THE SCIENCE FACTORY

MICHAEL NIELSEN is of the pioneers of quantum computation and quantum information. Born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1974, he was educated at the university of Queensland, Australia, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of New Mexico, USA, where he earned a PhD in Physics in 1998. He was a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a Senior Faculty Member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. He left Perimeter Institute in 2008 to pursue a career as a fulltime writer. He has published more than 50 scientific papers and is co-author of one of the 10 most cited books in physics. He has also written many articles for the popular science press, including Scientific American and Nature, and runs a popular online blog, with 3,000 regular readers – named by the London Sunday Times as one of the top 100 blogs in the world. Some of his blog posts relating to REINVENTING DISCOVERY have been downloaded more than 20,000 times. His articles on the topic have also been published in leading trade journals, and he has been invited to talk on the subject to more general audiences at places such as Google, the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Library of Congress. He currently lives in Toronto, Canada.

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Michael Nielsen's blog

Featured titles

Reinventing Discovery

REINVENTING DISCOVERY
How Open Science is Making Us Smarter

We are in the midst of a major new scientific revolution. With the recent rise of citizen science and mass online collaboration, the internet is rapidly and dramatically transforming the way we make discoveries. But it's not just a case of speeding things up. Through tools such as wikis and blogs, we are starting to crack a host of previously intractable problems, forcing us to reconsider the nature of scientific proof and the limits of scientific knowledge. We’re doing science ‘harder, faster, smarter’.

In REINVENTING DISCOVERY, the acclaimed physicist, innovator and writer Michael Nielsen chronicles the main players, technological developments and emerging battles in this exciting arena. Peppered with rich anecdotal evidence, real stories and case studies ranging from chess, experimental novels and birdwatching, to genetics and virus research, open-source computing and mathematics, and astronomy, particle physics and climate change, he sets out to show how knowledge is growing and flourishing as never before as it is exchanged, coordinated and shared online – and how all of us have a part to play on this high-tech frontier.

At the same time the book is a manifesto for open science. There are, Michael points out, severe obstacles to open collaboration in some areas of science, and he reveals how these will damage progress until and unless we make a move to a more open system. Original, provocative and pathbreaking, this is the first popular book on the topic, by an author with deep scientific and online expertise.

Publisher: Princeton University Press (UK & US)
Delivery: 30 April 2010
Publication: Autumn 2010
Status: Proposal and sample chapter
Length: 70,000 words

All rights available excluding:
UK & Commonwealth, US