In A Tale of Seven Elements, Eric Scerri presents the fascinating history of those seven elements discovered to be mysteriously "missing" from the periodic table in 1913.

This book describes the origins and evolution of the chemical elements we and the cosmos are made of. The story starts with the discovery of the common elements on Earth and their subsequent discovery in space. How do we learn the composition of the distant stars? How did progress in quantum theory, nuclear physics, spectroscopy, stellar structure and evolution, together with observations of stars, converge to provide an incredibly detailed picture of the universe? How does research in the micro-world explain the macro-world? How does progress in one affect the other, or lack of knowledge in one inhibit progress in the other? In short, Shaviv describes how we discovered the various pieces of the jigsaw that form our present picture of the universe; and how we sometimes put these in the wrong place before finding in the right one. En route we meet some fascinating personalities and learn about heated controversies. Shaviv shows how science lurched from one dogma to the next, time and again shattering much of what had been considered solid knowledge, until eventually a stable understanding arose. Beginning with generally accepted science, the book ends in today’s terra incognita of nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology. A monumental work that will fascinate scientists, philosophers, historians and lay readers alike.

"Shiva does not spell religion. Shiva spells responsibility -- our ability to take our very life process in our hands.'' -- Sadhguru 'Shi-va' is 'that which is not', a primordial emptiness; Shiva is also the first-ever yogi, Adiyogi, the one who first perceived this emptiness. Adiyogi is symbol and myth, historic figure and living presence, creator and destroyer, outlaw and ascetic, cosmic dancer and passionate lover, all at once.A book like no other, this extraordinary document is a tribute to Shiva, the Adiyogi, by a living yogi; a chronicle of the progenitor of mysticism by a contemporary mystic. Here science and philosophy merge seamlessly, so do silence and sound, question and answer--to capture the unspeakable enigma of Adiyogi in a spellbinding wave of words and ideas that will leave one entranced, transformed.

The acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams tackles "big questions like the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness ... in an entertaining and easily digestible way” (Wall Street Journal) with a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between. Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called “the poet laureate of science writers,” explores these questions and more—from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.

While there have been many books on cosmology and galactic and stellar evolution in which abundance analysis of astrophysical objects has played some part, this book is the first one for several years where specialists in the various relevant fields discuss the basis and implications of the subject as a whole. The major aim of the book is to bring together the results from high redshift studies and galactic studies in a coherent way and to cover relevant aspects of nuclear and atomic physics.

"How did the understanding of Jesus as the universal Son of Man of Apocalyptic Judaism develop into the notion of a cosmic god, the cosmic Christ? George van Kooten traces the earliest encounters between antiquity and Christianity."

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.