Why is the sky dark at night?

The answer to this ancient and celebrated riddle, says Edward Harrison, seems relatively simple: the sun has set and is now shining on the other side of the earth. But suppose we were space travelers and far from any star. Out in the depths of space the heavens would be dark, even darker than the sky seen from the earth on cloudless and moonless nights. For more than four centuries, astronomers and other investigators have pondered the enigma of a dark sky and proposed many provocative but incorrect answers. Darkness at Night eloquently describes the misleading trails of inquiry and strange ideas that have abounded in the quest for a solution.

In tracing this story of discovery—one of the most intriguing in the history of science—astronomer and physicist Harrison explores the concept of infinite space, the structure and age of the universe, the nature of light, and other subjects that once were so perplexing. He introduces a range of stellar intellects, from Democritus in the ancient world to Digges in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, followed by Kepler, Newton, Halley, Chéseaux, Olbers, Poe, Kelvin, and Bondi.

Harrison’s style is engaging, incisive yet poetic, and his strong grasp of history—from the Greeks to the twentieth century—adds perspective, depth, and scope to the narrative. Richly illustrated and annotated, this book will delight and enlighten both the casual reader and the serious inquirer.

From the celebrated author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience comes an original and exhilarating attempt at making sense of the strange laws of quantum mechanics.

A century ago, a brilliant circle of physicists around Niels Bohr argued that the search for an objective, realistic, and mechanical picture of the inner workings of the atom—the kind of picture that had previously been an ideal of classical physics—was doomed to fail. Today, there is widespread agreement among philosophers and physicists that those arguments were wrong. However, the question of what that picture might look like, and how it might fit into a comprehensive picture of physical reality, remains unsettled.

In A Guess at the Riddle, philosopher David Z Albert argues that the distinctively strange features of quantum mechanics begin to make sense once we conceive of the wave function, vibrating and evolving in high-dimensional space, as the concrete, fundamental physical “stuff” of the universe. Starting with simple mechanical models, Albert methodically constructs the defining features of quantum mechanics from scratch. He shows how the entire history of our familiar, three-dimensional universe can be discerned in the wave function’s intricate pattern of ripples and whorls. A major new work in the foundations of physics, A Guess at the Riddle is poised to transform our understanding of the basic architecture of the universe.

A history of relations between Britain and Russia from the nineteenth century to the present.
 
With Riddle, Mystery, and Enigma, statesman and author David Owen tells the story of Britain’s relationship with Russia, which has been surprisingly underexplored. Through his characteristic insight and expertise, he depicts a relationship governed by principle as often as by suspicion, expediency, and necessity.
 
When the two nations formed a pragmatic alliance and fought together at the Battle of Navarino in Greece in 1827, it was overwhelmingly the work of the British prime minister, George Canning. His death brought about a drastic shift that would see the countries fighting on opposite sides in the Crimean War and jostling for power during the Great Game. It was not until the Russian Revolution of 1917 that another statesman had a defining impact on relations between Britain and Russia: Winston Churchill, who opposed Bolshevism yet never stopped advocating for diplomatic and military engagement with Russia. In the Second World War, he recognized early on the necessity of allying with the Soviets against the menace of Nazi Germany. Bringing us into the twenty-first century, Owen chronicles how both countries have responded to their geopolitical decline. Drawing on both imperial and Soviet history, he explains the unique nature of Putin’s autocracy and addresses Britain’s return to “blue water” diplomacy.  Newly revised, this paperback edition features extended chapters on Putin’s Russia and the future of British–Russian relations after the Russo-Ukrainian War.
 

What is literature? Can we measure ‘literariness’ in texts themselves? The innovative Computational Humanities project The Riddle of Literary Quality asked thousands of Dutch readers for their opinion about contemporary Dutch and translated novels. The public shared which novels they had read, what they really thought of them, and how they judged their quality. Their judgments of the same novels were compared with the results of computational analysis of the books. Using evidence from almost 14,000 readers and building on more textual data than ever before, Van Dalen-Oskam and her team uncovered unconscious biases that shed new light on prejudices many people assumed no longer existed. This monograph explains in an accessible way how the project unfolded, which methods were used, and how the results may change the future of Literary Studies.