Annal:1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1993. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Science/Technology books
- Science/Technology authors.
Fuzzy Logic: The Revolutionary Computer Technology That Is Changing Our World
- 1993 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
- Score: 10.43
AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence
- 1993 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.43
In the summer of 1956, ten young scientists, some barely out of their doctoral studies, sat down to consider the astounding proposition that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can, in principle, be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” Armed with their own enthusiasm, the excitement of the idea itself, and an infusion of government money, they predicted that the whole range of human intelligence would be programmable within their own lifetimes. Nearly half a century later, the field has grown…
Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion
- 1993 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.43
At 1:00 P.M., on March 23, 1989, two obscure scientists at the University of Utah announced that they had discovered salvation in a test tube—cold nuclear fusion. The technology promised sale, cheap, limitless energy, and the press played it as the scientific breakthrough of the century. It would become instead a fiasco of epidemic proportions, an unforgettable morality tale in the scientific method: what happens when reason is perverted by hope and greed.
Gary Taubes’s Bad Science is the vivid, dramatic, and definitive story of the astonishing quest…
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
- 1993 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- 1993 Pulitzer–Biography finalist
- 1992 NBA–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 18.43
Richard Feynman’s life encompassed the most important discoveries and changes in science in this century. As a boy he tinkered with radios and as a scientist he looked at all things from an unusual and unique perspective. Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize, was an eccentric and hard-driven perfectionist—a genius indeed. Feynman’s career touched on every area of modern science: from the Manhattan Project to quantum mechanics, to the Space Shuttle Commission. Beyond the importance of the physicist, we learn of a man whose emotional demons made him all the…
- 1993 LATimes–Sci/Tech finalist
- Score: 6.43
“In the Amazon Basin the greatest violence sometimes begins as a flicker of light beyond the horizon. There in the perfect bowl of the night sky, untouched by light from any human source, a thunderstorm sends its premonitory signal and begins a slow journey to the observer, who thinks: the world is about to change.”
Watching from the edge of the Brazilian rain forest, witness to the sort of violence nature visits upon its creatures, Edward O. Wilson reflects on the crucible of evolution, and so begins his remarkable account of how the living world became…
