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Other books that I found really useful, informative, motivating and accessible in high school include Feynman's QED -- a really cool introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics that I read my senior year -- and Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. I think somebody mentioned it already.

Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty is a really good discussion on the history of math. Also quite accessible. I read it my freshman year of college.

More tangential books that I've enjoyed include The Drunkard's Walk and Chances Are. They cover similar ground, though, and I like the latter better.

There's also some pretty good fiction that gives you the flavor of some of the mindbending concepts that can arise from physics. Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars is a good "juvenile" book that takes a step into the Twin's Paradox. Time dilation pops up in Larry Niven's A World Out of Time as well. For solar system level astrophysics, Niven's The Integral Trees postulates a really cool alternative to planets.

I read most the fiction around the time I was in high school, with the exception of Time for the Stars. Ironically, it's the only one that I can guarantee doesn't have "adult themes." I don't know what sort of restraints your parents put on your reading, though. They're all good books.

The other thing, other than books I mean, you can do is find a mentor or club in your area that could help put you on your way. An astronomy club would be a good idea, but there may also be physics or chemistry styled mentors in your area. They're likely to act out of a local university or research center (I live in Huntsville, Alabama, where Marshall Spaceflight Center is located. I know they have outreach/mentoring programs).

Oh, and I know I'm going on, one last thing that I found really useful and fun was my involvement in summer programs. In my case, the big one was Mississippi Governor's School, a three week summer program. It was an awakening from a social standpoint. (Ten years later, a large proportion of my friends either attended it or I know via some connection to it, still.) And it had an astrophysics class, which was awesome. I know other states have programs like it (assuming you're in the US), and MGS at least is easier to get into than commonly believed. People think a counselor's recommendation is required, but it's not and you get two opportunities to attend, between sophmore and junior and junior and senior years. It's unlikely you're in MS, of course, but other places have similar programs.

Good luck with things and keep us posted. :)

You should read Richard Dawkin's "The Greatest Show On Earth". Most of chapter 1 is used to explain the scientific use of "theory" and how the pundits manipulate the word to remove authority from it. Here is a large excerpt from the book:

"WHAT IS A THEORY? WHAT IS A FACT?

Only a theory? Let’s look at what ‘theory’ means. The Oxford English Dictionary gives two meanings (actually more, but these are the two that matter here).

Theory, Sense 1: A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.

Theory, Sense 2: A hypothesis proposed as an explanation; hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of ideas about something; an individual view or notion.

Obviously the two meanings are quite different from one another. And the short answer to my question about the theory of evolution is that the scientists are using Sense 1, while the creationists are – perhaps mischievously, perhaps sincerely – opting for Sense 2. A good example of Sense 1 is the Heliocentric Theory of the Solar System, the theory that Earth and the other planets orbit the sun. Evolution fits Sense 1 perfectly. Darwin’s theory of evolution is indeed a ‘scheme or system of ideas or statements’. It does account for a massive ‘group of facts or phenomena’. It is ‘a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment’ and, by generally informed consent, it is ‘a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed’. It is certainly very far from ‘a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture’. Scientists and creationists are understanding the word ‘theory’ in two very different senses. Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the heliocentric theory. In neither case should the word ‘only’ be used, as in ‘only a theory’.

As for the claim that evolution has never been ‘proved’, proof is a notion that scientists have been intimidated into mistrusting. Influential philosophers tell us we can’t prove anything in science. Mathematicians can prove things – according to one strict view, they are the only people who can – but the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried. Even the undisputed theory that the moon is smaller than the sun cannot, to the satisfaction of a certain kind of philosopher, be proved in the way that, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem can be proved. But massive accretions of evidence support it so strongly that to deny it the status of ‘fact’ seems ridiculous to all but pedants. The same is true of evolution. Evolution is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the Northern Hemisphere. Though logic-choppers rule the town, some theories are beyond sensible doubt, and we call them facts. The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.

I could carry on using ‘Theory Sense 1’ and ‘Theory Sense 2’ but numbers are unmemorable. I need substitute words. We already have a good word for ‘Theory Sense 2’. It is ‘hypothesis’. Everybody understands that a hypothesis is a tentative idea awaiting confirmation (or falsification), and it is precisely this tentativeness that evolution has now shed, although it was still burdened with it in Darwin’s time. ‘Theory Sense 1’ is harder. It would be nice simply to go on using ‘theory’, as though ‘Sense 2’ didn’t exist. Indeed, a good case could be made that Sense 2 shouldn’t exist, because it is confusing and unnecessary, given that we have ‘hypothesis’. Unfortunately Sense 2 of ‘theory’ is in common use and we can’t by fiat ban it. I am therefore going to take the considerable, but just forgivable, liberty of borrowing from mathematics the word ‘theorem’ for Sense 1. It is actually a mis-borrowing, as we shall see, but I think the risk of confusion is outweighed by the benefits. As a gesture of appeasement towards affronted mathematicians, I am going to change my spelling to ‘theorum’. First, let me explain the strict mathematical usage of theorem, while at the same time clarifying my earlier statement that, strictly speaking, only mathematicians are licensed to prove anything (lawyers aren’t, despite well-remunerated pretensions).

To a mathematician, a proof is a logical demonstration that a conclusion necessarily follows from axioms that are assumed. Pythagoras’ Theorem is necessarily true, provided only that we assume Euclidean axioms, such as the axiom that parallel straight lines never meet. You are wasting your time measuring thousands of right-angled triangles, trying to find one that falsifies Pythagoras’ Theorem. The Pythagoreans proved it, anybody can work through the proof, it’s just true and that’s that. Mathematicians use the idea of proof to make a distinction between a ‘conjecture’ and a ‘theorem’, which bears a superficial resemblance to the OED’s distinction between the two senses of ‘theory’. A conjecture is a proposition that looks true but has never been proved. It will become a theorem when it has been proved. A famous example is the Goldbach Conjecture, which states that any even integer can be expressed as the sum of two primes. Mathematicians have failed to disprove it for all even numbers up to 300 thousand million million million, and common sense would happily call it Goldbach’s Fact. Nevertheless it has never been proved, despite lucrative prizes being offered for the achievement, and mathematicians rightly refuse to place it on the pedestal reserved for theorems. If anybody ever finds a proof, it will be promoted from Goldbach’s Conjecture to Goldbach’s Theorem, or maybe X’s Theorem where X is the clever mathematician who finds the proof."

Now, if you managed to read all that. I definitely recommend buying it: http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/1416594787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269444004&sr=8-1

It really is an education.

I too have made lifelong friends with my former guildies and guild leaders and they have definitely changed my life for the better! Unfortunately, there remains a stigma to meeting friends online, especially through online games. Friends made through online games are often perceived as “less valuable” friendships because "how can online friends be be “real” friends if you don’t interact with them face to face?". I think that this stigma and misperception of online friends as "not real" friends will begin to change over time as online games continue to become more prolific. Just like with online dating. The stigma has only just begun to lift.

In the meantime, you can take solace in the fact that friendships made through online games have been found to be more intimate and more long lasting that friendships made through other mediated contexts (social networking, for instance) and can be as “real” as any “offline” friendship (see here and here. I also talked about this a lot in my PhD research).

I hope your Mom enjoys the book! There is a little bit in there about the value of online gaming communities - hopefully, that will help to break the stigma!

This is not correct.

An atmospheric model is nothing but a complicated piece of software which solves an ensemble of equations governing the dynamics of the atmosphere - equations which, in simple forms, are introduced to third-year undergrads in atmospheric science. They do not account for individual particles; they model advection of fluid due to gradient forces.

The atmosphere may very well be a chaotic system, but it's one that is driven by very regular forcing mechanisms, e.g. the sun. It's unlike that I'd be able to tell you what the weather is going to be like in your backyard on a given day arbitarily far in the future. Even with perfect initial conditions, there's other errors which could propagate and show up in the variability of the system. But even without a model, I can make very good guesses as to what the weather is going to be like. For instance, if you give me a date in the winter, then I can very easily give you a reasonable guess as to the temperature range you'd expect on that day, and if you live in certain regions of the world, I might even be able to tell you a little bit about what the most likely weather patterns would be.

The atmosphere and the climate system responds in a regular manner to regular forcings. Yes, it's a chaotic nonlinear system, but as the old-saying goes, I can always guarantee you that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. We've been modeling the atmosphere for a long time now with good results. Even Charney's first primitive stab at integrating the barotropic vorticity equation on the ENIAC was successful in many ways. As an atmospheric scientist and an atmospheric modeler, let me just say that if it weren't possible to built models of the atmosphere that had some predictive utility, we wouldn't be wasting out time - there are many, many other important questions in our field that we could be working on.

Further down in this thread, you've bragged that you've never read the IPCC AR4. From your other comments, I'm guessing that you've never spent time reading much on atmospheric science or climate science in general. I'd strongly recommend that before you continue making assertions such as this, you take some time to read up on atmospheric science in general:

• Global Physical Climatology, Hartmann
  
  
• Global Warming: The complete Briefing, Houghton
  
  
• Climatology: An Atmopsheric Science
  
  Furthermore, since you profess an interest in programming and models, feel free to check out the actual source code from models that are actually used to simulate the climate:
  
  
• NCAR CCSM4.0 (registration required)
  
  
• GISS Model E
  
  There are many, many more that I can link you too if you'd like.
  
  
  

JK: There is a lot of validity to this parallel. In their book Partisan Hearts andMinds, Green, Palmquist, and Schickler argue that political parties are akin to a deep social identity. The work of Jennings, Stoker, and Bowers (among many others!) find that partisanship is generally adopted early in life and remains constant through one’s adulthood. Just like religion, children are generally likely to adopt their parents’ political views, particularly in more politicized households.

It is certainly common for people to use a political party as a prescription for their beliefs. In Follow the Leader, Gabe Lenz shows that policy positions generally do no drive how individuals vote. Instead, he finds the opposite: individuals first choose which candidate they want to support, THEN adopt that candidate’s policy positions.

One issue that we think many Americans know a lot about is abortion. Thus it can serve as an interesting test for the role of policy positions in how individuals adopt their political parties. In a series of articles and a new book, Achen and Bartels ask: “Do people vote Republican because they are conservative on abortion? Or are they conservative on abortion because they are Republicans?” What is the causal direction between abortion attitudes among voters and their partisanship.

They find that for some set of voters, particularly women, you see a movement toward the party that matches their views on abortion. They find that, “Almost half of 1982 pro-choice non-Catholic Republicans had disappeared from the party by 1997.”

But on the other hand, you see a significant number of voters who remain with their party and adopt their party’s view on abortion. Achen and Bartels also find that “More than half of 1982 male pro-life Democrats had become pro-choice by 1997.” These voters changed their views on abortion to match their partisanship rather than the other way around.
Even on the issue of abortion, you see a large number of voters who use their political party to determine their political beliefs. Thus Achen and Bartels conclude, “Most of the time, the voters are merely reaffrming their partisan and group identities at the polls. They do not reason very much or very often. What they do is rationalize.”

> If done right, science is science.

THAT'S THE KEY. SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY ARE NOT DONE RIGHT.

SCIENCE DEMANDS THINGS LIKE REPEATABILITY. THIS IS RARELY DONE IN PSYCHOLOGY STUDIES.

SCIENCE ALSO DEMANDS THINGS LIKE THE ABILITY TO OBJECTIVELY OBSERVE THINGS. BUT YOU CANNOT DO THIS IS SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY. YOUR OWN PERCEPTIONS DEEPLY COLOR YOUR INTERPRETATION OF OTHERS.

SCIENCE ALSO DEMANDS MATHEMATICAL RIGOR. AS ANOTHER POINTED OUT, THIS STUDY INVOLVED SOMETHING LIKE 311 INDIVIDUALS, WHICH IS AN ASTONISHINGLY SMALL NUMBER.

NEUROSCIENCE WILL BECOME THE PROPER SCIENCE THAT PSYCHOLOGY CURRENTLY CLAIMS TO BE.

THIS BOOK HAS AN INTERESTING SECTION ON THE SCIENTIFIC SHORTCOMINGS OF PSYCHOLOGY.

PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY ARE GREAT THINGS, AND I'M HAPPY FOR THEIR EXISTENCE. BUT PEOPLE WHO CLAIM "SCIENCE IS SCIENCE" NEEDED MORE CLASSES ON MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS, AND CHEMISTRY.

EDIT: HERPADERP "SCIENCES" ==> "STUDIES". ALSO, WHEN DID REDDIT BECOME SO STUPID?

Not sure how helpful this will be, but you might point out that there's evolution and Christianity are not NECESSARILY incompatible, that's there's no real reason for him to be worried about evolution clashing with his faith in god. You could point out that many Christians do believe in Evolution. The Catholic Church actually endorses natural selection so any Catholic that denies evolution is actually committing blasphemy. Lutherans, Methodists, and many other Christian denominations see no inconsistency between believing in the Christian God and accepting evolution.

There's also several books you could point him to. Richard Dawkins's new book "The Greatest Show on Earth" http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/1416594787/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252038340&sr=1-2

surveys the evidence for evolution, so that would be a great book for your brother to read. Most Creationists demonize Dawkins, though, so your brother might not be receptive to that.

Michael Ruse, a Philosophy Professor at Florida State University, has written countless books on the history of Evolution, the debate between Creationists and Evolutionists, and the history of the conflict between Christianity and Science. Ruse, while an agnostic, IS sympathetic to Christianity, and your brother should find him less offensive to read than Dawkins.

http://www.amazon.com/Can-Darwinian-Christian-Relationship-Religion/dp/0521637163/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252038283&sr=8-2

http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Creation-Struggle-Michael-Ruse/dp/0674022556/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252038283&sr=8-6

http://www.amazon.com/Darwinian-Revolution-Science-Tooth-Claw/dp/0226731693/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252038283&sr=8-13

Biologists virtually all agree that life on this planet has evolved over a period of about 3.7 billion years and that humans and modern fish share a fish-like ancestor (and a single-celled ancestor, for that matter). They have reached these conclusions because they're the best explanations for the evidence we see in the fossil record and in our DNA, among other things. Creationists deny these conclusions because they're not very well-informed or because they're unwilling to let go of a Genesis-based explanation for the existence of life on this planet.

I'm not trying to bash you; it sounds like you have an open mind and that's good. But the "battle" you describe isn't really a meaningful one. The people who know the most about this sort of thing consider the question settled.

I'd encourage you to read up on the subject if you're curious. Richard Dawkins recently released a book full of evidence for evolution. And although I don't recommend it as wholeheartedly, Finding Darwin's God was written by a Christian for Christians to make the case for evolution.

You are probably just trolling but it is just not that simple for a lot of people. Some reasons:

1. In the US and many of those other countries, the environment is such that tempting, fattening, not very nutritious food is everywhere. Try finding healthy food at an airport. For someone like me who visits the US from time to time, I am astonished at what is on offer. Even the "wholegrain" bread there tastes like cake and is full of fructose. Salads are accurately described as "oil with a lettuce leaf and cheese".
   
   
2. Food companies deliberately design foods to be as addictive as possible. Yes, addictive - they fire up the same parts of the brain that cocaine lights up. Rats will make almost at much effort to get to processed breakfast cereals as they will to get to cocaine. See http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605297852 for a long discussion of these issues.
   
   
3. Quite a few people come from a genetic background of famine and poverty that has led to selection of people who put on bulk whenever they get the chance. For these people losing weight is orders of magnitude harder than it is for those who are effortlessly thin.
   
   Losing weight is a bit like holding your breath - easy to do for a while, but for many people it is impossible to sustain. Try holding your breath for 4 minutes - you will see what I mean. Something lower down the brain kicks in and overrides your best intentions.

The fact that CO2 concentrations are increasing in the atmosphere is literally the definitive consequence of an imbalance in global carbon dioxide fluxes. I'm getting this idea from the observations and my knowledge of the global carbon cycle and basics physics / chemistry. Since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, this also leads to a measurable energy balance.

Actually, the fact that CO2 emissions are increasing global temperatures has a overwhelming amount of support from climate models and direct observations of the greenhouse effect.

You're making all these wild claims about things we don't know or things you have to account for which I assure you climate scientists are aware of and account for. All of the questions you've asked were covered in my introductory Climate Science course. The literature on this stuff is very well established.

Also, why did you just make up that humans contributed 20 ppm for the current 400 ppm? It is abundantly clear that almost all of the CO2 increase from 310 ppm to 410 ppm between 1960 and 2017 is due to us. We know this from the oxygen isotopes of the CO2 and we know it from doing global carbon budgets. All of you claims are totally baseless and easily debunked by reading an introductory Climate Science textbook, so I will leave it at that.

Well, "as far as you know" happens to be dead wrong. Gödel never recognized that at all. His final paper in the Einstein tribute book was Gödel's attempt at a proof for physical platonic theory by proving time to be ideal.

Gödel loved him some Plato and Leibniz.

Check out "The Disappearance of Time: Kurt Godel and the Idealistic Tradition in Philosophy."
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2346/is_n409_v103/ai_14916956

But I do love the GEB!

Here's another book pointing out this Gödel-platonic link...
http://www.amazon.com/Incompleteness-Proof-Paradox-Godel-Discoveries/dp/0393051692

Sorry to burst your bubble. But I hope this helps you understand Gödel's view of his theory better!

If anyone's interested in the backround of the pictures, go read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. It's a really great book, and makes you realize what an awesome person he was. The book is written in such a way that you feel as though you're sitting in a room with him and just sort of chatting.

I'd recommend the book Feeling Good to gain insight as to the whys and hows of cbt and metacognition. Identifying what thoughts make you feel what ways and being conscious of that helps you determine what makes you feel the way you want. It suddenly becomes less "I should think differently" and more "I'd rather think differently, because I don't like what effect the prior line of thought has on me."

Some days are certainly harder than others, but it stops feeling like a task you need to force yourself into pretty quickly.

I'd really recommend Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. The entire purpose of the book is to explain relativity and quantum physics to laymen. Has some really good explanations and great "scenarios" that can help describe the physics.

Fair enough. Didn't know that this was where you were coming from.

No, I haven't read Barrow. But pretty much any popularization of physics recently seems to make this very point. From Brian Greene to Lee Smolin seems to make this point.

I think we were both missing what the other was saying. I agree with your point on why, apologies for the bluntness. I didn't fully see your Devil's Advocate position until now. So I guess we agree to agree?

I usually try to answer these kinds of questions in a comprehensive way, and in this case I'd explain that there isn't conscious choice, some camels just had a survival and reproductive advantage and passed the advantage along to offspring, etc.

But in this case, Richard Dawkins has just released a new book about evolution, called The Greatest Show on Earth, which is Dawkins' effort to lay out all of the evidence for evolution. Dawkins was a fantastic biology writer before he became an advocate for atheism, and this book is not about atheism, but rather the science and evidence that back up the Theory of Evolution.

I'm listening to the audiobook version now, but I'm well-versed in evolutionary theory. I suggest you get the book and read it, taking advantage of the diagrams and ability to go at your own pace.

Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces are both great introductory books that explore the fascinating essentials of Physics. Feynman is a lucid and captivating science teacher.

> If you want to involve photons in this picture, you can, but it won't help you very much.

I beg to differ. I only really understood what “electricity” is, including said guitar-amp phenomenon, when I got photons in the picture , thus creating a very different model than the one presented by most textbooks on transistor electronics. The stuff that moves at the speed of light when you turn a switch on? Photons. The stuff that actually transfers electromagnetic energy, including wire “electricity”, from a battery/source to charge? Photons. Stuff that binds electrons to protons? Photons. Stuff that get stored in capacitors? Photons. Hell the photon↔electron interaction goes well beyond “light” or “electricity” and do most things in the universe! (except gravity and nuclear phenomena). I don’t feel qualified to explain it all in quantum terms but I got the better picture from Richard Feynman’s QED, which I heartily recommend to any curious layman. (Also, this page).

I was going to ask you if it's approachable for a non-physicist like myself. I mean, it's Feynman.

However, rather than ask I looked to Amazon.com.

>Feynman makes it easy for the curious amateur to understand. This book is accessible and mind-blowing. Everyone should read it. And there is little if any math so don't be intimidated.

Well, then. I guess I'll be reading it!

EDIT: Here's the book

Oh, and thank you!

A lot of sci-fi books predict private space exploration as well. My favorite example is the Mars Trilogy. However, the supposed leaders in commercial spaceflight, like SpaceX for example, are subsidized by NASA just like the companies that were developing Ares I and V. The only difference is that their projects cost less. But the reason they cost less is not because they are innovating the field by being commercial enterprises, rather, they cost less because they only go barely past the Kármán line whereas the Ares rockets could go to the moon.

I love Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171

Funny, interesting and educating.

So here is a question: how did people drink whole milk for thousands of years and not get fat? Do you really think skim milk is why you are thin? Come on.

Also, there was a study here on reddit a couple years ago where they tracked about 20K people in ... norway, sweden, somewhere like that, and the women who drank whole milk were overall thinner than those who drank low fat milk.

These sorts of statistics are common. Fat people drink skim milk, and thin people drink whole milk. Other fat people drink whole milk, etc.

As for fried foods... most of reddit says 'fat is satiating' as a mantra. Why doesn't fried chicken fill you up so that you don't eat more then?

This guy makes a good stab at why people over eat:

http://www.amazon.com/End-Overeating-Insatiable-American-Appetite/dp/1605297852

In one study he cites, scientists watched rats given normal food, vs fatty food, vs sweet food, and finally vs fat AND sweet food. The rats would go for the fat or sweet food a bit more than the normal food, but once you combined them, they continued on and on to the food even long after they had eaten enough to normally be full (where they would stop when they were eating normal food). The only substance that would make rats work as hard to get to the food? Cocaine. And it wasnt much above the sweet and fatty food.

His theory is that it is our ability to combine these flavors that make a food not just a bit more appealing, but 10x more (or whatever) appealing to some people. These people have trouble not eating more, just as some drug users quit, and some can't ever stop.

You strutting around saying that you lost 20 lbs ... is like me saying I quit drinking beer, but someone I know is an alcoholic. Do you think the 'choice' to quit is the same for all people? Please.

Mars is very very amazing. So much about it screams Terraform ME!!

The Martian Day is only 30minutes longer than earth.
It would have 4 seasons due to a similar inclination in its tilt.
Possibly vast amounts of underground water.

Sigh.. Best books I ever read.

Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

If you like Feynman, you might try the Feynman Lectures on Physics, which is a 3-book set covering everything from mechanics to QM to E&M to fluid dynamics. It definitely has that Feynman charm to it. It won't give you the math overview, though, but you're probably better off just picking that up as you go if you've already had calc. If you go much further you'll eventually want linear algebra, though.

Dawkins discusses this in more detail in his book The Greatest Show on Earth, also available as an audiobook, read by the author.

One thing I took away from the book was that fossil evidence is superfluous at this point. It fully supports evolution theory of course, but it's a bonus, and even without it "the evidence for evolution would be entirely secure".

That's from the chapter that discusses the fossil record. The rest of the book is about all the other evidence.

Right now I'm reading "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman". great book!

http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041

I just finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book explains the important scientific discoveries about life, geology, and astronomy; but also the stories of the scientists who came up with these discoveries.

I got the audiobook, and it made my commute seem much shorter. It's a little dry in a few bits (especially the parts about geology), but overall it's a good, entertaining read.

http://www.amazon.com/Six-Not-So-Easy-Pieces-Relativity-Space-Time/dp/0465023932/ref=sr_1_1

A nobel physics prize winner describes how relativity works using high-school geometry. If you know the Pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2 for right triangles), then you can learn why time runs at different speeds.

It's really an amazing piece of work.

(Six Easy Pieces is also good, but doesn't cover relativity)

The very same. He was quite a character. There are many books about him, such as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Unfortunately, I don't have a link from Google Books for you, but you should definitely look him up. =)

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is very good and a bit more up-to-date (it's a book not a TV series), and I speak as someone who has read the book of Cosmos several times.

Brian Green's The Elegant Universe is worth reading, even if you think String Theory is "Not Even Wrong" (Greene is not one of the die-hards).

The training was extensive and I loved it. I have explained it in detail and my adventures in my book "My dream of Stars"

Check out my book here: https://www.amazon.com/My-Dream-Stars-Daughter-Pioneer/dp/0230112218

The ladycrappo 7-Step Dealing With Depression Plan
Brought to you by a chick who's been hospitalized for major depression on four separate occasions and is now living a relatively stable normal life

1. Exercise, exercise, exercise. This may be the last thing you feel like doing, but it's one of the cheapest, safest, most effective ways to boost your mood. Don't feel you have to go to a gym if the ambiance creeps you out; ride a bike, get out in the sunshine, whatever works for you.
   
   
2. Eat well. Shitty diets make you feel shitty physically and mentally. Depressed people tend to have trouble with eating either too much or too little, and with eating crappy stuff in general that wrecks your blood sugar and makes you lethargic. You don't need that. Make a good healthy diet a priority: fruits and veggies, whole grains, lean protein, unsaturated fats, you know the drill.
   
   
3. Get your sleep schedule sorted out. Don't let yourself sleep too much because you don't want to face life; it just makes you more listless. If you're having trouble sleeping enough, force yourself to get on a more regular schedule. Sleep is fundamental to good mental health.
   
   
4. Shower every day. Keep up with personal hygiene, even when you feel like a hideous human turdball. A clean turdball can feel slightly better about itself than a dirty turdball, and whatever bit of dignity and self-worth you can reclaim for yourself is really important.
   
   
5. Do stuff. You won't want to, you really won't want to, but do it anyways. Answer your phone, get out of the house, go out to eat or see a movie-- do normal people stuff despite your profound sense of abnormality. This serves to keep you feeling like a member of the human race, keep you connected with the people in your life who are your support system, and also just to distract you from the ugly world inside your head.
   
   
6. Read up on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is focused on concrete strategies of altering your thinking and behavior. Pick up a copy of Feeling Good and give it's recommendations a serious try.
   
   
7. Do what it takes to get out of your own head. Depression turns you in on yourself, blots out the larger world, traps you in the darker aspects of your own thinking. It's a particularly dark and dangerous sort of self-absorption. Do things that force you to empathize with other people, in other places: do some volunteer work, spend time with loved ones, read about people in unfortunate circumstances who maintain a core of dignity (e.g., What is the What).

check this out-- the author really thought it through & seems to have really done his homework

i think i would not go for life. but i would love to go photograph it. imagine being the first photographer on mars

Bill Bryson has some answers. I found this on reddit from people recommending books. This book is awesome and will help with all questions regarding that and then some http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/0767908171

I recently bought Six Easy Pieces and Six No-So-Easy Pieces and both are fantastic.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard P. Feynman (Princeton Science Library)
http://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Theory-Light-Matter/dp/0691024170
To start, you need to you learn that eveything is made from complex waves of probability and that is the only way the math works. This short and inexpensive book is a work of art, accessible by the "intelligent layman". Then google the amazing Feynman!

Dennis Hartmann's textbook is an excellent introduction to Climate Science, with a few concluding chapters on natural and anthropogenic climate change.

I'll recommend Hartmann's Climate book.

If you ever wanted to learn about the climate system and all sorts of fun things this is where I'd start!

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly everything. Really, really fucking awesome.

Am currently reading the book "Incompleteness: the Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel":

http://www.amazon.com/Incompleteness-Proof-Paradox-Godel-Discoveries/dp/0393051692

One of the suggestions the author makes is that, according to a Platonist like Godel, mathematics is as empirical as any other science form. This contrasts with the logical positivist perspective of asserting that mathematics and logic are language games and thus mathematical truths are simply bound by the nature of the syntax of mathematical language (and thus do not actually say anything verifiable or otherwise true).

Godel's position is a bit more complex than I've described above, per the book. According to the author, one of Godel's assertions was that reality was a priori. That is, all of reality is bound by the nature of mathematical truth (and therefore, if you accept the Platonist position, then nothing is ever inherently empirical, or everything is inherently empirical).

Not knowing enough about the fundamentals of mathematics, I cannot give a suitable position either way, but just saying that there are some who claim that mathematics is as empirical as any other real science.

If you haven't read it already, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is a fantastic read.

If you're looking for a very simple intro, try Isaac Asimov's Understanding Physics.

If you want something more in-depth and you're comfortable learning some math as well, try Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics.

The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos

Also, The Age of Spiritual Machines discusses theoretical and quantum physics. I'm not saying its the book to read to learn physics but thats what originally got me interested.

No, not really. First of all the Big Bang was not an explosion of light and heat that we could "see" (unlike, say, a supernova) but a rapid expansion of space. That's all space, including the bit we're riding along on. Space is expanding everywhere - so everywhere we look, galaxies are rushing away from us. It's really hard to wrap one's mind around; try to think of a bunch of magic marker dots on a balloon you're blowing up. What direction would an ant on one of those dots look to find the origin of the expansion?

As far as the time travel idea, a crude analogy might be to suggest that when you look at the sun - the light from which is eight minutes old - you aren't traveling backwards in time; it just took a few minutes for the sunlight to reach you. Likewise when we see the light from far away stars, it just took a really really fucking long time to get here, so we're seeing light as it was emitted aeons ago.

We can detect cosmic microwave background radiation, which is pretty interesting stuff. It's also relevant here because it's uniformly distributed everywhere we look. Where is its origin if it's uniformly distributed?

[edit] I highly recommend you read Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos for starters.

> we're so far from an awesome Mars colony....
> I won't see it in my lifetime

You should read The Case For Mars next.

http://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/0684835509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266988147&sr=8-1

It's more of a general all-about-science book, but Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. It was years ago that I read it but it has some really interesting sections about geology and biology if I recall correctly.

All the other books people are mentioning are light fare: Read this - http://www.amazon.com/The-Feynman-Lectures-Physics-Volume/dp/0201021153

It will take you from zero science knowledge to a lot. The explanations and teaching methods are excellent.

I think a good place to start is here: Rick Strassman - DMT the Spirit Molecule

Basically, the pituitary gland seems to be the "seat of consciousness", or the "dominant monad" of the body and mind. These kids have their own separate pituitary glands, see? It's located front and center of the head--right behind the eyes. So, for example, if you "see yourself through your own eyes", "you" seem to be physically located right there, don't you? Like an inch or two inside the top of the bridge of your nose or somethin.

You know, Shit like that's in this book...

In case anyone is interested: DMT, The Spirit Molecule

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp/0375727205/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2

Woo!

You must realize you are the box and the box is you. With the same instance that you understand your box, your box understands you. This means quantum mechanics may substitute for a cozier box?

On a sidenote however, I understood quatum mechanics at least a little better after reading QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter I recommend it.

I recommend reading Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule

Recently I've read Feynman's The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. It's a nice "introduction" to the world of quantum physics. ((Also available online on certain sites.))

Another good book that gives a decent overview (Of everything really) is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Indeed. The plate tectonic theory is relatively young (not until the last half century was there even evidence starting to accumulate); but the theory dates back nearly 100 years.

Aerik is just being facetious, but really only those in school within the last 40 years or so would have been introduced to the theory. And when we are, we're taught the concept more as a matter fact, such that it would be obvious to anyone who thought about it for more than 5 minutes; but many experts rejected the notion for a long time.

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, has a great chapter, about the scientists who really pushed the idea.

If you haven't already read Red Mars then I recommend it; plot aside, the science behind the terraforming efforts described in the book was impeccably researched, and probably not far off what we'll eventually attempt.

If you like that, you should buy this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Character/dp/0393316041

Feynman's QED

Asimov's non-fiction is good

Godel, Escher, Bach

Einstein's original book

Maxwell's book (lots of math)

Any specific Science books?

I could recommend "How to Build a Dinosaur" by Jack Horner
Or "Greatest Show on Earth" by Dawkins.

but neither of those make a difference if that's not the sciencey genres you were looking for.

If you want to understand how reflection behaves in a "true" way, read Feynman's QED. Transcripts of popular science lectures. They're not exactly simple to understand, but they were designed to be at least somewhat accessible.

http://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/0684835509

Red Mars

'Fabric of the Cosmos' by Brian Greene

Here are two books that you can use to teach yourself on these therapies:

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Really guys? No one mentions the hard SF books for Mars exploration by Kim Stanley Robinson?

Mars Trilogy