To me, each one is like a different country, the first time, I generally grasp only part of what they offer so I read my books over again, just like I visit the same places more than once. I hope this list will be useful to you. Anyway, it will serve to remind me of all the other books by these authors that I have not read yet.

You may browse through this alphabetical list to find what strikes your fancy or visit my "favourite books" page where the books I have read and re-read are listed according to their subject matter.

George Ainslie is chief Psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center Coatesville PA, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University Medical School. He has authored Picoeconomics: The Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person 1992 and The Breakdown of Will 2001.

About George Ainslie: http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbach/Ainsliereview.htm

Brian Alexander was a contributing editor for biotechnology at Wired magazine. He has written for the New York Times, Science, Esquire, Outside and many other magazines before writing Rapture, How Biotech Became the New Religion in 2003.

John Allman is a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California and a well recognized expert on primates, cognition and brain evolution.

His lab's webpage: http://www.allmanlab.caltech.edu/

Matthew Alper is associate dean of reasearch at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. He has written The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God 2001.

About The God Part of the Brain: http://www.godpart.com

Scott Atran is a director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and Professor of anthropology and psychology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and the organizer of a NATO working group on suicide terrorism.

Robert Aunger has a Master's degree in Urban Planning, and a PhD in biological anthropology from UCLA. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago in culture and mental health and at King's College Cambridge in evolutionary psychology before joining the University of London in 2003. He is the author of The Electric Meme (2002), Darwinizing Culture (2003) and reflective Ethnographic Science (2004).

Homepage: http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~rva20/

Robert Allen Baker, a University of Kentucky psychology professor emeritus and a leading "ghost buster" worked on the premise that "there are no haunted places, only haunted people".

Ernest Becker taught Cultural Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, at the San Fransisco State College and at the Simon Frazer University. He wrote The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962), The Revolution in Psychiatry (1964), The Denial of Death (1973) and Escape from Evil (1975). He died of cancer at 49 in 1974.

Links about Becker: http://www.geocities.com/ptypes/becker.html

Susan Blackmore is a Reader of Psychology at the University of the West of England in Bristol where she lectures on the psychology of consciousness.She has written; Beyond the Body (1982), Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (autobiography, 1996), Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997), The Meme Machine (1999), and Consciousness: An Introduction (2003)

Homepage: http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/
On near death experience: http://www.near-death.com/experiences/experts09.html
Links on Memetics: http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Memetics/

Howard Bloom is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the American Sociological Association and the Academy of Political Science. He has lectured at Wesleyan University, Georgia State University and New York University. He is the author of The Lucifer Principle (1995) and The Global Brain (2000).

Homepage: http://www.howardbloom.net/

Pascal Boyer was senior researcher at the Institut des Sciences de l'Homme of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon, France He is now Luce Professor of Collective Memory and Individual Memory at Washington University St Louis Missouri. He has written several books of which: Barricades mystérieuses & pièges à pensée : introduction à l'analyse des épopées fang (), Tradition as Truth and Communication (1990), The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (1994), and Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors (2001), Et L'homme Crea Les Dieux (2003)

Homepage: http://artsci.wustl.edu/~pboyer/

Professeur de physique théorique à l’Université de Louvain en Belgique ses recherches portent principalement sur la physique statistique.

En 1997 il écrit avec avec Alan Sokal l'ouvrage controversé Impostures intellectuelles contre le postmodernisme, en 2001 le traité Chance in Physics et en 2003, avec Régis DEBRAY À l'ombre des lumières qui traite de la difficile interface entre les mondes litteraires et scientifiques.

Jean Bricmont est président de l' Association française pour l’information scientifique (AFIS) depuis 2001.

William Broad is a science writer for The Times who has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize. His books include: Betrayers of the Truth (1982 with Wade N, 1982), Star Warriors (1985), Teller's War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception (1992), Star Warriors: A Penetrating Look into the Lives of the Young Scientists Behind Our Space Age Weaponry 1993), Germs : Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (2001 with Engleberg S. and Miller J.),

About "Germs ...": http://www.nrbookservice.com/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=C5889

Richard Brodie is the original creator of Microsoft Word and author of two books, Getting Past OK (1993), and Virus of the Mind (1995). He now heads a high tech consulting firm.

Homepage: http://www.memecentral.com/rbrodie.htm
Links on Memetics: http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Memetics/

Rodney Brooks is Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at MIT and director of the Artifical Intelligence Laboratory.

Allen Buchanan (Ph.D. 1975, UNC Chapel Hill) joined the faculty in 2002 as professor of philosophy and of public policy in the Sanford Institute. He was previously at the Universities of Arizona, Wisconsin and Minnesota. He is the author of over one hundred articles and six books: Marx and Justice: Radical Critique of Liberalism (1982), Ethics, Efficiency, and the Market (1985), Deciding For Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making (with Dan W. Brock, 1989), Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce From Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec (1991) and (with Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler), From Chance to Choice (1999).

Publications: http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/hri/life/buchanan.html

John Alfred Valentine Butler of the Chester Beatty Research Institute and the Royal Cancer Hospital, in London, is the author of The Life of the Cell (1959), Gene Control in the Living Cell (1968), The Life Process (1970) and Modern biology and its human implications (1976).

Elias Canetti (1905-94), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Litterature in 1981 mainly on the basis of Crowds and Power, his masterwork of philosophical anthropology about "la condition humaine" on an overpopulated planet.

About Canetti: http://www.cwd.co.uk/babel/eliascanetti.htm

Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusets Institute of Technology. He has become widely known as critic of media manipulation and dissident of US foreign policies. He is a prolific writer and has written several books as a linguist such as Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Language and Mind (1968) Reflections on Language (1975), Rules and Representations (1980), Modular Approaches to the Study of the Mind (1984), Language and Politics (1988) and New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000). As a concerned citizen he has also written The Fateful Triangle (1999), Rogue Srates (2000), Propaganda and the Public Mind (2001)

About Chomsky: http://people.cornell.edu/pages/zs15/Chomsky.pdf
http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/chomsky.htm
http://fates.cns.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/chomsky.htm

- James Cowan is the author of Mysteries of the Dreaming, The Spiritual Life of Australian Aborigines.

His Books: http://www.mindbodyspirit.com.au/auth/c/cowanja.htm

Alan Cromer (1941-1998), was Professor of Physics at Northeastern University of Boston and the author of Physics for the Life Sciences (1977), Physics in Science and Industry (1980), Uncommon Sense, the Heretical Nature of Science (1993), Connected Knowledge: Science, Education, and Philosophy (1997)

About "Uncommon Sense... ": http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/bookreviews/10-3/cromer.html

Eugene D'Aquili (-2001), Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania and has authored and co-authored five books and numerous papers relating on biogenetic structuralism to philosophy of science, religious phenomenology, and neuroepistemology. The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (with Andrew Newberg 1999), Why God Won't Go Away, Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (with Andrew Newberg and Vince Rause 2001)

About "Why Dod ...": http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/why_god.html
About "The Mystical Mind": http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWildWeb/courses/exp/resources/reviews/review_daquili_newberg01.htm

From 1831 to 1836 Darwin served as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle on a British science expedition around the world. Darwin studied plants and animals everywhere he went, collecting specimens for further study. Twenty three years after his return he made public his life work: "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" also known as "The Origin of Species" for short (1859).

About Darwin: http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96feb/darwin.html

It must be mentionned that he obtained the one million dollar Templeton Foundation Prize for his efforts to find a scientific basis for religion.

About "The Mind of God": http://dannyreviews.com/h/The_Mind_of_God.html
His books: http://www.mindbodyspirit.com.au/auth/d/daviespaul.htm

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist; he holds the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene (1976, 2d ed. 1989), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) and other books.

Unofficial homepage: http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/default.asp
On memes: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html

Terrence W. Deacon conducts research in neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology in laboratories at Boston University, where he is associate professor of biological anthropology, and at McLean Hospital at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of The Symbolic Species; The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1997)

Book review: http://www.thymos.com/mind/deacon.html

Daniel Clement Dennett is a philosopher; director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University; author of Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), coauthor (with Douglas R. Hofstadter) of The Mind's 1(1981), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Freedom Evolves (2003)

Homepage: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/~ddennett.htm
About Freedom Evolves: http://www.human-nature.com/nibbs/03/dcdennett.html

David Deutsch is a member of the Quantum Computation and Cryptography Research Group at the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford University. He is author of The Fabric of Reality (1997)

Home page: http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html

Jared Diamond is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Until recently he was Professor of Physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (1997), of The Third Chimpanzee (1992), and of Why is Sex Fun? (1998).

About Jared Diamond: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/diamond.html
http://www.physiology.ucla.edu/faculty/diamond.htm

Eric Drexler received his bachelor's degree, master's degree, and PhD from MIT. His PhD was the first doctoral degree in Molecular Nanotechnology and his thesis was published as Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation (1992). He also authored Engines of Creation (1986) and Unbounding the Future (1991) with Chris Peterson and Gayle Pergamit.

Homepage: http://e-drexler.com/p/idx04/00/0404drexlerBioCV.html

Niles Eldredge is a paleontologist; curator in the Department of Invertebrates at The American Museum of Natural History, in New York; author of 21 books of which Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria and Unfinished Synthesis (1985), The Miner's Canary (1991), and Fossils (1991), and Reinventing Darwin (1995), The Myths of Human Evolution (), Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis (1998), Triumph of Evolution And the Failure of Creationism (2000)

About Miles Eldredge: http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/eldredge.html
interview: http://www.calacademy.org/calwild/sum98/niles.htm

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was educated as a philosopher. He was editor-in-chief of Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Religion until his death after publishing extensively on the history of religions: Rites and Symbols of Initiation (1958), The Sacred and the Profane (1959), Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1960), Myth and Reality (1963), Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964), A History of Religious Ideas I (1978), II (1982) and III (1995).

About Mircea Eliade: http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/mebio.htm

Stephen Engleberg is the investigations editor of The Times. co-authored Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair: With the Minority Views (with Joel Brinkley 1988) and Germs : Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (with Judith Miller and William J. Broad 2001),

Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist who played an important role in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He shared the Nobel Prize of Physics with otherin 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics. He was a remarkably effective educator as Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He wrote the Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963), The Character of Physical Law (1965), QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985) and other books. He died in Los Angeles in 1988.

Biography: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Feynman.html

Thomas Friedman graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University with a degree in Mediterranean studies and received a master's degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University and has been awarded honorary degrees from several U.S. universities. He is the author of Friedman is the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) and Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (2002).

Homepage: http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/thomasfriedman.htm

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He holds an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College and Doane College, and is a member of advisory boards for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Journal of Democracy, and The New America Foundation. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Global Business Network. He is the author of: Our Posthuman Future (2002), of State-Building (2004) and several other books.

Homepage: http://www.sais-jhu.edu/Faculty/fukuyama/index.html

- Martin Gardner graduated from the University of Chicago in 1936 with a major in philosophy. He is the author of more than 65 books and countless articles, ranging over the fields of science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and conjuring. To mention a few, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952), Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus (1981), The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (1988), The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry, from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings (1991), On the Wild Side (1992), Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a Fringe-Watcher (1996), Gardner's Workout : Training the Mind and Entertaining the Spirit (2001), The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems (2001),

Interview: http://www.csicop.org/si/9803/gardner.html

Joel Garreau is a reporter and editor at the Washington Post. He is the author of Edge City, Life on the New Frontier, The Nine Nations of North America and Radical Revolution (2005).

Web site: http://www.garreau.com

Homepage: http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/mgm/
About: http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/G/GellM1annM1.asp

Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. His books include When Things Start To Think (1999), The Nature of Mathematical Modeling (1998), and The Physics of Information Technology (2000).

His homepage: http://web.media.mit.edu/~neilg/

A native of New York, Gleick graduated from Harvard College in 1976 and helped found Metropolis, an alternative weekly newspaper in Minneapolis. Then he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times. In 1989-90 he was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University. He is the author of Chaos, Making a New Science (1997).

His webpage: http://www.around.com/

Stephen Jay Gould is an evolutionary biologist, a paleontologist, and a snail geneticist; professor of zoology at Harvard University; MacArthur Fellow; author of, among others, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), The Mismeasure of Man (1981), The Flamingo's Smile (1985), Wonderful Life (1989), and Bully for Brontosaurus (1992).

Gould archive: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/

Brian Greene was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, He taught at Cornell and is now Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University. He has made important advances in superstring theory and is the author of The Elegant Universe (1999) and Fabric of the Cosmos (2004).

Homepage: http://phys.columbia.edu/faculty/greene.htm
On string theory: http://www.superstringtheory.com/index.html

Stephen A. Gregory, Professor, Associate Director of Institute for Astrophysics, Director of Capilla Peak Observatory His books include Introductory Astronomy and Astrophysics (with Michael Zeilik,and Elske Smith 1992)

Homepage: http://panda.unm.edu/ifa/gregory/gregory.htm

John Gribbin is Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex in England. He has written several bestsellers of which; In Search of Schrodinger's Cat (1984), In Search of the Edge of Time : Black Holes, White Holes, Wormholes (1992), In Search of the Double Helix: Quantum Physics and Life (1995), Companion to the Cosmos (1996), Q is for Quantum: An Encyclopedia of Particle Physics (1998), The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry and the Theory of Everything (1999), The Case of the Missing Neutrinos : And Other Curious Phenomena of the Universe (2000), XTL : Extraterrestrial Life and How to Find It (2003)

His homepage: http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/

Alan Guth is Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of many academic awards he is the author of The Inflationnary Universe; The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (1997),

More on inflation: http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Guth/Guth1.html

Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and is a doctoral candidate in the field of neuroscience. Harris wrote The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason out of a sense of urgency regarding what he argues constitutes perhaps the greatest threat we face today.

Homepage: http://www.samharris.org

Stepen Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein. He is the author of A Brief History of Time (1988), The Universe in a Nutshell (2001) and many academic papers.

Homepage: http://www.hawking.org.uk/home/hindex.html
PBS Hawking page: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/html/home.html

Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, an economist and media analyst. He is author of numerous books, including The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (with N. Chomsky, 1979), Corporate Control, Corporate Power (1981), The Real Terror Network (1982), Demonstration Elections (1984, with Frank Brodhead), Manufacturing Consent; political economy of the mass media (1988, with Noam Chomsky), Beyond Hypocrisy; Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda (1992), Triumph of the Market (1995), The Global Media (1997, with Robert McChesney), and The Myth of The Liberal Media: an Edward Herman Reader (1999).

More on Edward Hoffman: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Edward_Herman.html

- Bruce Hoffman (Ph.D., International Relations, University of Oxford, England), is Vice President for External Affairs and Director of the RAND think tank in Washington D.C. His expertise: global security environment, terrorism and other emerging threats, domestic and international terrorism, Middle East. He is Editor-in-Chief, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. He is a member of the advisory boards of both Terrorism and Political Violence and Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs; and is Chairman of the International Research Group on Political Violence. He is the author of Inside Terrorism (1998) and Countering the New Terrorism (with others 1999).

More on Bruce Hoffman: http://www.rand.org/hot/media/bios/hoffman.html

-Douglas Richard Hofstadter (Ph.D in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975), is a professor of cognitive science and computer science at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, (1980) Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985) and The Mind's I (with Daniel Dennett, 1988).

More on Douglas Hofstadter: http://www.fermigas.com/DouglasHofstadter.html

John Horgan is a freelance journalist and author. A former senior writer at Scientific American (1986-1997), he has also written for The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Discover, The London Times, The Times Literary Supplement, New Scientist, and other publications around the world.

He is the author of The End of Science (1996), The Undiscovered Mind (1999), Where Was God on September 11? (2002) and Rational Mysticism (2003).

Homepage: http://www.johnhorgan.org/

Dr. James Hughes teaches Health Policy at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut and is the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association.

http://betterhumans.com

Journalist Susan Jacoby is the director of the Center for Inquiry Metro New York, a rationalist research and advocacy organization. She is the author of Moscow Conversations (1972),  Half Jew (1982), Wild Justice (1984), Soul to Soul (1994) and Freethinkers (2004).

Homepage: http://www.susanjacoby.com/about.html

William James (1842-1910) was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy. James expressed his religious concerns in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), in Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1898), in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and in A Pluralistic Universe (1909).

His memorial website: http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/james.html

Steven Berlin Johnson is a writer, author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms The Way We Create And Communicate (1999). and Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2002).

His homepage: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/

Michio Kaku is Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York. He graduated from Harvard and received his Ph.D. from Berkeley. He is author of Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes (1995), Time Warps and the Tenth Dimension (1995), Beyond Einstein The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe (1995 with Jennifer Trainer), Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century (1998) and Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Introduction and Introduction to Superstrings and M-Theory (1999)

His homepage: http://www.mkaku.org/

Stuart Kauffman is a biologist; professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute; author of Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution (1993), and of At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (with George Johnson,1995).

His homepage: http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/

Edwin C. Krupp is an astronomer and the director of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. He is the author of In Search of Ancient Astronomies () Echoes of the Ancient Skies (1994), Beyond the Blue Horizon: : Myths and Legends of the Sun, Moon, Stars and Planets (1991) and Skywatchers, Shamans & Kings (1997)

More on astronomical myths: http://www.pibburns.com/catasbib/astro.htm

Thomas Kuhn (1923-1996), a professor of philosophy and history of science at M.I.T. from 1979 to 1983 and the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy there from 1983 until 1991, was the author or co-author of five books on the philosophy and history of science of which: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977).

More on Thomas Kuhn: http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/Kuhnsnap.html

Howard Kurtz is the host of the weekly CNN program Reliable Sources, which turns a critical lens on the media. He is the media reporter for The Washington Post and writes a regular column called Media Notes. He is author of Media Circus: The Trouble With America's Newspapers (1994), Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time (1996), Spin Cycle: How the White House and the Media Manipulate the News (1998), The Fortune Tellers : Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation (2000)

More on Reliable sources: http://www.iwantmedia.com/people/people14.html

Paul Kurtz is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, editor of Free Equiry magazine, founding chairman of the Commitee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CISCOP) and copresident of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He is the author of several books of which The Trascendental Temptation (), the Forbidden Fruit () and Living without Religion (1994)

Council for Secular Humanism: http://www.secularhumanism.org/home/kurtz/

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and entrepreneur, has been pushing the technological envelope for years in his field of pattern recognition. Among his many accomplishments, he developed the technology behind the flatbed scanner, and he is a leading expert in speech recognition. He has successfully founded, developed, and sold four AI businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, and reading technology.

He is the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines (), The Age of Spiritual Machines, When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (), The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology () and coauthor of Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2005 with Terry Grossman).

Homepage: http://www.kurzweilai.net

Henri Laborit (1914-1995) left a career in surgery for fundamental research in medecine. He was the first to use the tranquilizer chlorpromazine. He has written several books in French

Books: http://www.sdm.qc.ca/txtdoc/tbhlabor.html
Interview: http://www.goodshare.com/laborit.htm

Corliss Lamont holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. He was a director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1932 to 1954 then was the chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Commitee until his death in1995.

Homepage: http://www.corliss-lamont.org/

Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist and Professor at the Center for Neural Science, New York University, seeks a biological rather than psychological understanding of our emotions. Among his fascinating findings is the work of amygdala structure within the brain. He is the author of The Emotional Brain (), and Synaptic Self (2002); coauthor (with Michael Gazzaniga) of The Integrated Mind, and editor with W. Hirst of Mind and Brain: Dialogues in Cognitive Neuroscience.

Homepage: http://www.cns.nyu.edu/corefaculty/LeDoux.php

Aaron Lynch is an independent researcher from Evanston, Illinois. He has written: Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society (1999),

More on Aaron Lynch: http://www.thoughtcontagion.com/aaron.htm

More on John Maddox: http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1988/jun/maddox_p13_880613.html

Self taught Laurence O. McKinney is the Director of the American Institute for Mindfulness in Arlington, Massachusetts. His professional and teaching careers encompass thirty years of uninterrupted activity as a writer, educator, consultant and innovator.  He is the author of "Neurotheology, Virtual Religion in the 21st Century" (1994)

Webpage: http://www.thinkaboutit.org/publicationpage.htm

Marvin Minsky got his BA and PhD in mathematics at Harvard and Princeton. He is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has led to both theoretical and practical advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, neural networks, and the theory of Turing Machines and recursive functions. In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. His other inventions include mechanical hands and other robotic devices, the confocal scanning microscope, the "Muse" synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin), and the first LOGO "turtle" (with S. Papert). He is the author of Semantic Information Processing, MIT Press (1968) and of Society of Mind (1988) which is the title of the course he teaches at MIT.

Homepage: http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/

Hans Moravec is a Principal Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He received a PhD from Stanford in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot, remote controlled by a large computer, that negotiated cluttered obstacle courses. His two books, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988), and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1999), consider the future prospects for humans, robots and intelligence.

Homepage: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/

Murray was born and raised in Newton, Iowa. He obtained a B.A. in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Charles Murray is the Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He first came to national attention with Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, the controversial analysis of the reforms of the 1960s. This was followed in 1988 by In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. In 1994, he and the late Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, one of the most widely debated works of social science in recent decades. His latest book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, presents evidence that the rate of great accomplishment has been declining in the last century.

Interview: http://www.skeptic.com/03.2.miele-murray-interview.html

Andrew Newberg M.D. is assistant professor in the Department of Radiology in the Division of Nuclear Medecine and instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pensylvania. He is coauthor with Eugene d'Aquili of The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (1999) and Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (2001).

His webpage: http://www.andrewnewberg.com/

Dennis Overbye, who studied physics at MIT, is Deputy Science Editor of The New York Times and author of the critically acclaimed Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (1991) and the recently published Einstein in Love.

More on Overbye's books: http://www.gyre.org/news/author/Dennis+Overbye/

Roger Penrose is a mathematical physicist; Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford; author of Techniques of Differential Topology in Relativity (1972), Spinors and Space-time, with W. Rindler, 2 vols. (1984, 1986), The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (1989), and Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994); The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (1997), coeditor with C.J. Isham and Dennis W. Sciama of Quantum Gravity 2: A Second Oxford Symposium (1981), and with C.J. Isham of Quantum Concepts in Space and Time (1986).

Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist, is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is author of Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), Learnability and Cognition (1989), The Language Instinct (1994)., How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002)

Homepage: http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/

Born in Vienna in 1902, Karl Popper was educated at the University of Vienna. He took a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928, and taught in secondary school from 1930 to 1936. In 1937 he emigrated to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College at Christchurch. In 1946, he moved to England to become reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics, where he was appointed professor in 1949. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976. He retired from academic life in 1969, though he remained intellectually active until his death in 1994.

Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification lies at the heart of his philosophy of science.

Obituary: http://www.britac.ac.uk/pubs/src/popper/part1.html

Bill Press is a journalist and news analyst. who wrote Spin This: All The Ways We Don't Tell The Truth.

Comment: http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3aed07bb7198.htm

Web page: http://psy.ucsd.edu/chip/ramabio.html

James Randi is an internationally known magician and escape artist who has made a career of investigating pseudo-science, paranormal, occult and supernatural claims.

Randi Foundation: http://www.randi.org/

Chet Raymo is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. He is the author of several books on science, including 365 Starry Nights An Introduction to Astronomy for Every Night of the Year (1982), The Soul of the Night (1996), and Honey From Stone: A Naturalist's Search for God (1997) He also wrote Skeptics and True Believers (1998).

His homepage: http://www.raymo.net/

Greg Reinking, received bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering at Texas Tech University, conducted original thesis research with the Molecular Physics group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and studied medical physics at U.C. Berkeley. He received his doctorate in medicine degree from Baylor College of Medicine followed by training in surgery and radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Reinking was recently named to Texas Tech University Electrical Engineering's Honorary Engineering Academy for his accomplishments and contributions. He currently practices in Honolulu, HI. Dr. Reinking has authored numerous journal articles in physics and medicine as well as the book Cosmic Legacy (2003).

Richard Restak is a graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is a practicing neurologist and neuropsychiatrist and the author of dozens of articles and more than 15 books on the brain, including The Brain (1979), The Mind (1988), The Brain has a Mind of its Own (1991), Infant Mind (1996), The Longevity Strategy (1998), Mysteries of the Mind (2000), The Secret Life of the Brain (2001), The New Brain (2003).

Douglas Rushkoff has served as an adjunct professor of communications at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and as an Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture. He is the author of several books on new media and popular culture, including Cyberia (1994), Media Virus (1996), Playing the Future (1996), Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say (2001), and Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism (2003).

His homepage: http://www.rushkoff.com/

Carl Sagan (1934-1996), was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. Co-founder and President of The Planetary Society, he severs as Distinguished Visiting Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Dr. Sagan has received the Pulitzer Prize, the Oersted Medal, and many other awards - including eighteen honorary degrees from American colleges and universities. He has authored many books of which: Intelligent Life in the Universe. (1966), The Cosmic Connection. An Extraterrestrail Perspective. (1973), The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977), Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (1977), Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (1979), Cosmos (1980) Comet (1985 with Ann Druyan), Contact: A Novel (1985), The Nuclear Winter: The World After Nuclear War (1985), A Path Where No Man Thought (1990 with Richard Turco), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992 with Ann Druyan), Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996) and Billions and Billions.

His webpage: http://www.carlsagan.com/

Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and the host of the Skeptics Lecture Series at Caltech. He is the author of: How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science (), Why People Believe Weird Things (1997), Teach Your Child Science (), and The Borderlands of Science : Where Sense Meets Nonsense (2002), How We Believe, 2nd Edition : Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (2003) and The Science of Good and Evil : Why People Cheat, Share, Gossip, and Follow the Golden Rule (2004).

More on Michael Shermer: http://www.skeptic.com/director.html

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist; Professor of Physics at the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University; author of The Life of The Cosmos (1995) and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2001).

More on Lee Smolin: http://www.qgravity.org/lee/

Alan David Sokal is a physicist at New York University. He is best known to the general public for the Sokal Affair of 1996. Sokal submitted a parodic paper to the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text to see if they would publish any nonsense which "flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". The journal published it and Sokal revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca. He followed this up by co-authoring the book Fashionable Nonsense with Jean Bricmont in 1998. The book accuses pseudo academics of using scientific and mathematical terms incorrectly to impress readers. His research in physics include statistical mechanics, quantum field theory, mathematical physics, and computational physics.

Homepage: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal.html

Kip Thorne is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and author of Black Holes and Time Warps(1994)

His page: http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~kip/

His books include: First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1993), Dreams of a Final Theory : The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (1994),

More on Steven Weinberg: http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~weintech/weinberg.html

John Archibald Wheeler is emeritus professor at Princeton University He has autored several books of which Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam (1998)

Biography: http://s01.middlebury.edu/PA355A/students/Amber%20on%20Wheeler/JAWtoc.htm