This “fun, brain-twisting book . . . will make you think” as it explores more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, philosophy, physics, and the social sciences (Sean Carroll, New York Times–bestselling author of Something Deeply Hidden). Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician’s purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn’t require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind, Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts—and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world—and much more.

What can magic tell us about ourselves and our daily lives? If you subtly change the subject during an uncomfortable conversation, did you know you're using attentional 'misdirection', a core technique of magic? And if you've ever bought an expensive item you'd sworn never to buy, you were probably unaware that the salesperson was, like an accomplished magician, a master at creating the 'illusion of choice'. Leading neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde meet with magicians from all over the world to explain how the magician's art sheds light on consciousness, memory, attention, and belief. As the founders of the new discipline of NeuroMagic, they combine cutting-edge scientific research with startling insights into the tricks of the magic trade. By understanding how magic manipulates the processes in our brains, we can better understand how we work - in fields from law and education to marketing, health and psychology - for good and for ill.

The greatest treasure, a most dangerous magic. Growing up in the Cinzio Traveling Players Company, Genevieve Flannery is accustomed to a life most teenagers could never imagine: daily workouts of extravagant acrobatics; wild animals for pets; and her mother, Delia, whose mind has always been tortured by visions—but whose love Geni never questions. In a world of performers who mystify and amaze on a daily basis, Delia’s ghostly hallucinations never seemed all that strange . . . until the evening Geni and her mother are performing an aerial routine they’ve done hundreds of times, and Delia falls to her death. That night, a dark curtain in Geni’s life opens. Everything has changed. As they reel from the tragedy, the Cinzio Players are also grappling with the circus’s new owner: a generous, mysterious man whose connection to the circus—Geni suspects—has a dark history. And with the discovery of an otherworldly inheritance and her perilous mission to protect it, Geni is suddenly stumbling into a new reality of her own, her life interrupted daily by the terrors only Delia used to see. As the visions around her grow stronger, and her magical legacy becomes even more menacing, Geni is not sure who she should trust or love. Worst of all, she’s starting to question whether she can trust her own mind.

Private investigator Dana Cutler must take down a cunning psychopath before he can pull off the perfect crime, in Sleight of Hand, a novel of suspense from Phillip Margolin, New York Times bestselling author of Capitol Murder and Supreme Justice. Charles Benedict – charismatic criminal defense lawyer, amateur illusionist, and professional hit man – has performed his greatest sleight of hand yet: framing a millionaire for the murder of his much younger wife. When Horace Blair married Carrie, the prosecutor in his DUI trial, he made her sign a prenuptial agreement guaranteeing her twenty million dollars if she remained faithful for the first ten years of marriage. Just one week before their tenth anniversary, Carrie disappears, and Horace is charged with her murder. Desperate to clear his name, the millionaire hires D.C.’s most ruthless defense lawyer – Charles Benedict. P.I. Dana Cutler is in the Pacific Northwest on the trail of a stolen relic dating from the Ottoman Empire. Hitting a dead end sends her back to Virginia perplexed and disappointed – and straight into the case of Horace and Carrie Blair. Now Dana must conjure a few tricks of her own to expose Benedict’s plot, before he can work his deadly magic on her...

2015 Reprint of 1944 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This remains one of the most definitive works on card technique, providing step-by-step instructions that will teach you the correct methods for the basic manipulations and for more advanced flourishes. Offering the most foolproof methods available, Jean Hugard and Frederick Braue explain such basic manipulation as the palm, the shuffle, the lift, the side slip, the pass, the glimpse, the jog and the reverse. They detail various false deals, crimps and changes and the more advanced execution needed for forces, fans and the use of the prearranged deck.

Offers step-by-step instructions for performing a variety of mind reading tricks, including tips on establishing the proper mystical atmosphere and warming up an audience.

A collection of visual illusions with explanations of the science behind them, gathered from the Best Illusions of the Year contest. --

Fleeing her mother’s murderers, a London teenager discovers an underground world of thieves and ghosts in this dark urban fantasy series debut. Jasmine Towne and her mother have always been taken care of by men known only as the Uncles. But Jazz was raised to always beware. And she discovers why on the day she finds her paranoid mother murdered. Her mother’s last words, scrawled in her own blood, demand action: JAZZ HIDE FOREVER. Seeking cover in the London Underground, Jazz slips through a mysterious gate—and seemingly through time. Inside an abandoned city of bomb shelters and forgotten Tube stations, she finds temporary refuge with a gang of petty thieves. But flashes of the past, spectral and haunting, share the tunnels with no regard for the living. Now Jazz must ask herself a difficult question: how long can she hide from the terrors of both her worlds? "Magical realism at its finest…with mystery, magic, ghosts and a fascinating subterranean world.”—Sfrevu.com

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.