What are the great scientific questions of our modern age and why don't we know the answers? This volume takes on the most fascinating and pressing mysteries we have yet to crack and explains how tantalisingly close science is to solving them (or how frustratingly out of reach they remain).

The Big Questions in Science and Religion explores these ten queries to determine whether religious beliefs can survive in the scientific age. Author Keith Ward, an expert in the field of world religions, devotes a full chapter to each question, wherein he considers concepts from Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity, alongside the speculations of cosmologists, physicians, mathematicians, and philosophers.

What is life about? How are men and women different? How did the universe begin? We all ponder these questions from time to time but some scientists spend their lives investigating them. Are they anywhere near finding answers? In this exciting new book, leading scientific thinkers address twenty of the really big questions that people have been asking for hundreds of years. The contributors include: John Sulston, who led the British side of the Human Genome Project and who offers his views on whether we can ever end disease; Susan Greenfield, Oxford University professor of pharmacology, who describes what she thinks is a thought; John Barrow, Cambridge professor of mathematical sciences, who tells us what is time; and American psychologist David Buss, who suggests why we fall in and out of love. Their answers are each put into context by more general commentaries discussing the differing views of other leading contemporary scientists and looking at how people have tackled the question in the past. The result is a breathtaking tour of scientific thought through the ages and a peek at some of the most cutting-edge and controversial research today. Packed with fascinating insights, it shows how science is investigating problems that affect us all on a large scale and suggests that we are closer to finding solutions to some of life's big questions than we might think.

Why don't we feel the Earth move? Why does an ice cube float? Why can't you unscramble an egg? Why can't we live forever? These are all questions that a curious kid might ask. In What's the BIG Idea?, renowned juvenile science educator Vicki Cobb answers these and other fascinating questions to help kids learn more about the world through the wonders of science. A big idea is one that has no simple or easy answer, and there are four big ideas in this book: motion, energy, matter, and life. The motion of nonliving objects—rolling balls, falling stones, the moon and stars—seems so ordinary and familiar that most people take it for granted. Matter, on the other hand, comes in so many different forms—solids, liquids, gases, metals, nonmetals, living material—that it is hard to imagine anything that all matter has in common. Energy is an idea that is in the news just about every day, yet most people couldn't tell you what the big idea of energy is. And life—what life is—seems mind-boggling and infinitely complicated. How do we bend our brains around it? Scientists learn by asking questions. And this book, now in paperback, is designed to make young readers stop and think about each of the questions before reading what scientists have learned that answers each question. They'll be able to do simple things to see for themselves, and they will build their own scientific knowledge in the process. By the time they've finished this book, they'll get the big picture of what science is all about.

Robert Winston answers 100 big questions from kids across the world in this fun and unique science book. In this unique science book, Professor Robert Winston answers more than 100 real-life questions from children all around the world! And who could be a better scientist to ask questions to than Professor Robert Winston? Ask a Scientist puts the fun back into science in this thrilling book for children aged 6-9. All the popular science topics are covered, with weird and wacky questions and clear and lively answers, including biology: “Why do freckles come in dots on your face?”; physics: “Could you jump off the world?”; Earth: “Why is the sky blue?”; chemistry: “Why are there bubbles in boiling water?”; natural science: “Do dogs cry?”, and space: “Why will the Sun explode and make us extinct?”. This exciting new edition includes eight pages of additional questions relating to the recent hot topics in science, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Inside the pages of this quirky science book, you’ll find: - Every aspect of science: including biology; space; physics; chemistry; Earth; natural sciences. - The topic of science presented in a fresh, exciting way, by tackling it from the child’s perspective. - More than 100 real-life questions from children from all around the world about every aspect of science. - Updated reissue of the 2019 edition with an additional eight new pages, including coverage of important recent topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The inspiration behind this unique science book came from the many questions posed by Robert Winston’s grandchildren and by children from the schools he has visited over the years. The book includes some of these questions, plus many more gathered from countries all over the world – including the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe, Canada, the USA, India, China, and Japan. The 100 big questions featured inside the book cover all the main science topics: chemistry, physics, biology, Earth, space, and natural science.

This book provides an introduction to a range of fundamental questions that have taxed evolutionary biologists and ecologists for decades. All of the questions posed have at least a partial solution, all have seen exciting breakthroughs in recent years, yet many of the explanations have been hotly debated.

One of our most brilliant social critics—author of the bestselling The Middle Mind—presents a scathing critique of the “delusions” of science alongside a rousing defense of the tradition of Romanticism and the “big” questions. With the rise of religion critics such as Richard Dawkins, and of pseudo-science advocates such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer, you’re likely to become a subject of ridicule if you wonder “Why is there something instead of nothing?” or “What is our purpose on earth?” Instead, at universities around the world, and in the general cultural milieu, we’re all being taught that science can resolve all questions without the help of philosophy, politics, or the humanities. In short, the rich philosophical debates of the 19th century have been nearly totally abandoned, argues critic Curtis White. An atheist himself, White nonetheless calls this new turn “scientism”—and fears what it will do to our culture if allowed to flourish without challenge. In fact, in “scientism” White sees a new religion with many unexamined assumptions. In this brilliant multi-part critique, he aims at a TED talk by a distinguished neuroscientist in which we are told that human thought is merely the product of our “connectome,” a map of neural connections in the brain that is yet to be fully understood. . . . He whips a widely respected physicist who argues that our new understanding of the origins of the universe obviates any philosophical inquiry . . . and ends with a learned defense of the tradition of Romanticism, which White believes our technology and science-obsessed world desperately needs to rediscover. It’s the only way, he argues, that we can see our world clearly. . . and change it.