This book provides new and critical perspectives on the internal development of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (the PCSWA; Pugwash) and its role in international nuclear diplomacy during the 1960s Cold War.  Conceived by western scientists dissenting from their own government’s position on nuclear weapons, the conferences brought together elite scientists from across the East-West divide to work towards nuclear disarmament and for peace. The analysis follows two lines. First, the book charts the emergence during the conferences of a distinctive form of technopolitical...

This book focuses on continuing the long-standing productive dialogue between physical science and the philosophy of science. Researchers and readers who want to keep up to date on front-line scientific research in fluid mechanics and gravitational wave astrophysics will find timely and well-informed analyses of this scientific research and its philosophical significance. These exciting frontiers of research pose deep scientific problems, and raise key questions in the philosophy of science related to scientific explanation and understanding, theory change and assessment, measurement,...

This book describes the groundbreaking work of Chaim Leib Pekeris and his collaborators. Between 1955 and 1963 they used the first electronic computer built in Israel, the Weizmann Automatic Computer (WEIZAC), to develop powerful numerical methods that helped achieve new and accurate solutions of the Boltzmann equation, calculate energy levels of the helium atom, produce detailed geophysical and seismological models derived from the study of the free oscillations of the earth, and refine models used to predict meteorological phenomena and global oceanic tides. This book provides a unique...

This book offers a history of the instrumentation used to materialize the early thought experiments devised in the Einstein-Bohr disputes over the foundations of quantum mechanics. It shows how the second world war and cold war fostered the development of materials, instruments, and systems that made it possible to create, manipulate, and detect single quantum systems, thus creating the material conditions for experiments in foundations of quantum mechanics and for a broad spectrum of experimental inquiries on the structure and properties of matter which underlay the creation of new research...