Appetizers, canapâes, and snacks. I dare you : the weirdest ride in the universe ; The cafâe table at the beginning of the universe ; The problem with God : the tale of a twisted confession

A taste of sin. Brace yourself : the Five Heresies ; Heresy number one : Why A does not equal A ; When is a frog a river? : Aristotle wrestles Heraclitus ; Heresy number two : Why one plus one does not equal two ; Heresy number three : Prepare to be burned at the stake (the Second Law of Thermodynamics : why entropy is an outrage) ; Heresy number four : Randomness is wrong : the six monkeys at six typewriters error ; A brief history of the God problem : were Kepler, Galileo, and Newton creationists? ; Galileo's nature fetish : poking the Pope ; Gamow versus Hoyle : the war between Big Bang and Steady State ; The tale of the termites

The saga of a scratch mark. The mystery of the magic beans : what the hell is an axiom? ; Barley, bricks, and Babylonians : the birth of math ; Scratch mud and you get mind : the rise of a virtual reality ; The sorcery of corners ; Celebrities in the heavens : how to invent astronomy ; What's the angle? : blindness in Babylon ; Why knot? : the Egyptian rope trick ; How to hypnotize a Greek : math as a tourist attraction ; Seduce 'em with numbers : how to do a Pythagoras ; Squaring your way to fame : Pythagoras's not new theorem

How Aristotle invented the axiom. A trip to Plato's cave ; Aristotle fights for attention

or zeroing Zeno ; How Euclid makes Aristotle's "science" stick ; Galileo's dad and the drug of geometry ; Kepler : how to tickle the soul of the Earth ; Kepler's boxes and balls : yes, Kepler's freaky math

Everybody do the flip. Guillotining an axiom : seveing the neck of parallel lines ; "One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name" ; Bare-naked math : Peano strips it down ; Ted Coons, dancing wonder : a tale of two translation ; Presto, change-o : translation's little secret ; The day you uploaded your self : translations saves your life

Is metaphor a crime? The hunger of the stuttering forms : isomorphic symbol sets ; Leonardo's stones : why metaphor works ; Plaid in the pool : the eye doctor who gave you waves ; How form goes manic : what's an Ur pattern? ; Real estate in the embryo : location, location, location : Karl Ernst von Baer and Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch ; Master of the universe : Herbert Spencer, grand unifier and flirt ; The scandal of the century : George Eliot and her ape ; Bulging forth from nothing : the emergence of "emergence" ; Charlie Darwin shows up late ; The zygote snabs Herbert Spencer ; The embryo goes cosmic

Einstein turns an axiom inside out. The man who gave Star Trek its space : Bernhard Riemann ; Albert Einstein's pajamas ; Einstein gives seven ugly ducklings a home : the year of miracles ; Einstein's secret weapon : Aristotle's invention ; The adventures of Einstein's predictions

The amazing repetition machine. Forget information : or, How Claude Shannon got it wrong ; The case of the conversational cosmos ; How gossips grows the universe ; The magic onion of meaning ; Doing the glycerin twist : David Bohm ; Benoãit Mandelbrot zigs and zags

It's from bits : the two-bit tarantella. How math lost its picture

and how it got them back again ; Fuse and fizz, thou shalt bud : fractals and the bounce from boom to bust ; The sorcery of simple rules ; The Japanese sword maker and the alchemy of iteration ; Gaming your way to fame : John Conway enters the scene ; Axioms in silicon : Conway's game of life ; Good-bye to equations : Stephen Wolfram's new kind of science

What are the rules of the universe? The case of the obsessive-compulsive cosmos ; Time, the great translator : an information theory of time ; Wrap yourself in string : iteration and emergent properties ; Baking the Big Bagel : how to start and end a universe ; Will silicon axioms fly? ; The Big Bang tango : quarking in the social cosmos.