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| Appetizers, Canap�s, and Snacks | |
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| Introduction: I Dare You-The Weirdest Ride in the Universe | |
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| The Cafe Table at the Beginning of the Universe | |
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| The Problem with God: The Tale of a Twisted Confession | |
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| A Taste of Sin | |
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| Brace Yourself: The Five Heresies | |
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| Heresy Number One: Why A Does Not Equal A | |
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| When Is a Frog a River? Aristotle Wrestles Heraclitus | |
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| Heresy Number Two: Why One Plus One Does Not Equal Two | |
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| Heresy Number Three: Prepare to Be Burned at the Stake (The Second Law of Thermodynamics-Why Entropy Is an Outrage) | |
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| Heresy Number Four: Randomness Is Wrong-The Six Monkeys at Six Typewriters Error | |
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| A Brief History of the God Problem: Were Kepler, Galileo, and Newton Creationists? | |
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| Galileo's Nature Fetish: Poking the Pope | |
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| Gamow versus Hoyle: The War between Big Bang and Steady State | |
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| The Tale of the Termites | |
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| The Saga of a Scratch Mark | |
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| The Mystery of the Magic Beans: What the Hell Is an Axiom? | |
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| Barley, Bricks, and Babylonians: The Birth of Math | |
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| Scratch Mud and You Get Mind: The Rise of a Virtual Reality | |
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| The Sorcery of Corners | |
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| Celebrities in the Heavens: How to Invent Astronomy | |
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| What's the Angle? Blindness in Babylon | |
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| Why Knot? The Egyptian Rope Trick | |
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| How to Hypnotize a Greek: Math as a Tourist Attraction | |
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| Seduce 'Em with Numbers: How to Do a Pythagoras | |
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| Squaring Your Way to Fame: Pythagoras's Hot New Theorem | |
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| How Aristotle Invented the Axiom | |
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| A Trip to Plato's Cave | |
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| Aristotle Fights for Attention-Or Zeroing Zeno | |
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| How Euclid Makes Aristotle's "Science" Stick | |
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| Galileo's Dad and the Drug of Geometry | |
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| Kepler: How to Tickle the Soul of the Earth | |
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| Kepler's Boxes and Balls: Yes, Kepler's Freaky Math | |
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| Everybody Do the Flip | |
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| Guillotining an Axiom: Severing the Neck of Parallel Lines | |
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| "One Man Deserves the Credit, One Man Deserves the Blame, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Is His Name" | |
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| Bare-Naked Math: Peano Strips It Down | |
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| Ted Coons, Dancing Wonder: A Tale of Two Translations | |
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| Presto, Change-o: Translation's Little Secret | |
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| The Day You Uploaded Your Self Translation Saves Your Life | |
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| Is Metaphor a Crime? | |
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| The Hunger of the Stuttering Forms: Isomorphic Symbol Sets | |
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| Leonardo's Stones: Why Metaphor Works | |
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| Plaid in the Pool: The Eye Doctor Who Gave You Waves | |
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| How Form Goes Manic-What's an Ur Pattern? | |
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| Real Estate in the Embryo: Location, Location, Location-Karl Ernst von Baer and Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch | |
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| Master of the Universe: Herbert Spencer, Grand Unifier and Flirt | |
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| The Scandal of the Century: George Eliot and Her Ape | |
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| Bulging Forth from Nothing: The Emergence of "Emergence" | |
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| Charlie Darwin Shows Up Late | |
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| The Zygote Snabs Herbert Spencer | |
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| The Embryo Goes Cosmic | |
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| Einstein Turns an Axiom Inside Out | |
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| The Man Who Gave Star Trek Its Space-Bernhard Riemann | |
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| Albert Einstein's Pajamas | |
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| Einstein Gives Seven Ugly Ducklings a Home: The Year of Miracles | |
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| Einstein's Secret Weapon: Aristotle's Invention | |
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| The Adventures of Einstein's Predictions | |
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| The Amazing Repetition Machine | |
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| Forget Information: Or How Claude Shannon Got It Wrong | |
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| The Case of the Conversational Cosmos | |
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| How Gossip Grows the Universe | |
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| The Magic Onion of Meaning | |
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| Doing the Glycerin Twist: David Bohm | |
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| Benoit Mandelbrot Zigs and Zags | |
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| It's from Bits: The Two-Bit Tarantella | |
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| How Math Lost Its Pictures … and How It Got Them Back Again | |
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| Fuse and Fizz, Thou Shalt Bud: Fractals and the Bounce from Boom to Bust | |
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| The Sorcery of Simple Rules | |
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| The Japanese Sword Maker and the Alchemy of Iteration | |
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| Gaming Your Way to Fame: John Conway Enters the Scene | |
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| Axioms in Silicon: Conway's Game of Life | |
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| Good-Bye to Equations: Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science | |
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| What Are the Rules of the Universe? | |
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| The Case of the Obsessive-Compulsive Cosmos | |
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| Time, the Great Translator: An Information Theory of Time | |
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| Wrap Yourself in String: Iteration and Emergent Properties | |
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| Baking the Big Bagel: How to Start and End a Universe | |
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| Will Silicon Axioms Fly? | |
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| Conclusion: The Big Bang Tango-Quarking in the Social Cosmos | |
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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Notes | |
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| Index | |