James Gleick

Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological--the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the...

An incisive portrait of one of the world's greatest scientific minds traces the evolution of Isaac Newton's scientific thought, from his early years at Cambridge University through his critical contributions to the history of science. Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral - an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements...

In a collection of previously published pieces, the author muses on the Internet revolution that has taken place all around us. From the foibles and ambitions of Microsoft, which he predicted would come to take over the world years before it became obvious to the rest of us, to the futuristic possibilities of mobile networked computing, Gleick gives us a gradual and inexorable account of the way computers have come to pervade our lives.