For generations, field guides to plants and animals have sharpened the pleasure of seeing by opening our minds to understanding. Now John Adam has filled a gap in that venerable genre with his painstaking but simple mathematical descriptions of familiar, mundane physical phenomena. This is nothing less than a mathematical field guide to inanimate nature.

Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality?

Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.

Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool.

Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information.

In order to understand information, we must define it; bit in order to define it, we must first understand it. Where to start?

The solution of the Monty Hall problem hinges on the concept of information, and more specifically, on the relationship between added information and probability.