Science, Mathematics & Technology

Our lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling--reluctantly--for likelihood, building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability. Chances Are is the story of man's millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable--to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. In these pages,...

Have you ever found yourself wondering what we might have in common with stars, or why the Moon never leaves us? Thinking about the precise dancing of planets, the passing of time, or the nature of natural things? Our world is full of unshakable mystery, and although we live in a civilization more complicated than ever, there is simplicity and reassurance to be found in knowing how and why. From the New York Times bestselling creator of Lost in Translation, Eating the Sun is a delicately exis...

Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has ...