Annal:2006 Aventis Prize for General Science Book
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Aventis Prize in the year 2006. 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.
Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity
- 2006 Aventis-General winner
- Score: 10.56
In his bestselling E=mc2, David Bodanis led us, with astonishing ease, through the world’s most famous equation. Now, in Electric Universe, he illuminates the wondrous yet invisible force that permeates our universe—and introduces us to the virtuoso scientists who plumbed its secrets.
For centuries, electricity was seen as little more than a curious property of certain substances that sparked when rubbed. Then, in the 1790s, Alessandro Volta began the scientific investigation that ignited an explosion of knowledge and invention. The…
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- 2006 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.56
In his runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to fall into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Using a vast historical and geographical perspective ranging from Easter Island and the Maya to Viking Greenland and modern Montana, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe—one whose warning signs can be…
Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos
- 2006 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.56
In this thrilling journey into the mysteries of our cosmos, bestselling author Michio Kaku takes us on a dizzying ride to explore black holes and time machines, multidimensional space and, most tantalizing of all, the possibility that parallel universes may lay alongside our own.
Kaku skillfully guides us through the latest innovations in string theory and its latest iteration, M-theory, which posits that our universe may be just one in an endless multiverse, a singular bubble floating in a sea of infinite bubble universes. If M-theory is proven correct, we…
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life
- 2006 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.56
If it weren’t for mitochondria, scientists argue, we’d all still be single-celled bacteria. Indeed, these tiny structures inside our cells are important beyond imagining. Without mitochondria, we would have no cell suicide, no sculpting of embryonic shape, no sexes, no menopause, no aging.
In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Nick Lane brings together the latest research in this exciting field to show how our growing insight into mitochondria has shed light on how complex life evolved, why sex arose (why don’t we just bud?), and why we age and die.…
Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes
- 2006 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.56
In August 1930, on a voyage from Madras to London, a young Indian looked up at the stars and contemplated their fate. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—Chandra, as he was called—calculated that certain stars would suffer a strange and violent death, collapsing to virtually nothing. This extraordinary claim, the first mathematical description of black holes, brought Chandra into direct conflict with Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the greatest astrophysicists of the day. Eddington ridiculed the young man’s idea at a meeting of the Royal Astronomy Society in 1935, sending…
- 2006 Aventis-General shortlist
- Score: 6.56
What’s going on when we’re tetchy, spotty, fearful, tearful or just plain awful? Hormones rule our internal world: they control our growth, our metabolism, weight, water balance, body clocks, fertility, muscle tone, mood, the speed of ageing, whether you want sex or not (and whether you enjoy it) and even who we fall in love with. Their effects may occur in seconds and be over in a flash, or take months and last for thirty years. While we can name some hormones we rarely know what they actually do. But that doesn’t stop us claiming that “it’s my hormones”…
