Annal:1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology

Fuzzy Logic: The Revolutionary Computer Technology That Is Changing Our World

Daniel Mcneill

• 1993 LATimes–Sci/Tech winner
• Score: 10.43

 

AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence

Daniel Crevier

• 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 exponentially—with mixed results.

Based on extensive interviews with the major players, including Marvin Minsky, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Raj Reddy, and Patrick Winston, AI is part intellectual history, part business history. Rich with anecdotes about the founders and leaders of the field and their celebrated feuds and intellectual gamesmanship, the book chronicles their dramatic successes (“expert” systems, robotics, “smart” technologies, and even world-class chess playing) and their equally dramatic failures (language…

Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion

Gary Taubes

• 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 for cold fusion, from its premature birth in a Utah turf war to its lingering and surreal death in a laboratory in College Station, Texas. It is the story of good scientists and bad, of heroes and charlatans, and of a race in which thousands of researchers spent tens of millions of dollars to prove or disprove the existence of a canard. Drawing from interviews with over 260 scientists, administrators, and journalists, Taubes dissects the cold fusion episode with wit and clarity, tracing the untold inside story of scientific research…

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

James Gleick

• 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 more human. In the hands of gifted writer James Gleick, Richard Feynman is a man worth knowing.

The Diversity of Life

Edward O. Wilson

• 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 diverse and how humans are destroying that diversity. Wilson, internationally regarded as the dean of biodiversity studies, conducts us on a tour through time, traces the processes that create new species in bursts of adaptive radiation, and points out the cataclysmic events that have disrupted evolution and diminished global diversity over the past 600 million years. The five enormous natural blows to the planet (such as meteorite strikes and climatic changes) required 10 to 100 million years of evolutionary repair. The sixth great…