are legitimate, but make little to no effort to ensure your understanding or pose creative problems.

Perhaps the book The Way Things Work? I loved this book when I was a kid.

This is an incredibly broad and complex set of questions.

Here is a good video describing why there are so many programming languages.

Wikipedia has multiple pages comparing programming languages. Here is the beginning.

Students will spend years in school learning about the different layers of abstraction in programming and how code gets turned into something the computer will understand. This website along with the companion book is an excellent overview of the subject.

If you have more specific questions after perusing through the resources, I can answer them. The links the other poster and I have posted will give you a high-level overview of what you asked, but if you want all the details, you'd be halfway to a computer science bachelors degree.

As a poster mentioned above, Stewart's Multivariable Calculus, and [Boas' Mathematical Physics](http://www.Mathematical.com/ Methods in the Physical Sciences https://www.amazon.com/dp/0471198269/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_6zeYAbQ5R5KB6) are excellent sources for the required math background.

Almost all sexually reproducing organisms have two sexes and a rigorous method for maintaining them. There are some interesting hypotheses that this has something to do with the inheritance of organelles. I read about it in Nick Lane's book.
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-Meaning/dp/0199205647

There are a lot of mechanisms for making (and keeping) the two sexes different. I find it really interesting that there's so much variation here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system

This is also a good read: A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Male orangutans grow beautiful facial hair! I'm pretty sure this is just a coincidence, though.

It's not uncommon for two closely related species to sexually select for different traits in their mates, as it helps cut back on interbreeding (read The Beak of the Finch for an excellent example of this). Normally genetic variety is a good thing, but if a lineage diverges because it is specializing in two different niches, interbreeding between the two branches hurts both of them. Perhaps beards—and the sexual preference for them—developed in early humans because it set them apart from their cousins.

Let's say that there is a hypothetical observer 10 billion light-years away. If that observer travels toward us at a speed of 10 km/hour, the observer's 'present' exists about 200 years in our future. Conversely, if the observer travels away from us at the same velocity, its 'present' is the same distance in our past.

Note that this doesn't allow that distant observer to ever see our future before it happens, as the speed of light prevents any information from our future from being communicated to the observer until well after it has become our present.

Source.

I hadn't seen this answer yet, so I will throw it out there. Like most of the other ideas here this is a hypothesis. Life has made various evolutionary innovations over history and one idea is that woody bark/stems were first evolved sometime immediately proceeding the carboniferous. Woody stems are stronger and more resilient because there are protein cross links between cellulose strands. Cellulose being a long strand of linked sugars. Woody stems are very difficult to digest, which is why pretty much nothing eats it. When it first evolved, literally nothing ate it because it was so new and no organism had the tools to break it down. So, during the carboniferous trees and plants with woody stems proliferated because they had few or no natural predators, and probably also because they could grow taller than their competitors thanks to the strong stems and thus had better access to sunlight. They did still die of old age however, and that woody material would just sit there without decaying. Eventually it would be buried and millions of years later we would dig it out of the ground as coal or oil.

Well, the process plants use to grow is they take CO2 out of the atmosphere to build cellulose and other structural molecules and release oxygen. So what was happening in the carboniferous was that this was a very one way process. The carbon was being fixated and nothing was breaking it down to re-release it.

That all changed when fungi, think mushrooms and molds, eventually evolved the enzymatic equipment to break down woody stems. Sometime at the end of the carboniferous presumably. With this second innovation, the woody part of plants didn't just sit around waiting to be buried, it was broken down the fixated CO2 was released back into the atmosphere. Obviously this added a new variable to the equation and the oxygen level in the atmosphere struck a new and lower balance.


I suggest "Oxygen" and "power, sex, suicide" by nick lane if you are really interested in this subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-Meaning/dp/0199205647

https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/dp/0198607830

In order to learn about chaos theory, you need to know a little bit about differential equations. If you feel like you have that down, this book is a good place to start for a beginner:
http://www.amazon.com/Nonlinear-Dynamics-Chaos-Applications-Nonlinearity/dp/0738204536/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302645159&sr=8-1

Bill Bryson explains this very simply and well in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/076790818X

The object would be traveling at such massive speed that you would almost certainly be powerless to do anything about it.

Depending on what it was made out of, but almost any substance would vaporize before IT would actually hit you. In fact, something of the dimensions you state would most likely never make it through the atmosphere.

Even if it somehow did, it would be the resulting explosion that would get you rather than the object itself.

Salt: A World History everything and more than you ever wanted to know about salt

Depends on your level, but any book with a title not far away from "Introduction to quantum field theory" will do the job if you already know a lot of physics. For instance, this is the text book of the introductory course at my university. But it is for people with a bachelor in theoretical physics.

Why not start with Einstein's own book on the subject? Less than $10. Amazon link.

The first part of Bill Brysons "A Short History of Nearly Everything" explains this kind of thing:
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X#reader_076790818X

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Reality-Complete-Universe/dp/0679776311

• UK: amazon.co.uk
  
• Spain: amazon.es
  
• France: amazon.fr
  
• Germany: amazon.de
  
• Japan: amazon.co.jp
  
• Italy: amazon.it
  
• China: amazon.cn
  
  
  This bot is currently in testing so let me know what you think by voting (or commenting).

This is a nice one for visualization:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters_2015_Jan_1/Special_relativity_rel_sim/index.html

Going deeper than that, I'd just look for a cheap textbook on relativity that mentions simultaneity in the table of contents, or read Einstein's math-free book on relativity:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-The-Special-General-Theory/dp/0517884410

(One reviewer there is saying that that version is missing the crucial images, so make sure you find one that has them.)

One thing I suspect you're getting hung up on is that this ought to make time travel a possibility. It doesn't.

Essentially, events can be separated in two ways: timelike and spacelike. So you should think in those terms instead of simultaneous or not simultaneous.

If events are spacelike separated, then they can be seen as either occurring simultaneously, A before B, or B before A.

If events are timelike separated, then event A precedes event B, always.

The difference between the two types of events is simple. If light has enough time to make it from one event to the other, they are timelike separated.

If light doesn't have enough time to make it between the two events, they are spacelike separated.

This is actually why faster than light drives ALWAYS implies the possibility of time travel, no matter what hand-waving warp drive, hyper drive, or what ever a sci-fi author tries to introduce. If you can travel between two spacelike separated events, you can travel backward in time. They are identical.

Put another way, with spacelike separated events, you can ALWAYS find a reference frame where the events occurred simultaneously, but you can NEVER find a reference frame where the events occur at the same place.

With timelike separated events, you can ALWAYS find a reference frame where the events occured in the same place, but NEVER a reference frame where they occurred at the same time.

Some of the scientists who invented the atomic bomb, after that was done, worked on some wild ideas at General Atomics in San Diego. One of those ideas was for a spacecraft propelled by a series of small nuclear explosions. Seriously. A bunch of little atomic bombs going off in sequence in the back of the craft. They had the shielding all worked out, the required thrust, etc, in some detail. Could actually work for spacecraft leaving from earth orbit and provide a way to get to, say, Mars, and back in a relatively short time. George Dyson, the son of one of the scientists, wrote an interesting book (still available) about the project if you want to follow up on the details.

Along the same line, Jerry Coyne's "Why Evolution is True" is fantastic.

"Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is stupid, insane, or hasn't read Jerry Coyne" - Richard Dawkins

I GOT THIS, I GOT THIS ONE. Ok, so, I've been studying effects of chronic stress in humans and wildlife (mostly wildlife) full time since 1990. Really crudely: chronic stress is basically a state of too much cortisol/corticosterone for too long a time. (this is oversimplifed - other hormones are involved too - but let's leave it at that) Cortisol & corticosterone are two closely related hormones that are released from the adrenal gland to deal with "stressors", meaning, challenges that are threatening the body in some way - anything from a physical challenge like freezing temperatures or starvation, to a perceived social challenge like social stress, uncertainty, etc. (epinephrine's also involved but to a lesser degree, since epinephrine is broken down very rapidly by the liver.)

So here's the thing. DURING A SHORT TERM EMERGENCY, CORT IS GOOD, since it helps your body deal with the stressor. It diverts energy toward keeping blood glucose up and feeding it to your brain and a few other organs; it also increase blood pressure and reduces insulin sensitivity in several tissues. It affects your brain so that you stay alert, memorize whatever's happening, and redirects behavior toward "emergency/escape" behaviors. Finally it shuts down nonessential things you don't need immediately - digestion, reproduction, growth, tissue maintenance - so that you can focus on getting away.

All that is good in the short term. It's in the LONG TERM that high cort starts causing serious problems. Because shutting down "nonessential" activities may be survivable short term, but is extremely detrimental long term (I am valiantly resisting pointing out an obvious political metaphor) Examples:

• Cort raises blood glucose and decreases insulin sensitivity. Long term effect: thought to increase insulin resistance and potential diabetes risk. There's a really intriguing hypothesis that it's heavily involved in metabolic syndrome, which in turn is thought to lead to high blood pressure and obesity as well as diabetes; the idea is that metabolic syndrome might actually be a mild form of Cushing's syndrome, aka too much cortisol. See here and here.
  
  
• Cort affects the brain, changes alertness and alters behavior. Long term effect: cortisol has a strange and consistent effect in lots of species impairing long-term memory and shrinking the hippocampus. Example, rats and humans. Cool bird example: if you give cort to a kittiwake chick (a kind of gull), it switches to aggressive emergency behavior, but a week later it is having trouble memorizing where food is hidden, and 8 months later is worse than controls in finding its way out of little mazes (ref). There's also a persistent textbook citation that cort causes outright neuron death though imho there hasn't been enough study on that.
  
  
• Cort shuts down the immune system. (this is actually an extremely complicated interaction but I'm not going to go there) You know that "hydrocortisone anti-itch cream" you buy in drugstores? That stuff is pure cortisol, and the reason it works is that cortisol inhibits inflammation, along with every other aspect of the immune system. Long term problems include: reduced white blood cell count (we just confirmed this in a new taxon, sea turtles) and pronounced susceptibility to infectious disease. (tangent: one of the great problems we have when wildlife die after [say] an oil spill is that the animals often die later via infectious disease, really because of high cort, but the lawyers do not recognize that chain of events and will conclude that the animals died of a "different cause" than the oil spill.) There's a persistent, difficult-to-test hypothesis that prolonged high stress is involved in development of cancer, reviewed here, here, here.
  
  
• Cort shuts down reproduction. Long term problems: this varies from subtle ones like reduced sperm count, reduced testosterone in males, reduced estrogen in females, reduced chance of conception (there's persistent, intriguging correlations of stress and human infertility) to dramatic impacts like menstrual cycle completely stopping, or out-and-out miscarriage.
  
  
• Cort shuts down digestion. Long-term problems: you get gradual loss of tissue maintenance throughout the digestive tract, e.g. enzymes aren't produced as much, mucus lining isn't produced as much, small damage sites aren't fixed as rapidly, and ultimately you can end up with conditions like irritable bowel syndrome and even ulcers. (before anyone asks: ulcers were once thought to be entirely caused by stress, then were shown to really be caused by Helicobacter pylori but now it appears that what may be happening is that it's a combination: stress enables a resident population of H. pylori to get out of control.)
  
  
• Cort shuts down growth & tissue maintenance. Long term problems: Most dramatically, "stress-induced dwarfism" in highly stressed children (refugees, abused kids, even if they had lots to eat). We're looking at this right now in young stressed sea turtles. In adults you get slowed wound healing and a generally reduced ability to heal, strengthen or repair any tissue.
  
  All the above occur in just about every species that's been studied, from mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes.
  
  tl;dr - Prolonged chronic stress has pronounced detrimental effects on almost every aspect of health, in virtually all vertebrates that have been studied.
  
  cites: My entire Endnote library. I will post some more specific cites if I have time. For a good all-around intro: the best all-around general public book on this remains Sapolsky's "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" - a bit outdated now but has stood the test of time surprisingly well.
  
  PS forgot to mention that, since you asked about a pregnant woman "and her baby", there some interesting epigenetic effects in which stress during pregnancy programs the fetus's stress-response system so that its behavior and cortisol responses are permanently altered for its entire life. Example: Stress a pregnant sheep for just 2 days and years later her adult offspring exhibit insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease, example here