Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Science & Technology

"Pleasure of imagination. . . . I a geologist have illdefined notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surface &c truly poetical." from Charles Darwin's Notebook M, 1838

The early nineteenth century was a golden age for the study of geology. New discoveries in the field were greeted with the same enthusiasm reserved today for advances in the biomedical sciences. In her long-awaited account of Charles Darwin's intellectual development, Sandra Herbert focuses on his geological training, research, and thought, asking both how geology influenced...

In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer contains an edited and annotated transcript of the...

The fifth volume of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison covers Edison's invention and development of the first commercial incandescent electric light and power system. In the process he turned his famed Menlo Park laboratory into the first true research and development facility. This also enabled him to develop a new telephone for the British market in the midst of his herculean efforts on electric lighting.

In the face of daunting technical challenges and skepticism from leading scientists and engineers, Edison and his team of experimenters and machinists found the solution to the...

When President Kennedy issued his well-known challenge to reach the moon and return safely before the end of the 1960s, the immediate responsibility for undertaking the task fell to 54-year-old NASA director James E. Webb. Eight years later, when the Apollo 11 spacecraft splashed down safely in the Pacific and the screens in NASA's Mission Control at Houston flashed the words -Task Accomplished, - it was Webb who deserved much of the credit. In Powering Apollo, W. Henry Lambright explores Webb's leadership role in NASA's spectacular success--success that is rare in ambitious...

Distinguished French immunologist and physician Patrice Debre offers an extensive, balanced, and detailed account of Louis Pasteur's life, struggles, and contributions. Drawing heavily on Pasteur's own scientific notebooks and writings, Debre presents a complete critical account of his discoveries and the controversies they raised with other scientists and occasionally with his closest associates.

-He was a man who often was incapable of conducting himself properly in the most elementary social interactions. His only continuing contacts with women were limited to his mother, nieces, and housekeepers. He was a man who knew the power of money and desired it, but refused to work for it, preferring to live off the sweat of his family and long-suffering friends, whom he often insulted even as they paid his bills.---from the book

This, then, was Oliver Heaviside, a pioneer of modern electrical theory. Born into a low social class of Victorian England, Heaviside made advances in...

One of the most imaginative mathematicians of the nineteenth century, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) changed the course of modern algebra with his discovery of quaternions in 1843. Although Hamilton's work was largely theoretical, his ideas came to have invaluable practical applications with the advent of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. In this acclaimed biography, Thomas L. Hankins brings together the many aspects of Hamilton's life and work--from his significant contributions to mathematics, optics, and mechanics to his passion for metaphysics, poetry, and...

Rarely does the world see as versatile a figure as Herbert Simon. A Nobel laureate in economics, he was an accomplished political scientist, winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association, and founder of the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In all his work in all these fields, he pursued a single goal: to create a science that could map the bounds of human reason and so enlarge its role in human affairs.

Hunter Crowther-Heyck uses the career of this unique individual to examine the evolution of the social sciences after...

In the first half of the twentieth century, psychology was a discipline in search of scientific legitimacy. Debates raged over how much of human and animal behavior is instinctive and how much is learned, and how behavior could be quantified accurately. At the Johns Hopkins University's new Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, Curt P. Richter stood aside from these heated theoretical arguments, choosing instead to apply his data-collection methods, innovative measurement techniques, playful sense of exploration, and consummate surgical skill to laboratory examinations of the biological basis of...

According to the stereotype, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century inventors, quintessential loners and supposed geniuses, worked in splendid isolation and then unveiled their discoveries to a marveling world. Most successful inventors of this era, however, developed their ideas within the framework of industrial organizations that supported them and their experiments. For African American inventors, negotiating these racially stratified professional environments meant not only working on innovative designs but also breaking barriers.

In this pathbreaking study, Rayvon Fouche...

On June 17, 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. Curiously, unlike every previous milestone in the -space race, - this event did not spur NASA to catch up by flying an American woman. Though there were suitable candidates-two years earlier, thirteen female pilots recruited by the private Woman in Space program had passed a strenuous physical exam and were ready for another stage of astronaut testing-American women would not escape earth's gravity for another twenty years.

In Right Stuff, Wrong Sex, Margaret Weitekamp shows how the Woman...

In this autobiography of his early life (1800-1834), George Bentham, nephew of the great Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, offers a lively depiction of the times, both in England and on the Continent, particularly of post-Napoleonic France, where he lived with his family for twelve years. Returning to London as his uncle Jeremy's assistant, he recounts his experiences in this role and his encounters with many of the leading, and the rising, figures of the day, such as Alexander von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill.

An emerging figure himself in the field of botany - where he would...

For much of her life she worked alone, brilliant but eccentric, with ideas that made little sense to her colleagues. Yet before DNA and the molecular revolution, Barbara McClintock's tireless analysis of corn led her to uncover some of the deepest, most intricate secrets of genetic organization. Nearly forty years later, her insights would bring her a MacArthur Foundation grant, the Nobel Prize, and long overdue recognition. At her recent death at age 90, she was widely acknowledged as one of the most significant figures in 20th-century science.

Evelyn Fox Keller's acclaimed...

Karl Z. Morgan was a physicist at the Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was director of health physics from the late 1940s until his retirement in 1972. He collaborated with leading trial lawyer Ken M. Peterson to write this extraordinary memoir about the dawn of the nuclear age and the moral dilemmas associated with nuclear energy.

A deeply humane and religious scientist, Morgan regards his own role, in meeting the challenges presented by the "angry genie" of nuclear energy, with the same unblinking eye he focuses on government, the military, and the nuclear...