Surgeon, scholar, best-selling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ignac Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his own studies and clinical experience. Ignac Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately--childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared--they...
Surgeon, scholar, best-selling author, Sherwin B. Nuland tells the strange story of Ignac Semmelweis with urgency and the insight gained from his o...
Probing the life and work of Kurt Godel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning--and brought him to the edge of madness.
Probing the life and work of Kurt Godel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathem...
The answer to the controversy--a "yardstick" suitable for measuring the cosmos--was discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who was employed by the Harvard Observatory as a number cruncher, at a wage not dissimilar from that of workers in the nearby textile mills.Miss Leavitt's Stars uncovers her neglected history, and brings a fascinating and turbulent period of astronomical history to life.
The answer to the controversy--a "yardstick" suitable for measuring the cosmos--was discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who was employed by the Harv...
With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity--his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor--and elegantly explains his work and its implications.
With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity--his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor--and elegantly ...
Born in colonial New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford grew up on the frontier--a different world from Cambridge, to which he won a scholarship at the age of twenty-four. His work revolutionized modern physics. Among his discoveries were the orbital structure of the atom and the concept of the "half-life" of radioactive materials. Rutherford and the young men working under him were the first to split the atom, unlocking tremendous forces--forces, as Rutherford himself predicted, that would bring us the atomic bomb. In Richard Reeves's hands, Rutherford comes alive, a ruddy, genial man and a pivotal...
Born in colonial New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford grew up on the frontier--a different world from Cambridge, to which he won a scholarship at the age of...
Trained as a musician, amateur scientist William Herschel found international fame after discovering the planet Uranus in 1781. Though he is still best known for this finding, his partnership with his sister Caroline yielded other groundbreaking work that affects how we see the world today. The Herschels made comprehensive surveys of the night sky, carefully categorizing every visible object in the void. Caroline wrote an influential catalogue of nebulae, and William discovered infrared radiation. Veteran science writer Michael D. Lemonick guides readers through the depths of the solar system...
Trained as a musician, amateur scientist William Herschel found international fame after discovering the planet Uranus in 1781. Though he is still bes...
Galileo was then sixty-nine years old and the most venerated scientist in Italy. Although subscribing to an anti-literalist view of the Bible, as per Saint Augustine, Galileo considered himself a believing Catholic Playing to his own strengths--a deep knowledge of Italy, a longstanding interest in Renaissance and Baroque lore--Dan Hofstadter explains this apparent paradox and limns this historic moment in the widest cultural context, portraying Galileo as both humanist and scientist, deeply versed in philosophy and poetry, on easy terms with musicians, writers, and painters.
Galileo was then sixty-nine years old and the most venerated scientist in Italy. Although subscribing to an anti-literalist view of the Bible, as per ...
