The Ponderables series offers hardback books covering Mathematics, Engineering, or Physics, each packed with 100 milestone stories. The included 2.5-meter timeline poster helps visualize discoveries. Perfect for adult learners and science enthusiasts seeking an engaging overview of key achievements.
The thoughts and deeds of great thinkers always make great stories, and here are one hundred of the most significant. Each story relates to a confounding puzzle that became a discovery and changed the way we see the world.
Includes a 12-page, 2.5 meter pull out timeline poster with over 1000 milestone facts - great to use to track great events that were happening at the same time.
Ponderables Mathematics
This volume tracks the work of history's greatest mathematicians, ancient and modern. From Pythagoras, whose love of numbers led to a violent death and made him perhaps a murdered; to Fibonacci, whose guide for bookkeepers changed the way we add; and Descartes, who took inspiration from a fly to convert numbers into shapes and back again - changing maths for ever. Take a journey that goes beyond school-day sums and get a glimpse of the true power of mathematics.
Ponderables Engineering
The story of engineering is in many ways the story of civilisation. It begins in the Stone Age, when we learned to make stone tools, and it continues today as we develop renewable power sources, faster transportation, larger, more efficient buildings, and even create robots to do the jobs that are too dangerous and difficult for us. Along the way engineers have built on what came before, turning the lintel into the arch, the ironclad into the ocean liner, and the glider into the stealth plane. As scientists discover more, engineers can do more, only limited by their imaginations.
Ponderables Physics
Physics, the field of enquiry that investigates the very foundations of Nature and without which all other sciences would be meaningless. Here, discover how great physicists uncovered the truths about the universe: Galileo discovered the principles of pendulums while watching a lamp swing in church; Isaac Newton realised that the force holding the Moon in orbit was the same one that made apples fall from trees; and Richard Feynman figured out how subatomic particles behave while watching a student spin a lunch plate. These physicists and many like them have changed the way we picture the Universe. As we study the stuff of nature in ever closer detail, what will we see next?
