History

Leading paleontologist J. David Archibald explores the rich history of visual metaphors for biological order from ancient times to the present and their influence on humans' perception of their place in nature, offering uncommon insight into how we went...

The rapid evolutionary development of modern Homo sapiens over the past 200,000 years is a topic of fevered interest in numerous disciplines. How did humans, while undergoing few physical changes from their first arrival, so quickly develop the...

Published in 1842, this important monograph by Charles Darwin (1809-82) formed the first part of a trilogy of geological studies based on observations made during the celebrated second voyage of the Beagle. Influenced by Charles Lyell's Principles of...

This original work contains the first detailed account of the natural philosophy of Robert Hooke (1635-1703), leading figure of the early Royal Society. From celestial mechanics to microscopy, from optics to geology and biology, Hooke's contributions to...

The epic story of human evolution, from our primate beginnings more than five million years ago to the agricultural eraOver the course of five million years, our primate ancestors evolved from a modest population of sub-Saharan apes into the globally...

How should science be written? It is a question that piqued natural philosophers of the seventeenth century as they experimented with the rhetorical figures, neologisms, verse-forms, and generic variety that characterise the literary texture of their...

One of the most important parts of British heavy industry today is our railway system. Its constant appearances in news bulletins, its enormous appeal to fans or "enthusiasts", its permanent role in the lives of most of us, and its economic significance...

The age of the baroque - a time of great strides in science and mathematics - also saw the construction of some of the world's most magnificent buildings. In this book, George L. Hersey explores the interrelations of the two developments, explaining how...

For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building...

The first global history of voluntary consensus standard setting.Finalist, Hagley Prize in Business History, The Hagley Museum and Library / The Business History ConferencePrivate, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to...

When planes crash, bridges collapse, and automobile gas tanks explode, we are quick to blame poor design. But Henry Petroski says we must look beyond design for causes and corrections. Known for his masterly explanations of engineering successes and...

The period from the late fourth to the late second century B. C. witnessed, in Greek-speaking countries, an explosion of objective knowledge about the external world. WhileGreek culture had reached great heights in art, literature and philosophyalreadyin...

Philosophia Botanica (The Science of Botany), by Carl Linnaeus, was originally published in Latin in Stockholm and Amsterdam in 1751. It is a greatly expanded revision of his Fundamenta Botanica (Foundations of Botany) of 1736, summarizing his work on...

A giant of the discipline of biogeography and co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace was the most famous naturalist in the world when he died in 1913. To mark the centennial of Wallace's death, James Costa offers an elegant edition of...

Sonar to Quartz Clock examines how the unapplied phenomenon of piezoelectricity became applied for technologies such as sonar, crystal frequency control, the quartz clock, and how its research has consequently changed during WWI and the interwar period...

How did our modern picture of the universe come into being? Masters of the Universe tells this fascinating story in an unusual format that blends factual and fictional elements. It is based on a series of interviews that a fictional person conducted with...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262511247Author Michael Thad AllenFormat PaperbackPage Count 362Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press LtdWeight(grams) 499g

In early July 1899, an excavation team of paleontologists sponsored by Andrew Carnegie discovered the fossil remains in Wyoming of what was then the longest and largest dinosaur on record. Named after its benefactor, the Diplodocus carnegii-or Dippy, as...

This history of computing focuses not on chronology (what came first and who deserves credit for it) but on the actual architectures of the first machines that made electronic computing a practical reality. The book covers computers built in the United...

The most beautiful and influential photographs ever made were of the whole earth seen from space. They were taken from the moon, almost as an afterthought, by the astronauts of the Apollo space programme. They inspired a generation to think more...

Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier periods of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it that a...

In 1906, after an earthquake wiped out much of San Francisco, leading California officials and scientists described the disaster as a one-time occurrence and assured the public that it had nothing to worry about. California Earthquakes explains how,...

Accident and emergency departments are the doorway to the hospital for acutely ill and injured patients. Whereas casualty departments have existed for over 150 years, they were often poorly staffed and managed. This book describes the fight to create a...

Change in human understanding of the natural world during the early modern period marks one of the most important episodes in intellectual history. This era is often referred to as the scientific revolution, but recent scholarship has challenged...

Arguably the best available introduction to constructivism, a research paradigm that has dominated the history of science for the past forty years, "Making Natural Knowledge" reflects on the importance of this theory, tells the history of its rise to...

This book comprehensively covers the history and current developments of space programme of China. It presents the complete story of China's space programme from its origins through to present day activities on the International Space Station. This...

Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, "high modern" social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behavior-and to remake the world...

Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom is the first book that focuses in detail on the birth and development of Bohr's atomic theory and gives a comprehensive picture of it. At the same time it offers new insight into Bohr's peculiar way of thinking, what...

This book provides a rounded biography of Franz (later Sir Francis) Simon, his early life in Germany, his move to Oxford in 1933, and his experimental contributions to low temperature physics approximating absolute zero. After 1939 he switched his...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781910010150Author J. R. CarpenterFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint UniformbooksPublisher Uniformbooks

Science is about discovery, a journey towards knowledge. With authors as diverse as Galileo and Lewis Carroll, the extracts featured in this anthology span centuries and continents; they include startling revelations that changed the way we think and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781556437724Author Philip Ashley FanningFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint North Atlantic Books,U.S.Publisher North Atlantic Books,U.S.Weight(grams)...

This book explores the role of causal constraints in science, shifting our attention from causal relations between individual events--the focus of most philosophical treatments of causation-to a broad family of concepts and principles generating...

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the centre of the universe how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple how Einstein unlocked the mysteries...

By explaining how to sire multicolored horses, produce nuts without shells, and create an egg the size of a human head, Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1559) conveys a fascination with tricks and illusions that makes it a work difficult for...

This book provides an introductory yet comprehensive account of James Clerk Maxwell's (1831-79) physics and worldview. The argument is structured by a focus on the fundamental themes which shaped Maxwell's science: analogy and geometry, models and...

In the second half of the nineteenth century, British firms and engineers built, laid, and ran a vast global network of submarine telegraph cables. For the first time, cities around the world were put into almost instantaneous contact, with profound...

Long before the age of "Big Data" or the rise of today's "self-quantifiers," American capitalism embraced "risk"--and proceeded to number our days. Life insurers led the way, developing numerical practices for measuring individuals and groups, predicting...

From the beginning of the space age, scientists and engineers have worked on systems to help humans survive for the astounding 28,500 days (78 years) needed to reach another planet. They've imagined and tried to create a little piece of Earth in a bubble...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262539296Author Ursula KleinFormat PaperbackPage Count 328Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd