The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of

"God does not play dice with the universe." So said Albert Einstein in response to the first discoveries that launched quantum physics, as they suggested a random universe that seemed to violate the laws of common sense. This 20th-century scientific revolution completely shattered Newtonian laws, inciting a crisis of thought that challenged scientists to think differently about matter and subatomic particles.The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of compiles the essential works from the scientists who sparked the paradigm shift that changed the face of physics forever, pushing our understanding of the universe on to an entirely new level of comprehension. Gathered in this anthology is the scholarship that shocked and befuddled the scientific world, including works by Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Erwin Schrodinger, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, as well as an introduction by today's most celebrated scientist, Stephen Hawking.

A popular insider offers a fascinating history of science fiction filled with provocative critiques, tidbits, and insights that reveal much about our cultural and literary history.

Roberto Piazza says: “Physics should be made simple enough to be amusing, but not so trivial as to spoil the fun.” This is exactly the approach of this book in making the science of ‘soft matter’ relevant to everyday life things such as the food we eat, the plastic we use, the concrete we build with, the cells we are made of.

Jung, C.G.

First there was gold. Then oil. Then technology. Now - who controls the world's rare earths controls the future. It was supposed to be a simple corporate job. Check out the company, make sure the client was protected and take home a big paycheck. But with Boozy McBain and Boston O'Daniel nothing is ever as it seems. As their investigation draws them deeper into a world of corporate and geopolitical intrigue, they learn that their client's company may hold the key to the competition for power over the world's most vital resources - a battle for global control of rare earth minerals, critical to the future of everything modern society demands, from the green energy revolution to next generation weapons and consumer technologies. To protect the client they must navigate a mysterious array of government agencies and corporations, and go up against a man who is determined to possess the sources of the new wealth of the 21st century, from Africa to Asia to America - and perhaps the stars. A man of relentless ambition with a reputation for heartlessness in his quest to wrest control of the rare earth monopoly from China and build the empire of the future at any cost. The deeper the detectives dig the more enemies they make, from corporate boardrooms and black tie galas to the hopeless despair of the Congo, and the more personal the search becomes for each, driven by the seductive call of wealth, glamour and exotic danger.

Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature begins from a piece of ephemera, usually consumer products or pop culture phenomena, and develops alternately comic and poignant snapshots of urban life. Dung’s sketches center on once-trendy items that evoke the world at the turn of the millennium, such as Hello Kitty, Final Fantasy VIII, a Windows 98 disk, a clamshell mobile phone, Air Jordans, and cargo shorts. The protagonist of each piece, typically a young woman, is struck by an odd, even overriding obsession with an object or fad. Characters embark on brief dalliances or relationships lasting no longer than the fashions that sparked them. Dung blends vivid everyday details—Portuguese egg tarts, Japanese TV shows, the Hong Kong subway—with situations that are often fantastical or preposterous. This catalog of vanished products illuminates how people use objects to define and even invent their own selves. A major work from one of Hong Kong’s most gifted and original writers, Dung’s archaeology of the end of the twentieth century speaks to perennial questions about consumerism, nostalgia, and identity.

Every life retells the hero or heroine's journey: a wondrous, sometimes painful but always necessary movement toward wholeness. What better way to understand our own experiences of growth and transformation than to hear from others who have gone before us? In "Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On" Helen Luke explores the inner life through dream and imagery, story and symbol. The first half of the book covers Luke's life from her earliest recollections until the age of seventy. It weaves together dreams and symbolic images from her inner life with accounts of personal events, including her seminal meeting with Jung. The book's second half is comprised of selections from the journals she kept during her last twenty years of life, offering a rare glimpse into a personal path of individuation.

A groundbreaking history of the human mind told through our experience of dreams—from the earliest accounts to current scientific findings—and their essential role in the formation of who we are and the world we have made. "A resounding case for the mystery, beauty and cognitive importance of dreams." —The New York Times What is a dream? Why do we dream? How do our bodies and minds use them? These questions are the starting point for this unprecedented study of the role and significance of this phenomenon. An inves­tigation on a grand scale, it encompasses literature, anthropology, religion, and science, articulating the essential place dreams occupy in human culture and how they functioned as the catalyst that compelled us to transform our earthly habitat into a human world. From the earliest cave paintings—where Sidarta Ribeiro locates a key to humankind’s first dreams and how they contributed to our capacity to perceive past and future and our ability to conceive of the existence of souls and spirits—to today’s cutting-edge scientific research, Ribeiro arrives at revolutionary conclusions about the role of dreams in human existence and evolution. He explores the advances that contempo­rary neuroscience, biochemistry, and psychology have made into the connections between sleep, dreams, and learning. He explains what dreams have taught us about the neural basis of memory and the transfor­mation of memory in recall. And he makes clear that the earliest insight into dreams as oracular has been elucidated by contemporary research. Accessible, authoritative, and fascinating, The Oracle of Night gives us a wholly new way to under­stand this most basic of human experiences.

Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction explores how fiction works in the brains and imagination of both readers and writers. Demonstrates how reading fiction can contribute to a greater understanding of, and the ability to change, ourselves Informed by the latest psychological research which focuses on, for example, how identification with fictional characters occurs, and how literature can improve social abilities Explores traditional aspects of fiction, including character, plot, setting, and theme, as well as a number of classic techniques, such as metaphor, metonymy, defamiliarization, and cues Includes extensive end-notes, which ground the work in psychological studies Features excerpts from fiction which are discussed throughout the text, including works by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Anton Chekhov, James Baldwin, and others

In a world where even the smallest and most remote village is being terrorized by the monsters that stalk the night, there is a hamlet, prosperous and peaceful, where mortals and vampires have lived in harmony for years. It is there that seventeen-year-old Sheavil Schmidt has slept, neither waking nor aging, for thirty years since first receiving the vampire's immortal kiss. The mysterious Vampire Hunter D is lured to the tranquil oasis by recurrent dreams of the beautiful, undying girl bathed in an eerie blue light and dancing in a ghostly chateau. * Over 100,000 copies of the Vampire Hunter D novels have been sold. * The Stuff of Dreams is volume 5 in a seventeen volume series. FOR MATURE READERS