Carlo Rovelli Collection 3 Books Set (Reality Is Not What It Seems, The Order of Time, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics)

As Michio Kaku reveals, what for 250 years was science-fiction fantasy is now the likeliest picture of reality... the journey he takes the reader on is so pituresque and the conclusions so startling that you are gripped - Sunday TimesThe world is coming to an end. But humankind's story is only just beginning...Imagine a future where we are not alone. Where our universe is just one of countless parallel worlds - some strangely familiar, some almost unimaginable. And that, when planet earth finally runs down to a cold, dark wasteland, we will be able to escape into these new worlds and start again. Kaku's thrilling guide to the galaxy shows us how it could happen sooner than we think - and the future for intelligent life is one of endless possibilities.Kaku brings his formidable explanatory talents to bear on one of the strangest and most exciting possibilities to have emerged from modern physics... wonderful - Brian GreeneOne of the gurus of modern physics - Financial TimesNobody who reads this book cane be anything less than amazed - Scotland on SundayAn exhilarating romp through the frontiers of cosmology - Martin ReesCover image: Joe Tucciarone / Science Photo Library

Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it.“A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.”—New York Review of BooksWe are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language: a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language.Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals.Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world: the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding: the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language: and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.

Picking up from A Discovery of Witches’ cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night takes Diana and Matthew on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and a coterie of Matthew’s old friends, the School of Night. As the search for Ashmole 782 deepens and Diana seeks out a witch to tutor her in magic, the net of Matthew’s past tightens around them, and they embark on a very different—and vastly more dangerous—journey.