Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, Richard Feynman was one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, but he was also a man who fell, often jumped, into adventure. This work presents the taped conversations that Feynman's had with his friend Ralph Leighton over a period of years.

Richard Feynman - Nobel Laureate, teacher, icon and genius - possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and a gift for telling the extraordinary stories of his life. This collection features his short pieces and reminiscences as he describes topics ranging from his love of beauty to college pranks to how his father taught him to think.

Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. This book is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization.

A follow-up to the bestseller Cryptonomicon , this book presents a cast of characters in a time of genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined the age of the High Baroque. It travels from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London, the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between.

The first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available -- a fully realised portrait of this extraordinary human being, and great genius.

A Blackadder for the high seas

Physicist and polymath, 'father of the atom bomb' J Robert Oppenheimer became the most famous scientist of his generation. This work is a portrait of a brilliant, ambitious and flawed man, and of the major events of the twentieth century. It is at once biography and history.

The life story of an extraordinary mathematical genius - John Nash - who became schizophrenic, entered remission, and won the Nobel Prize. Nash was only 21 years old and at Princeton University when he invented game theory, the most influential theory of rational human behaviour of our time.

Galileo is seen as one of the greatest scientists ever. Little is known of his illegitimate daughter, Virginia. As a nun, she wrote 120 letters to her father from 1623 to her death from exposure and malnutrition ten years later. This text investigates the father-daughter relationship.

For nearly 50 years, until his death in 1988, Richard Feynman's work lay at the heart of physics. Always controversial, Feynman was the key physicist from his days as part of the A-bomb-making team in the 1940s, until his discovery of the reason for the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

What is science and what is its true value? Can a scientist believe in God? Why, in this supposedly scientific age, is there such widespread fascination with flying saucers, faith healing, astrology and alien invasion? This work brings together topics ranging from the atomic bomb to ethics, the imagination to the meaning of life.

A space probe, designed to collect organisms and dust for study, falls to earth in a desolate area of north-eastern Arizona. In a nearby town, bodies lie flung about, faces frozen in surprise. The terror has begun. This bestseller is by the author of Jurassic Park .

'Christopher Moore is a very sick man, in the very best sense of the word' Carl Hiaasen

Written by an award-winning physicist turned historian who knew Einstein personally in the last years of his life, this is a scientific biography of Albert Einstein. It describes the man through his science.

Rosalind Franklin's research was central to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. She never received the credit she was due during her lifetime. In this classic work Anne Sayre, a journalist and close friend of Franklin, puts the record straight.

Dealing with the ultimate questions of life's origins, this study examines the pride, passion, and courage of the cosmological scientists who explore the origins, structure, and fate of the universe.

It's hot in Washington. No sign of rain. The world's climates are changing, catastrophe beckons, but no one in power is noticing. Yet.

Within a space ship lying on the sea bottom is a mysterious sphere that promises each of the main characters some personal reward: military might, professional prestige, power, understanding. Trapped underwater with the sphere, the humans confront eerie and increasingly dangerous threats after communication with the alien object has been achieved.

On a remote jungle island, genetic engineers have created a dinosaur game park. Drawing on his talent and brilliance, the author has written the techno-thriller of our time.

When Charles Wallace Murry goes searching through a 'wrinkle in time' for his lost father, he finds himself on an evil planet where all life is enslaved by a huge pulsating brain known as 'It'.