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Read these excerpts from reviews on my books How to Dunk a Doughnut, Weighing the Soul, and Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life.
Excerpts from Reviews of How to Dunk a Doughnut
Library Journal, New York, NY
Scientists are constantly trying to make science accessible to the general public, but rarely are they as successful as physicist Fisher…A fabulously fun and interesting read (don't miss the additional anecdotes in the “Notes and References” section), this book is recommended for all popular science collections.
Entertainment Weekly
With wry wit and feline curiosity, he puts the fizz in physics…
Publishers Weekly
…thoroughly engaging anecdotes serve to bring the process of science and the people who conduct scientific investigations to life.
Yorkshire Post Magazine
Brilliant.
New Scientist
Science is all around us. In this brilliant, entertaining book, Len Fisher provides scientific answers to familiar questions such as how to boil the perfect egg, how to catch a ball, the physics of sex, and why some vegetables absorb more gravy than others…
In doing so, he reveals the world of the scientist – how they think, what they do, and how they go about doing it – proving that even the most commonplace activities can be used as a key to understanding the laws of nature.
Plus Magazine
The book is that rare delight: a riveting read from diverse areas of science and mathematics that not only informs and entertains, but does so without condescension…this book…reads like a conversation with that science teacher we all wish we had had.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough – not only because it is a witty, informative read and the best popular science book I've read in a long time, but because it tells the important story of what science is really like.
Excerpts from Reviews of Weighing the Soul
Financial Times
Len Fisher, a media-friendly physicist…takes us on a very accessible and highly entertaining tour of various historical moments where contemporary commonsense ideas about how the world worked clashed with scientific findings…Weighing the Soul is a mine of delightful oddities, such as Galileo's use of…his mathematical skills to work out the exact location and dimensions of Hell.
Lancet
Fisher is a charming, persuasive narrator, with a gift for lucid explanations and vivid anecdotes…
Kirkus Reviews
…a quirky but winning approach to scientific history…
Publishers Weekly
Fisher entertains in an airy, lighthearted manner while imparting his own philosophy of science.
Good Book Guide
A witty insight into the impossible
Popular Science
Fisher has an enjoyable, light style and a wonderful ability to meander into other topics that are brought up by his main theme in a way that doesn't lose the reader, but makes the whole thing more fun.
Brisbane Courier-Mail
Publishers, recognising the reading public's increasingly ravenous appetite for science books, sometimes release valiant but turgid attempts to share complex knowledge. Occasionally, they release a writer with the rare genius of an outstanding teacher, one who turns the arcane world of science into a well-signed botanical garden. One such book is Len Fisher's Weighing the Soul.
Excerpts from Reviews of Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life
Publishers Weekly
November 2008: Physicist and Ig Nobel Prize–winner Fisher (How to Dunk a Doughnut) explores how game theory illuminates social behavior in this lively study. Developed in the 1940s, game theory is concerned with the decisions people make when confronted with competitive situations, especially when they have limited information about the other players' choices. Every competitive situation has a point called a Nash Equilibrium, in which parties cannot change their course of action without sabotaging themselves, and Fisher demonstrates that situations can be arranged so that the Nash Equilibrium is the best possible outcome for everyone. To this end, he examines how social norms and our sense of fair play can produce cooperative solutions rather than competitive ones. Fisher comes up short of solving the problem of human competitiveness, but perhaps that is too tall an order. Game theory works better as a toolkit for understanding behavior than as a rule book for directing it. Fisher does succeed in making the complex nature of game theory accessible and relevant, showing how mathematics applies to the dilemmas we face on a daily basis.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
"Through a combination of real-world examples…and philosophical problems, Fisher shows us that we're more cooperative than we sometimes think we are, while at the same time startlingly more selfish than we out to be…the writing is lively, the scientific discourse clear and accessible, and the ideas challenging and exciting."
Bloomberg.com
November 2008: When John Q. Public views the credit crisis, he sees pinstriped bankers getting bailouts and the worst global stock-market slump in more than three decades.
Len Fisher sees a game of chicken, an overgrazed pasture, and bankers lighting their own gray trousers on fire.
Fisher, an affable scientist who splits his time between Australia and the U.K., specializes in explaining abstruse concepts in pop titles such as How to Dunk a Doughnut. What connects the chicken, the pasture and the liar-liar-pants-on-fire is game theory, a branch of mathematics explored in his spunky new book, Rock, Paper, Scissors.'' Read the full interview and review on Bloomberg.com
Newsweek
The Science of Working Together by Jeneen Interlandi
Game theory–The mathematical study of human behavior in strategic situations–is normally the purview of CEOs and military leaders, who rely on its insights to vanquish opponents or outdo competitors. But those same insights can also be used to achieve greater cooperation, and not just between global superpowers. In his new book, Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life," physicist Len Fisher applies this budding science to real-world situations and provides some strategies for replacing conflict with harmony in our daily interactions.
The Idea: Unlike ants and bees, humans aren't hard-wired for cooperation; we tend to act out of self-interest. That inclination repeatedly draws us into "social dilemmas" where, in an attempt gain more for ourselves, we ultimately fare worse than we would have by cooperating (think of people who drive gas-guzzling cars or countries that won't sign the Kyoto Protocol). But we can prevent those selfish tendencies from wreaking havoc.
The evidence: The trick is to establish an agreement where everyone's self-interest is best served by cooperating. That means removing incentives to violate the agreement (say, by making sure the penalties of driving a gas guzzler far outweigh the benefits).
The Conclusion: Our faulty moral compasses needn't stop us from achieving lasting cooperation. We just need the right strategy.
SECTION: PERISCOPE; PAGE TURNER; Pg. 13 Vol. 152 No. 22 ISSN: 0028-9604
Copyright © 2008 Newsweek Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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