Robert Zimmerman:

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most stunning images of the cosmos humanity has ever seen. It has transformed our understanding of the universe around us, revealing new information about its age and evolution, the life cycle of stars, and the very existence of black holes, among other startling discoveries. The Universe in a Mirror tells the story of this telescope and the visionaries responsible for its extraordinary accomplishments.

Robert Zimmerman takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever sent into space. After World War II, astronomer Lyman Spitzer and a handful of scientists waged a fifty-year struggle to build the first space telescope capable of seeing beyond Earth's atmospheric veil. Zimmerman shows how many of the telescope's advocates sacrificed careers and family to get it launched, and how others devoted their lives to Hubble only to have their hopes and reputations shattered when its mirror was found to be flawed. This is the story of an idea that would not die--and of the dauntless human spirit. Illustrated with striking color images, The Universe in a Mirror describes the heated battles between scientists and bureaucrats, the perseverance of astronauts to repair and maintain the telescope, and much more. Hubble, and the men and women behind it, opened a rare window onto the universe, dazzling humanity with sights never before seen.

This book tells their remarkable story.

From the archive:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It

From Publishers Weekly:

In this intriguing volume, futurist and author Michael G. Zey (The Future Factor) imagines a time in which technology has stretched human life spans to 400 years or more. Genetic engineering, cloning technology and stem-cell science should eradicate disease and allow for nanoscopic repair and maintenance of the body, while "smart drugs" and "caloric restriction" programs ensure healthy bodies and sharp minds more or less indefinitely. Grounding his speculation in a thorough understanding of contemporary scientific research and present-day concerns (the environment, the post-boomer labor market, etc.), Zey's optimistic vision sees between-career hiatuses replacing retirement, and leisure time spent in the multi-generational home or on intense cross-cultural "immersion travels." Key players in the debate include supporters like Cambridge University scientist Aubrey de Grey, who envisions 5000-year life spans, and the radical futurist author Ray Kurzweil, who foresees the merging of humans and computers; meanwhile, organizations like the Coalition to Extend Life lobby the government for immortality research funding and find opposition in the President's Council on Bioethics and "deep ecologists" advocating zero-population growth. Criticizing current environmental trends as "anti-progress" and "anti-human," Zey's own solutions include controversial measures like human control of weather, colonization of outer space and genetically modifying food. He concludes that the "eventuality" of "a modern Fountain of Youth" is "closer than we think"; Zey's educated guess may not be entirely convincing, but it is both thorough and fascinating.

The Quest for Superlongevity and Physical Perfection

Hamid R. Ekbia:

This book is a critique of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the perspective of cognitive science - it seeks to examine what we have learned about human cognition from AI successes and failures. The book's goal is to separate those "AI dreams" that either have been or could be realized from those that are constructed through discourse and are unrealizable. AI research has advanced many areas that are intellectually compelling and holds great promise for advances in science, engineering, and practical systems. After the 1980s, however, the field has often struggled to deliver widely on these promises. This book breaks new ground by analyzing how some of the driving dreams of people practicing AI research become valued contributions, while others devolve into unrealized and unrealizable projects.

Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence

Jeff Edmonds:

There are many algorithm texts that provide lots of well-polished code and proofs of correctness. This book is not one of them. Instead, this book presents insights, notations, and analogies to help the novice describe and think about algorithms like an expert. By looking at both the big picture and easy step-by-step methods for developing algorithms, the author helps students avoid the common pitfalls. He stresses paradigms such as loop invariants and recursion to unify a huge range of algorithms into a few meta-algorithms. Part of the goal is to teach the students to think abstractly. Without getting bogged with formal proofs, the book fosters a deeper understanding of how and why each algorithm works. These insights are presented in a slow and clear manner accessible to second- or third-year students of computer science, preparing them to find their own innovative ways to solve problems.

How to Think About Algorithms

P. G. Maxwell-Stuart:

A pre-cursor to contemporary chemistry and physics, alchemy began as the pursuit of knowledge, initially in China as a search for the secret of immortality, and appearing independently in Egypt as an attempt to produce gold through the arts of smelting and alloying metals. In The Chemical Choir, P.G. Maxwell-Stewart authoritatively traces the fascinating history of alchemy from its earliest incarnations right up to its legacy in modern science as we know it today.

Continuing from its roots in China and Egypt, alchemy received a great boost in Europe from work done by Islamic and Jewish alchemists, whose written accounts were translated into Latin and combined with what was known of Greek natural science to produce an outburst of attempts to manipulate matter and change it into transformative substances called the Philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. Alchemy's heyday in Europe was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as practiced by the great minds of the age of Reason, including, among others, Sir Isaac Newton.

During this time, demonstrations of the alchemist's art were performed in royal courts under conditions meant to obviate any fraud, and specimens of the gold so transmuted can be seen in various museums. During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists--principally Carl Jung--perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for aspects of their theories about human nature. At the same time, laboratory scientists continued to experiment in ways very similar to those of their medieval and early modern forebears.

A lively overview of alchemy and its practitioners from the earliest times to the present, P.G. Maxwell-Stuart explores the changing importance and interest in alchemy through its historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts, revealing that the study of alchemy is not merely one of the stranger byways of antiquarianism, but rather a living part of the history of science itself.

From the archive:

Galileo was an astrologer.

Newton was an alchemist.

Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy

Karl Neder - physicist, Communist and all-round maverick - thinks he has made a discovery that will offer mankind energy for free. But no one believes him - or rather, no one understands him. And so he is forced to wander like a vagabond across Cold War Europe, an outcast from his native Hungary, leaving chaos and half-built machines in his wake." "But who, and where, exactly is Karl Neder now? Young journalist Lena Bomanowicz wants to find out, hoping to kick-start a stalled career but driven more by motives she would rather not interrogate. Yet to understand Karl Neder, she must wrestle with his story, which ranges from the castles of Transylvania to the rocket labs of NASA, from Viennese cafes to the blasted borderlands of the Soviet Union.

Philip Ball writes a "Lab lit" novel;. See reviews here and here.

The Sun and Moon Corrupted

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimates that without a servicing mission to replace key components, the Hubble Space Telescope will cease scientific operations in 2008. In January 2004, then-NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced that the space shuttle would no longer be used to service Hubble. He indicated that this decision was based primarily on safety concerns in the wake of the space shuttle Columbia accident in 2003. Many critics, however, saw it as the result of the new Vision for Space Exploration, announced by President Bush in January 2004, which focuses NASA's priorities on human and robotic exploration of the solar system. Hubble supporters sought to reverse the decision and proceed with a shuttle servicing mission. Michael Griffin, who became NASA Administrator in April 2005, stated that he would reassess whether to use the shuttle to service Hubble after there were two successful post-Columbia shuttle flights. The second post-Columbia flight took place successfully in July 2006. In October 2006, NASA approved a shuttle mission to service Hubble. That mission is now scheduled for October 8, 2008.

Hubble Space Telescope: NASA's Plans for a Servicing Mission

Can the United States continue to lead the world in innovation? The answer may hinge in part on how well the public understands engineering, a key component of the innovation engine. A related concern is how to encourage young people particularly girls and under-represented minorities to consider engineering as a career option.

Changing the Conversation provides actionable strategies and market-tested messages for presenting a richer, more positive image of engineering. This book presents and discusses in detail market research about what the public finds most appealing about engineering as well as what turns the public off.

Changing the Conversation is a vital tool for improving the public image of engineering and outreach efforts related to engineering. It will be used by engineers in professional and academic settings including informal learning environments (such as museums and science centers), engineering schools, national engineering societies, technology-based corporations that support education and other outreach to schools and communities, and federal and state agencies and labs that do or promote engineering, technology, and science.

Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering

What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.

From the archive:

Do you know, or are you guessing? Do you know, or are you guessing? You're guessing, aren't you..? No points! 0! You don't get any points for guessing!

Also:

Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.

A final thought:

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance

New work by Jon Kleinberg and Duncan Watts:

Social networks are of interest to researchers in part because they are thought to mediate the flow of information in communities and organizations. Here we study the temporal dynamics of communication using on-line data, including e-mail communication among the faculty and staff of a large university over a two-year period. We formulate a temporal notion of "distance" in the underlying social network by measuring the minimum time required for information to spread from one node to another -- a concept that draws on the notion of vector-clocks from the study of distributed computing systems. We find that such temporal measures provide structural insights that are not apparent from analyses of the pure social network topology. In particular, we define the network backbone to be the subgraph consisting of edges on which information has the potential to flow the quickest. We find that the backbone is a sparse graph with a concentration of both highly embedded edges and long-range bridges -- a finding that sheds new light on the relationship between tie strength and connectivity in social networks.

The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network