Annal:2003 Aventis Prize for General Science Book
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Aventis Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- Aventis Prize for General Science Book
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Science/Technology books
- Science/Technology authors.
Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures
- 2003 Aventis-General winner
- Score: 10.53
A labor of love and enthusiasm as well as deep scientific knowledge, Right Hand, Left Hand takes the reader on a trip through history, around the world, and into the cosmos, to explore the place of handedness in nature and culture. Chris McManus considers evidence from anthropology, particle physics, the history of medicine, and the notebooks of Leonardo to answer questions like: Why are most people right-handed? Are left-handed people cognitively different from right-handers? Why is the heart almost always on the left side of the body? Why does European…
Small World: Uncovering Nature's Hidden Networks
- 2003 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Most of us have had the experience of running into a friend of a friend far away from home—and feeling that the world is somehow smaller than it should be. We usually write off such unlikely encounters as coincidence, even though they seem to happen with uncanny frequency. According to some physicists, it turns out that this ‘small-world’ phenomenon is no coincidence at all. Rather, it is a manifestation of a hidden and powerful design that binds the world together. The Internet, the brain, power-grids and the global economy are all networks that seem to have…
Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You
- 2003 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.53
At the beginning of the twentieth century, H. G. Wells predicted that statistical thinking would be as necessary for citizenship in a technological world as the ability to read and write. But in the twenty-first century, we are often overwhelmed by a baffling array of percentages and probabilities as we try to navigate in a world dominated by statistics.
Cognitive scientist Gerd Gigerenzer says that because we haven’t learned statistical thinking, we don’t understand risk and uncertainty. In order to assess risk—everything from the risk of an automobile…
The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos
- 2003 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.53
One of the world’s leading astronomers, Robert Kirshner, takes readers inside a lively research team on the quest that led them to an extraordinary cosmological discovery: the expansion of the universe is accelerating under the influence of a dark energy that makes space itself expand. In addition to sharing the story of this exciting discovery, Kirshner also brings the science up-to-date in a new epilogue. He explains how the idea of an accelerating universe—once a daring interpretation of sketchy data—is now the standard assumption in cosmology today.
This…
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- 2003 Aventis-General shortlist
- 2003 Pulitzer–Nonfiction finalist
- Score: 12.53
Our conceptions of human nature affect everything aspect of our lives, from child-rearing to politics to morality to the arts. Yet many fear that scientific discoveries about innate patterns of thinking and feeling may be used to justify inequality, to subvert social change, and to dissolve personal responsibility.
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature and instead have embraced three dogmas: The…
If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens…Where Is Everybody?
- 2003 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.53
During a lunchtime conversation at Los Alamos more than 50 years ago, four world-class scientists agreed, given the size and age of the Universe, that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations had to exist. The sheer numbers demanded it. But one of the four, the renowned physicist and back-of-the-envelope calculator Enrico Fermi, asked the telling questions: If the extraterrestrial life proposition is true, he wondered, “Where is everybody?”
In this book, Stephen Webb presents a detailed discussion of the 50 most cogent and intriguing answers to Fermi’s famous…
