A light, accessible introduction to the ten most important discoveries in science and math during the 20th century.

Written for the general reader, this book provides an overview of some of the most radical scientific theories of the last hundred years. It explains how the previous world view, centered on ideal of harmony and permanence, came to be replaced by an Heraclitean view of a universe in constant flux. Flowers (a journalist and science writer) portrays the major figures of recent scientific progress, including Hubble, Einstein, Wegener, and Freud. He also considers the impact and implications of Bohr's revelations about the atomic world, Turing's idea about intelligence, the Leakey family's work on our hominid ancestry, and other breakthroughs.
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World-altering discoveries that reveal a universe of uncertainty and constant change

Whether probing the farthest reaches of the vast universe or exploring the microscopic world of genetics and the subatomic world of quantum mechanics, Instability Rules is a remarkably informative and engaging look at ten milestone discoveries and their discoverers-a wide range of very human personalities whose insights have dramatically altered our most basic assumptions about human existence during the last century. The stories include Edwin Hubble and the expanding universe, Alfred Wegener and continental drift, Neils Bohr and quantum mechanics, Alan Turing and artificial intelligence, and James Watson and Francis Crick and DNA. Also covering discoveries of the twenty-first century that are already refining these and other ideas, Instability Rules is an exhilarating, sometimes amusing encounter with the defining scientific discoveries of our age.

a century of remarkable scientific discovery

"We learned that the continents are forever slipping and sliding around the globe, like clothing on a teenager, and the mountains are forever rising, the oceans widening, the volcanoes stoking their furnaces for the next blast.

"Our bodies are a fever of change as our minds perpetually rewire themselves and our genes make uncountable decisions, renewing or growing or misfiring to produce the runaway cancers that may kill us, initiating the instability of mortal decay..."

"Within tiny atomic universes, particles pop in and out of being, impossible as that may be to conceive, while atoms collide and meld, buzzing continually in their electrically charged states.

"This, then, was the truth behind many of the defining discoveries of the twentieth century: existence is constant activity." from the Preface