Dynasty Foundation Popular Science Library

In 2006, the Foundation undertook its own publishing project. The Dynasty Foundation Popular Science Library publishes the best contemporary mass-market books on the natural sciences and the humanities.

The Dynasty Foundation Library has three basic goals:

• to make the natural sciences and the humanities more accessible to the general public and to popularize science by bringing it to readers in a contemporary form;
• to develop the popular science segment of the publishing business, making it a competitive sector;
• to foster a community where people interested in the sciences—writers, experts, publishers, booksellers, and readers—can interact.

Dynasty Foundation Library Books

In 2006, Geleos Publishers released two editions of the Russian-language version of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. In 2004, this extraordinary encyclopedia won the prestigious Aventis Prize for best general science book.

A Short History of Nearly Everything headed the 2007 bestseller list amongst popular science books.

In 2007, our imprint released James Trefil's The Nature of Science: An A-Z Guide to the Laws and Principles Governing Our Universe, which was first published in Russian on the website Elements.

James Trefil is a professor of physics at George Mason University (USA) and one of the most well-known authors of general science books.

November 2007 saw the release of Matt Ridley's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.

Originally published in English in 1999, the book continues to be a worldwide best seller.

Matt Ridley is a British zoologist and the author of several highly regarded popular science books.

In November 2007, we released Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell, the second popular science book by the great theoretical physicist.

His first general science book, A Brief History of Time, has been translated into forty languages and sold almost ten million copies.

Stephen Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

February 2008 saw the release of The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, by the famous American economist and historian Robert Heilbroner.

The book tells the story of the lives and ideas of the great economic thinkers. The book's tremendous sales worldwide overturned the notion that economics is boring.

In cooperation with the Liberal Mission Foundation, we have published Ella Paneiakh's Rules of the Game for Russian Entrepreneurs (Moscow: Kolibri, 2008).

This book by Petersburg sociologist Ella Paneiakh explores the relationship between business people and the machinery of the state, as well as the surprises and traps that lay in store for the novice who has decided to open his own firm and do business honestly, “by the rules.” The book also looks at the paradoxes of Russian life: after all, soon or later all of us have the idea to our own undertakings, great or small.

In August 2008, another title was added to the Dynasty Foundation Library—Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (Moscow: Geleos, 2008).

Written by a well-known British science journalist, the book explores so-called social physics and the use of natural scientific models—mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology—in describing social phenomena.

In 2005, Critical Mass won the Aventis Prize, which is awarded by the Royal Society (UK) to the best popular science book of the year.

Published in October 2008, Albert Einstein, Works on the Theory of Relativity (Moscow: Amfora, 2008) contains a number of his famous works on relativity theory as well as The Evolution of Physics, a book intended for the general reading public that Einstein wrote with Polish physicist Leopold Infeld.

Albert Einstein was one of the world's greatest scientists, a man who fundamentally changed our notions about the structure of the Universe and the nature of space and time.

The renowned English physicist Stephen Hawking wrote the introduction to this anthology.

October 2008 also saw the release of Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Moscow: Amfora, 2008). Sagan was an American astrophysicist and the most famous popularizer of science in the twentieth century.

The book examines the evolution of the Universe, the formation of the galaxies, and the emergence of life and intelligence. Sagan traces the paths that man's discovery of the Universe has taken—from the insights of the ancients and the breakthroughs of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein to today's space missions.

This book and the eponymous TV series brought Sagan international fame.

The God Delusion (Moscow: KoLibri, 2008), by the preeminent British ethologist and popular science writer Richard Dawkins, was published by the Dynasty Foundation Library in November 2008.

After the release of this book, which has now been translated into several dozen languages, Dawkins was named author of the year (2006) by Reader's Digest.

When The God Delusion was released, the American popular science magazine Discovery christened Dawkins “Darwin's Rottweiler,” thus equating him with the famous evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, who was dubbed “Darwin's bulldog” in the late nineteenth century. The English magazine Prospect opined that Dawkins is one of the three most visible public intellectuals in the world, along with Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco.

In Physics of the Impossible (Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2009), Michio Kaku, a Japanese-American physicist and one of the originators of string theory, ranks fantastic phenomena according to the likelihood of whether they will become realities sometime in the future.

Using the language and images of science fiction—from teleportation to telekinesis—Kaku undertakes a brilliant, engaging examination of the methods and limits of contemporary physics. He predicts how likely each “impossibility” is and when it might become a reality—in the coming century, in the next millennium or (perhaps) never.

According to Dr. Kaku, even the wildest dreams of science fiction might become a reality.

Michio Kaku is the author of more than 170 scientific articles in the world's preeminent physics journals. He is also known for his popular science best sellers Beyond Einstein, Visions, Hyperspace, and Parallel Worlds.

Dr. Kaku has worked on such PBS documentaries as Einstein Revealed and Stephen Hawking's Universe as well as series on the BBC and the Discovery Channel.

The main—almost the only—work of the outstanding Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), has been published in Russian translation by the Dynasty Foundation (Moscow: Amfora, 2009).

This work, which first came out in 1543, became one of the greatest breakthroughs in history.

The astrophysicist and academician V. A. Ambartsumian characterized the significance of the great scientist's work thus:
«The heliocentric system, created by Copernicus, was the beginning of the profoundest revolution in exact science. Having first appeared in astronomy, this revolution spread to mechanics and all of physics. In fact, the achievements of this scientific revolution serve as the foundation for the whole edifice of modern science.»

The book by the American ornithologist, physiologist, and geographer Jared Diamond—Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Moscow: AST, 2010)—became an international bestseller and brought its creator the prestigious Pulitzer Prize (1997), which at once turned the academic into an A-list celebrity.

Many people ponder the question why different regions of our planet have been developing so nonuniformly. Why were the Australian aborigines not able to come out of the Stone age while Europeans learned to produce complex tools, build space ships, and pass the accumulated knowledge to succeeding generations?

Relying on the data of geography, botany, zoology, microbiology, linguistics, and other sciences, Diamond convincingly proved that the asymmetry in the development of different parts of the world is not accidental and is based on many natural factors such as living environment, climate, availability of animals and plants suitable for domestication, and even the shapes and sizes of the continents.

Diamond's solid and convincing theory allows a reader to comprehend the hidden mechanisms of the development of human civilization in a new way.

The book by Armand Marie Leroi Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body [Russian translation: Mutants: On Genetic Variability and the Human Body (Moscow: Corpus, 2010)] opens the new series Elementy—a collection of the best examples of world popular science literature of the last decade. They were selected for translation into Russian by Dynasty Foundation experts.

In his exciting and sometimes shocking book, which made a big splash in the world of popular science literature at the beginning of the 21^st century, the British biologist brings us closer to answering questions about which everybody wonders:

• How is a human body created?
• How do we become who we are?

The author finds the most direct route to the solution—through mutations and mutants, through the histories of famous monsters.

Monsters or mutants are only a part of the spectrum of human forms for us today and studying them helps clarify the organism’s laws of development. There are mutations that make a person red-haired or fat, a dwarf or a giant... Changing the meaning of genes, mutations help us understand what these genes in fact are for the organism in the first place.

In the book Origin of Life: Science and Faith (Moscow: Corpus, 2010; translation of Science, Evolution, and Creationism), experts assembled under the aegis of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine describe the basic methods of scientific cognition and present massive evidence in support of biological evolution. They consider and critique the views of supporters of different creationist theories, including «intelligent design.»

The creators of the book tell a reader about many fascinating researches that allow using the evolution theory in treating human diseases, making new foods, and implementing various technological innovations.

One of the main goals of the book is to show that science and religion can be regarded not as two antagonistic points of view but as two mutually complementary world perceptions and that recognizing the validity of evolution theory does not exclude a deep and sincere religious feeling.

Origin of Life: Science and Faith will become a valuable source of information and arguments for all people interested in spreading and confirming sensible views of the world around us in society, based on factual scientific information.

A Day's Adventure in Math Wonderland (Мoscow, 2009) by Jin Akiyama and Mari-Jo Ruiz appeared in the Dynasty library.

The Math Wonderland—in which children, the heroes of this book, travel—really exists. This is a museum of interactive mathematical models in Hokkaido, Japan. It was founded by Jin Akiyama in 2003.

The fascinating models described in the book (many of which the author has exhibited all over Japan and around the world) are designed to help children discover amazing patterns and experience all kinds of mathematical wonders.

In his factual book Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (Moscow:Astrel, 2010), Alex Vilenkin, a physicist at Tufts University, USA, acquaints readers with the latest scientific achievements in cosmology and relates his own theory that proves the possibility and even probability that numerous parallel universes exist.

The implications of his hypothesis are mind-blowing: there are multitudes of other worlds like ours or principally different ones settled by unimaginable creatures or creatures indistinguishable from people.

Vilenkin's ideas turned out to be so clear, convincing, and simultaneously revolutionary that they instantaneously turned the modest office scientist into a popular talk show star. And his book has become an international bestseller with a huge public resonance.

In his autobiographical book Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (Moscow:Astrel, 2010), James Watson, a famous biologist and Nobel prize winner, writes about his famous discovery of the DNA structure, about how American science functions, and about the lessons he learned from his own life experience and from observing other people.

Speaking about his life path, the author gives the reader useful and practical advice about how to make a successful scientific career and possibly one day make an outstanding scientific discovery.

The book Birth of complexity. Evolutionary Biology Today: The Unexpected Discoveries and New Questions (Мoscow: Astrel, Corpus, 2010) by Doctor of Biological Science Alexander Markov, a well-known paleontologist and popularizer of science, is an attempt to overcome the barrier of mutual nonunderstanding between serious researchers and a wider audience.

Birth of Complexity is both a captivating story about what is happening at the forefront of biological science today and a serious attempt to summarize and systematize mankind's accumulated knowledge in this area.

In his book Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Мoscow: Astrel, Corpus, 2010), Neil Shubin, a professor of anatomy, a well-known paleontologist, and one of the discoverers of the legendary Tiktaalik (the link between fish and land animals) offers the reader an exciting tour from the beginning of evolution, following how the human body was formed and perfected in the course of three and a half million years.

The popular and witty book Prime Obsession (Moscow: Astrel, 2010) by John Derbyshire, an American mathematician and publicist, tells about numerous attempts in the last 150 years to prove (or disprove) the Riemann Hypothesis and about the destinies of people obsessed with this task.

 

 

For many centuries, symmetry has been a key concept for artists, architects, and musicians. But in the twentieth century, physicists and mathematicians also came to appreciate its deep meaning. Symmetry underlies such fundamental physical and cosmological theories as the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory.

In the book Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry (Elementy Series, Мoscow: CORPUS, Astrel, 2010), Ian Nicholas Stewart, a world-famous British mathematician, follows the discoveries of the essential laws of symmetry from ancient Babylon to the advanced frontiers of contemporary science.

The eccentric Girolamo Cardano, a gambler and braggart of the Renaissance was the first to solve a cubic equation; Évariste Galois, a neurotic genius and a failed revolutionary, single-handedly created group theory; William Hamilton, a dipsomaniac, scribbled his greatest discovery on bridge stones; and, of course, the great Albert Einstein—the fates of these extraordinary people and brilliant scientists are the background for one of the most absorbing stories in the history of science.

Ian Nicholas Stewart—Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, Coventry, Great Britain—is a famous popularizer of mathematics and an author of science fiction books. His scientific interests include catastrophe theory, symmetry, group theory, and bifurcation theory.

The book Pseudoscience and Extraordinary Claims of the Paranormal: A Critical Thinker's Toolkit (Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2011) by Jonathan C. Smith, is written for both paranormal believers and skeptics alike.

A reader will find in it an original, fascinating, and valid approach to analyzing paranormal claims and will learn how to to distinguish science from pseudoscience.

In contrast to fiction, Smith values facts above all.

Jonathan C. Smith, Ph.D. is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist, Professor of Psychology at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and Head of the Pseudoscience and Paranormal Laboratory.
In 1984, he founded the Roosevelt University Stress Institute primarily to combat pseudoscience in the field.
He has created a special program both classroom and on-line for teaching critical thinking and the valid evaluation of extraordinary claims of the paranormal.

Chris Turney's book Bones, Rocks, and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened (Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2011) has been issued in Russian.

Using the most intriguing historical riddles, the British scientist Chris Turney illustrates how written records, carbon, pollen, tree rings, and DNA sequencing, which are used in the newest dating technologies, can help archaeologists, paleontologists, and geologists “tell the time.” This book, as absorbing as a detective story, also carries a serious warning: if we want to have a decent future, then it is especially important to understand the past.

Chris Turney is a British geologist and currently holds a Chair in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter, UK.
In 2004, he did the radiocarbon dating of the “Hobbit” fossil of Flores found in Indonesia.
He has published numerous scientific papers and magazine articles and given frequent interviews that infect readers with an interest in the riddles of the ages of various artefacts.

Christopher Frith's book Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World (Мoscow: Corpus, Astrel, 2010) has been issued in Russian.

The famous British neuropsychologist is well known for his skill in speaking simply about very complicated problems of psychology, such as psychic activity, social behavior, autism, and schizophrenia. Today, this sphere, along with studying how we perceive the world, act, make choices, remember, and feel, is undergoing a scientific revolution involving neuroimaging methods.
In his book Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World, Christopher Frith speaks about all this most easily and entertainingly.

Paul Halpern's book Collider (Moscow: EKSMO, 2010) has been issued in the Russian translation in the EKSMO series “Discoveries That Shook The World” under the auspices of the Dynasty Foundation.

What does the Large Hadron Collider mean for science? What are scientists seeking? Why will physics possibly soon have one of the greatest breakthroughs in its history?

All these questions are discussed in Paul Halpern's book Collider.
Above all, the author proves why the appearance of mini black holes on the LHC, which many fear so much, is impossible both practically and theoretically

Paul Halpern is a Professor of Physics and Mathematics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He was the recipient of a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award and is the author of numerous books.

Richard Dawkins’s book The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Мoscow: Corpus, AST, 2010) has been published in Russian for the first time.

The book The Extended Phenotype by the well-known scientist and popularizer of science further develops the ideas in his renown book The Selfish Gene, where evolution and natural selection are considered from the standpoint of competition between genes.
These ideas, which provoked stormy disputes, have already secured their place in science, and The Extended Phenotype is rightfully considered one of the most important books in contemporary evolutionary biology.

The clarity of exposition, humor, and iron logic make even the strictly scientific works of Dawkins accessible to a wide circle of readers.
The Extended Phenotype is one of the best of Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins is a leading British biologist and author of the theory of memes. His brilliant books have played an enormous role in reawakening interest in popular science literature.

The book by Carl Zimmer Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures [in Russian translation: Parasites: The Secret World (Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2011)] has been published in Russian.

Carl Zimmer is one of the best science journalists of our time. He makes the most complex scientific theories understandable. His description of the life of parasites reminds readers of a science fiction novel with mysterious and ominous characters that sometimes appeal to their sympathy.

Parasites feed on the flesh and blood of their victims, influence the biological and social behavior of species and their population size, and ultimately steer the evolution of flora and fauna.
In a world where everybody feeds their own parasite, it is difficult to draw the line between the parasite and its victim. Should we destroy all parasites, or are parasites a necessary element of the ecosystem?

Carl Zimmer is a popular science writer and a blogger. He is the author of several books on biology, evolution, and parasites.

Matt Ridley's book Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011) claims to be one the most amazing books of the year.

Matt Ridley, Ph.D., is a British scientist and the author of several popular science books (including Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters published in Russian under the auspices of the Dynasty Foundation).
In the book Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, he has tried to present his own vision of the development of human nature by connecting it to the development of gender.

The book describes a hypothesis of sexual reproduction influencing evolution. This hypothesis today remains one the most controversial in the world.

Discussions about the origin of human language have lately advanced to a scientific level.
Philosophical speculation about how language could have appeared has been replaced by a deep analysis of the types of communication systems and directions in their development, of the brain structure and genome possibilities, and of the patterns of ecology and evolution.

Svetlana Burlak's book Origin of Language: Facts, Research, and Hypotheses (Moscow: Corpus, 2011) addresses not what might have been but what in fact was, what in accordance with currently established laws must necessarily have happened.

Svetlana Anatolyevna Burlak is a Russian linguist, Indo-Europeanist, and the author of general works on comparative linguistics and the origin of human language.

Carl Zimmer's book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea published under the auspices of the Dynasty Foundation (Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2011) is a captivating history of the theory of evolution from Darwin to 21st-century science.

Carl Zimmer is one of the best science journalists of our time. With his characteristic thoroughness, clarity, and unfailing humor, he gives a complete review of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the light of modern concepts.

What was behind the ideas of the great man agonizingly laying the path of new knowledge in a conservative society? Why have disputes about the origin of life and man on Earth not abated by now? How do evolutionary biologists advance and verify their hypotheses, and why do they categorically disagree with the arguments of creationists?

Searching for answers to these questions, a reader will make many amazing discoveries about the life of animals, birds, and insects and be compelled to start thinking about human morals and ethics and about the place and purpose of human beings in the Universe.

Diamond's intellectual bestsellers are an interesting alloy of anthropology, history, biology, ecology, geography, and other disciplines.

In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Мoscow: Astrel: CORPUS, 2011), the American scientist Jared Diamond offers a new and controversial view of the history of humanity.

A Washington Post reviewer remarked that modern society increasingly needs authors who, like Jared Diamond, are capable of wide and brave generalizations.

This book is a corrected and supplemented version of the 2008 edition published by AST.

A new book by the biologist Aleksandr Markov—The Evolution of Man (Moscow: Astrel, Corpus, 2011)—is a fascinating story about the origin and organization of man based on the latest research in anthropology, genetics, and psychology.

This edition was issued in two volumes:

• Volume 1: Monkeys, Bones, and Genes
• Volume 2: Monkeys, Neurons, and Soul

Aleksandr Markov, Doctor of Biological Science, is a leading researcher of the Paleontological Institute (RAS). His book about the evolution of living beings The Birth of Complexity (2010) was a notable event in the popular science literature and was well received by a wide readership.

In his book In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, (Moscow: Astrel, CORPUS, 2011), Nobelist Eric Kandel explains revolutionary achievements of modern biology and elucidates how behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and molecular biology originated a new science.

The book begins with memories of his childhood in a Vienna occupied by Nazis and goes on to describe Kandel's scientific career from his early fascination with history and psychoanalysis to his groundbreaking discoveries in the area of cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory, discoveries for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2000.

Olivia Judson's international bestseller Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex [in Russian translation: Of All Flesh, Two of Every Sort: Sex for Survival (Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2011)] is a unique guidebook in the form of answers of an authority on sex-related issues to the letters of representatives of all kinds of fauna.

Grotesqueness and humor in the book do not conflict with its scientific character and even promote the readers' interest in natural science and lives in nature.

“Perhaps the most original advice manual ever written . . . Judson has pulled off the rarest coup: a science book that's actually fun to read,” is the opinion of The New Republic, a magazine about politics, culture, and the arts.

In his Physics of the Future (Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2011), Michio Kaku acquaints readers with his amazing, inspiring, and provocative view of the century just begun.

The book is based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists in whose labs the future is being invented and modeled.
The result is the most authoritative and scientifically accurate description of the revolutionary developments taking place in medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production, and astronautics.