Classical Physics

Masters of language can turn unassuming words into phrases that are beautiful, effective, and memorable. What are the secrets of this alchemy? Part of the answer lies in rhetorical figures: practical ways of applying great aesthetic principles to a simple sentence or paragraph. Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric recovers this knowledge for our times. It amounts to a tutorial on eloquence conducted by Churchill and Lincoln, Dickens and Melville, Burke and Paine, and more than a hundred others.

A short and entertaining introduction to thermodynamics that uses real-world examples to explain accessibly an important but subtle scientific theory.

Albert Einstein described Relativity as a "popular explosion" of his famous theory. Written in 1916, it introduced the lay audience to the remarkable perspective which had overturned theoretical physics. Einstein's genius was to express this perspective in understandable terms.

Number theory is the branch of mathematics that is primarily concerned with the counting numbers. Of particular importance are the prime numbers, the "building blocks" of our number system. The subject is an old one, dating back over two millennia to the ancient Greeks, and for many years has been studied for its intrinsic beauty and elegance, not least because several of its challenges are so easy to state that everyone can understand them, and yet no one has ever been able to resolve them. But number theory has also recently become of great practical importance.

Written with a “formal playfulness [that] suggests Kundera with A.D.D.” (Village Voice), Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow became an underground cult classic upon its 2012 release. In a radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, a narrator named Georgi meanders through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. Spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene, he catalogs curious instances of abandonment, recounts scenes of a turbulent boyhood in 1970s Bulgari.