by Adam BeckerUntitled on Silicon Valley

FORTHCOMING TITLES

UNTITLED ON SCIENCE IN SILICON VALLEY ADAM BECKER

Praise for WHAT IS REAL?

Splendid…. Deeply detailed research, accompanied by charming anecdotes about the scientists – WASHINGTON POST

An exploration of how science shapes, and is shaped by, Silicon Valley – from AI to space exploration.

Is humanity’s destiny in the stars? Will AI take over the world? Can we live forever? And do we actually live in a simulation? Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other titans of Silicon Valley talk about these and other dreams and nightmares of our shared technological future. Where did they get these ideas, and will they become a reality? And what would these futures mean for the rest of us outside the tech industry? Follow author and astrophysicist Adam Becker as he digs into the science behind Silicon Valley’s visions of tomorrow.

ADAM BECKER is an author, journalist, astrophysicist, and public speaker. He has contributed to the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, the New York Times and numerous other media outlets including the popular ‘Story Collider’ podcast. Born in New Jersey in 1984, he studied philosophy and physics at Cornell University and then earned a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Michigan in 2012. His first book, WHAT IS REAL? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books, 2018), was described by the New York Times as ‘a thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science’. From 2016 to 2019 he was a visiting scholar at the Office for History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Basic Books Delivery: 5 January 2023 Publication: Autumn 2023 Status: Proposal and sample chapter Length: 90,000 words

All rights available excluding US & Canada (Basic Books)

FORTHCOMING TITLES

REIMAGINING TIME A Light-speed Trip Into Einstein’s Mindbending, World-changing Theory of Relativity TANYA BUB & JEFFREY BUB

Praise for TOTALLY RANDOM

Accessible, smart, and funny. An entanglement page-turner! – David Kaiser, author of HOW THE HIPPIES SAVED PHYSICS

A book about relativity that puts the pictures in Einstein’s head into the heads of its readers.

Like many people interested in the theory of relativity, the artist, philosopher and humorist Tanya Bub had never read Einstein's original work, somehow assuming she would be better off with more modern takes on the subject. But after idly clicking on a link to the 1905 paper Einstein had written when he was 24 years old – a first stab at explaining to the world his revolutionary ideas on space, time and matter – she ended up spending two years absorbed in his imaginative vision of the world.

What particularly struck her was that Einstein used words and maths to draw pictures in his readers’ minds. As she worked through his paper, she sketched in little diagrams and doodles to help her keep track of the thread of his argument and understand the rationale behind his equations. Soon her imagined scenarios became more elaborate, with props ranging from trains, mirrors and light guns to balloons, ice-cream cones and baseballs. Much to her surprise it turned out that the pictures could also generate numbers – the same values usually calculated with abstract mathematical equations. But here the pictures made intuitive sense because they came with a story.

In REIMAGINING TIME, Tanya Bub teams up with her father, the distinguished physicist Jeffrey Bub, to explain relativity in a way that’s never been done before. It’s a deliciously visual, wildly creative journey that reveals astonishing truths about the world we inhabit: time is relative, lengths get shorter with motion, the Universe has a speed limit, energy and mass are interchangeable, and gravity is the same thing as acceleration. The result: a quirky, funny accessible blend of science and art that goes to the heart of one of science’s most revolutionary discoveries.

TANYA BUB is the founder of 48th Ave Productions, a web-development company. She has degrees in philosophy of science from McGill University and fine arts from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver.

JEFFREY BUB is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He studied physics with David Bohm at Birkbeck College, London, and philosophy of science with Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos at the London School of Economics.

Tanya and Jeff’s first book together, TOTALLY RANDOM: Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics (Princeton University Press, 2018), was voted best quantum physics book of 2018 by Ethan Siegel of Forbes magazine (‘If you ever wondered about quantum entanglement and why it's so weird, this book is perhaps the best, simplest explainer of how it actually works’).

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: Yale University Press Publication: 8 June 2021 Status: Proofs Length: 192 pages