History

In the second millennium CE, long before English became the language of science in the twentieth century, the act of translation was crucial for understanding and disseminating knowledge and information across linguistic and geographic boundaries. This...

Popular natural history periodicals in the nineteenth century had an incredible democratizing power. By welcoming contributions from correspondents regardless of their background, they posed a significant threat to those who considered themselves to be...

The mechanical philosophy first emerged as a leading player on the intellectual scene in the early modern period-seeking to explain all natural phenomena through the physics of matter and motion-and the term mechanism was coined. Over time, natural...

Empiricism today implies the dispassionate scrutiny of facts. But Jessica Riskin finds that in the French Enlightenment, empiricism was inimately bound up with sensibility. In what she calls a "sentimental empiricism", natural knowledge was taken to rest...

Personal genomics services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com now offer what once was science fiction: the ability to sequence and analyze an individual's entire genetic code-promising, in some cases, facts about that individual's ancestry that may have...

This work offers a wide-ranging examination of how scientists have been portrayed in American culture. From the earliest depictions of Benjamin Franklin and his kite experiment to twenty-first-century renderings of mad scientists, representations of...

A committed Lutheran excommunicated from his own church, a friend to Catholics and Calvinists alike, a layman who called himself a "priest of God," a Copernican in a world where Ptolemy still reigned, a man who argued at the same time for the superiority...

Technocratic Visions examines the context and societal consequences of technologies, technocratic governance, and development in Mexico, home of the first professional engineering school in the Americas. Contributors focus on the influential role of...

Tracing the development of population genetics through the writings of such luminaries as Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, William B. Provine sheds light on this complex field as well as its bearing on other branches of biology.Book...

Demonstrates how policymakers influenced environmental science during the early nuclear age In Atomic Environments: Nuclear Technologies, the Natural World, and Policymaking, 1945-1960, Neil S. Oatsvall examines how top officials in the Truman and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780816525447Author Elizabeth DavidsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint University of Arizona PressPublisher University of Arizona PressWeight(grams) 456g

Since the founding in 1660 of the Royal Society, London, scientists engaging in experimental research have sought to establish a base for exploratory work in communities and their political institutions. This connection between science and the national...

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the advent of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) offered a revolutionary new perspective that transformed the classical neo-Darwinian, gene-centered study of evolution. In The Architecture of...

In The Globalization of Wheat, Marci R. Baranski explores Norman Borlaug's complicated legacy as godfather of the Green Revolution. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in fighting global hunger, Borlaug, an American agricultural...

Boyle's Law, which describes the relation between the pressure and volume of a gas, was worked out by Robert Boyle in the mid-1600s. His experiments are still considered examples of good scientific work and continue to be studied along with their...

The twentieth century was one of astonishing change in science, especially as pursued in the United States. Against a backdrop of dramatic political and economic shifts brought by world wars, intermittent depressions, sporadic and occasionally massive...

Tell me, sir, is it on your grandmother's or your grandfather's side that you are descended from an ape? In June of 1860, some of Britain's most influential scientific and religious authorities gathered in Oxford to hear a heated debate on the merits of...

Scientists' views on what makes an experiment successful have developed dramatically throughout history. Different criteria for proper experimentation were privileged at different times, entirely new criteria for securing experimental results emerged,...

'Cheap or rapid or convenient road transport for man and goods is one of the most important of all contributions to national comfort and prosperity.' An early evangelist for the automobile, William Worby Beaumont (1848-1929) drew on his engineering...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780804168922Author James GleickFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 326gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

Much of the history of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century has been written with a sharp focus on a few key figures and a handful of notable events. "Einstein's Generation" offers a distinctive new approach to the origins of modern physics...

Databases have revolutionized nearly every aspect of our lives. Information of all sorts is being collected on a massive scale, from Google to Facebook and well beyond. But as the amount of information in databases explodes, we are forced to reassess our...

"Marvelous. . . . Wonderfully imaginative. . . . Sparkling."-Wall Street Journal "Stunning. . . . Read this book: in equal measure it will give you hope and trouble your dreams."-Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life and Passage to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780142004807Author John CornwellFormat PaperbackPage Count 576Imprint Penguin USAPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 335gDimensions(mm) 213mm * 140mm...

This volume opens in spring 1914 when Einstein takes up a research professorship at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and closes with the collapse of the German Empire four and one-half years later. A good portion of the documentation, which...

This volume presents Einstein's writings from the final period of his work in Switzerland. Most of the material in Volume 4 documents Einstein's search for a relativistic theory of gravitation, a search that ended in Berlin in the fall of 1915 with the...

"Only a wayfarer born under unruly stars would attempt to put into practice in our epoch of proliferating knowledge the Heraclitean dictum that 'men who love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed.'" Thus begins this remarkable...

Women of Science is a collection of essays dealing with contributions women have made to various scientific disciplines, written by women scientists in those disciplines. The areas covered are: astronomy, archaeology, biology, chemistry, crystallography,...

We normally think of viruses in terms of the devastating diseases they cause, from smallpox to AIDS. But in The Life of a Virus, Angela N. H. Creager introduces us to a plant virus that has taught us much of what we know about all viruses, including the...

Abundant, salutary, problematic - energy makes history. As a symbol, resource and consumer good, it shapes technologies, politics, societies and cultural world views. Focussing on a range of energy types, from electricity and oil to bioenergy, this...

The Heavens on Earth explores the place of the observatory in nineteenth-century science and culture. Astronomy was a core pursuit for observatories, but usually not the only one. It belonged to a larger group of "observatory sciences" that also included...

This is a biography of a major American inventor, who obtained more than 350 patents during his lifetime. Elmer Sperry contributed greatly to the technological changes occurring between 1880 and 1930. He was best known for the Sperry gyrocompass and...

A translation of selected non-English texts included in Volume 16 is available in paperback. Since this supplementary paperback includes only select portions of Volume 16, it is not recommended for purchase without the main volume.Every document in The...

The Values of Precision examines how exactitude has come to occupy such a prominent place in Western culture. What has been the value of numerical values? Beginning with the late eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, the essays in this...

This is the fourth volume of the complete edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. For the first time full authoritative texts of Darwin's letters are available, edited according to modern textual editorial principles and practice. This volume...

Rich with archival detail and compelling characters, Life on Display uses the history of biological exhibitions to analyze museums' shifting roles in twentieth-century American science and society. Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain chronicle...

This is a story about sand and how science and silicon changed our lives. Over the last century, science taught us how to take this most common material and create the products on which we depend. It allows us to determine the atomic structure of...

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is one of the most powerful and versatile techniques now available for the study of molecular structure and reaction mechanisms. Written by recognised experts in the field, this classic account of modern NMR...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780060932565Author Kenneth C DavisFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint CollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams) 313gDimensions(mm) 205mm...

In these essays, Andrew Cunningham is concerned with issues of identity - what was the identity of topics, disciplines, arguments, diseases in the past, and whether they are identical with (more usually, how they are not identical with) topics,...