History

This book is a historical account of how natural philosophers and scientists have endeavoured to understand the universe at large, first in a mythical and later in a scientific context. Starting with the creation stories of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia,...

The scientific work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) represents a style of learning and understanding which is largely ignored today. Modern science tends to break objects down in a purely analytical way; by contrast, Goethe was interested in...

Could the $50 purchase of an ancient coin by a Rutgers astronomer have unlocked the mystery of the Christmas Star? For years, scientists have looked, with little success, to astronomical records for an explanation of the magical star that guided the Magi...

Tim Koeth peered into the crumpled brown paper lunch bag; inside was a surprisingly heavy black metal cube. He recognized the mysterious object instantly-he had one just like it sitting on his desk at home. It was uranium metal, taken from the nuclear...

Million-copy bestselling author of The Elements, Molecules, and Reactions Theodore Gray applies his trademark mix of engaging stories, real-time experiments, and stunning photography to the inner workings of machines, big and small, revealing the...

Quantum theory confronts us with bizarre paradoxes which contradict the logic of classical physics. At the subatomic level, one particle seems to know what the others are doing, and according to Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle", there is a limit...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780452289178Author Joseph MazurFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint PlumePublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 215gDimensions(mm) 195mm * 130mm * 15mm

The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life-and even invented real automated machines The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT...

This book is both a revelatory biography and an accessible study of Leonardo's life and multi-faceted work as a scientist and engineer. It covers all aspects of the man's life but is also a re-interpretation of the voluminous evidence to paint an...

What can fashionable ideas, blind faith, or pure fantasy possibly have to do with the scientific quest to understand the universe? Surely, theoretical physicists are immune to mere trends, dogmatic beliefs, or flights of fancy? In fact, acclaimed...

Science: A Four Thousand Year History rewrites science's past. Instead of focussing on difficult experiments and abstract theories, Patricia Fara shows how science has always belonged to the practical world of war, politics, and business. Rather than...

'[An] insightful analysis of 19th-century futurism ... Morus's account is as much a cautionary tale as a flag-waving celebration.' - DUNCAN BELL, NEW STATESMAN'[How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon] rattles thrillingly through such developments as the...

What will happen if (perhaps when) humanity makes contact with another civilisation on a different planet? In 1974 a message was beamed towards the stars by the giant Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, a brief blast of radio waves designed to alert...

Perhaps the world's most distinctive tree, ginkgo has remained stubbornly unchanged for more than two hundred million years. A living link to the age of dinosaurs, it survived the great ice ages as a relic in China, but it earned its reprieve when people...

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780375714597Author Joseph SchwartzFormat PaperbackPage Count 176Imprint Alfred A. KnopfPublisher Alfred A. KnopfWeight(grams) 210gDimensions(mm) 208mm *...

From the bestselling author of Imperfection, a theory of uncertainty as the very core of the scientific method and the essence of its wonder. How many times have we looked for something and found something else? A partner, a job, an object? The same...

A hilarious look at how the line between 'genius' and 'extremely lucky idiot' is finer than we'd like to admit.The more you delve into the stories behind history's greatest names, the more you realise they have something in common: a mystifying lack of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780471419198Author Howard BloomFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint John Wiley & Sons IncPublisher Turner Publishing CompanyWeight(grams)...

The science of ballistics has a long history and starts with one question: How does a projectile move through the air? Even before physicists worked that one out, military engineers had been tinkering with ballistic devices for centuries. The trebuchet...

Peter Atkins captures the heart of chemistry in this book, through an innovative, closely integrated design of images and text, and his characteristically clear, precise, and economical exposition. Explaining the processes involved in chemical reactions,...

In 1883, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the word "eugenics" to express his dream of perfecting the human race by applying the laws of genetic heredity. Adapting Darwin's theory of evolution to human society, eugenics soon became a...

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), the premier patron-practitioner of science in sixteenth-century Europe, established a new role of scientist as administrator, active reformer, and natural philosopher. This book explores Brahe's wide range of activities which...

This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath...

How scientists through the ages have conducted thought experiments using imaginary entities-demons-to test the laws of nature and push the frontiers of what is possible Science may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world...

This book presents the pioneering role of the women chemists at the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW). The account is placed within the framework of the long-forgotten background to the founding of this unique Institution, and the individuals...

Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is possibly the most perfect intellectual achievement in modern physics. Anything that involves gravity, the force that powers everything on the largest, hottest or densest of scales, can be explained by it...

This book explores the colourful past, present and future of an instrument that is, quite literally, close to our hearts. The stethoscope has become the symbol of medicine itself, but how did this come to be? What makes the stethoscope such a familiar...

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed such fervent investigations of the natural world that the period has been called the 'Scientific Revolution.' New ideas and discoveries not only redefined what human beings believed, knew, and could do,...

This book presents a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize for Science (Physics 1979), who was nevertheless excommunicated and branded as a heretic in his own country. His achievements are often overlooked, even besmirched...

Science is a serious business, right? Wrong. Scientists have been participants in the best reality show of all time, with all the highs, lows, bust-ups, and strange personalities of any show on telly today. From Luke O'Neill - the science teacher you...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781101983898Author Jim BellFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint E P Dutton & Co IncPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 261g

In 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved what no one had before: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi. Straddling the ages of classical physics and quantum mechanics, equally at ease with theory...

Just 28,000 years ago, the blink of an eye in geological time, the last of Neanderthals died out in their last outpost, in caves near Gibraltar. Thanks to cartoons and folk accounts we have a distorted view of these other humans - for that is what they...

How Cold War America came to attribute human evolutionary success to our species' unique capacity for murderAfter World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. Creatures of Cain charts the rise and precipitous...

As early as 1910 Americans recognized that cars were easy to steal and, once stolen, hard to find, especially since cars looked much alike. Model styles and colors eventually changed, but so did the means of making a stolen car disappear. Though changing...

This is first intellectual history of the Caribbean written by a top Caribbean studies scholar. The book examines both the work of natives of the region as well as texts interpretive of the region produced by Western authors. Stressing the experimental...

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy.From Musa al-Khwarizmi...

The story of a nineteenth-century invention (essentially a tiny greenhouse) that allowed for the first time the movement of plants around the world, feeding new agricultural industries, the commercial nursery trade, botanic and private gardens, invasive...

This 1993 volume is a lucid and accurate history of the technical research that led to the first atomic bombs. The authors explore how the 'critical assembly' of scientists, engineers and military personnel at Los Alamos, responding to wartime deadlines,...