Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

This book advocates the importance and value of errors for the progress of scientific research Hans Kricheldorf explains that most of the great scientific achievements are based on an iterative process (an 'innate self-healing mechanism'): errors are committed, being checked over and over again, through which finally new findings and knowledge can arise. New ideas are often first confronted with refusal. This is so not only in real life, but also in scientific and medical research. The author outlines in this book how great ideas had to ripen over time before winning recognition and being...

This book looks back on thirty-five years of microwave (MW) chemistry and explains how the application of the MW technique became an integral part of R&D, eventually becoming recognized in industry. Further, it details how MW chemistry has undergone a dynamic development in the past three decades, one driven by the advent of increasingly sophisticated professional MW reactors in place of the kitchen MW ovens used in earlier years. A major part of the book shows how substitutions, esterifications, amidations, hydrolyses, alkylations, eliminations, dehydrations, condensations, cyclizations,...

This book shows how bubonic plague and smallpox helped end the Hittite Empire, the Bronze Age in the Near East and later the Carthaginian Empire. The book will examine all the possible infectious diseases present in ancient times and show that life was a daily struggle for survival either avoiding or fighting against these infectious disease epidemics. The book will argue that infectious disease epidemics are a critical link in the chain of causation for the demise of most civilizations in the ancient world and that ancient historians should no longer ignore them, as is currently the...

Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of...

This book offers an innovative approach to the character of the intellectual life of Catholics in Scotland. It looks at Catholic attempts to fight the appeal of communism amongst the working classes in interwar Scotland, it analyses developments in the devotional life of Scottish Catholics and it discusses the unique theological contribution made by Scottish clerics. Chapters also explore the increasing presence of Catholics in Scotland in higher education and their role in shaping change within the Catholic Church. Finally, readers will have the opportunity to learn more about the...

Figuring the Population Bomb traces the genealogy of twentieth-century demographic "facts" that created a mathematical panic about a looming population explosion. This narrative was popularized in the 1970s in Paul Ehrlich's best-selling book The Population Bomb, which pathologized population growth in the Global South by presenting a doomsday scenario of widespread starvation resulting from that growth.

Carole McCann uses an archive of foundational texts, disciplinary histories, participant reminiscences, and organizational records to reveal the gendered geopolitical...

Sound Knowledge examines how scientific truth was accrued by means of visual and aural experience, and, in turn, how musical knowledge was located in relation to empirical scientific practice. James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart gather work by leading scholars to explore a crucial sixty-year period, beginning with...

Figuring the Population Bomb traces the genealogy of twentieth-century demographic "facts" that created a mathematical panic about a looming population explosion. This narrative was popularized in the 1970s in Paul Ehrlich's best-selling book The Population Bomb, which pathologized population growth in the Global South by presenting a doomsday scenario of widespread starvation resulting from that growth.

Carole McCann uses an archive of foundational texts, disciplinary histories, participant reminiscences, and organizational records to reveal the gendered geopolitical...

People have had trouble adapting to new technology ever since (perhaps) the inventor of the wheel had to explain that a wheelbarrow could carry more than a person. This little book by a celebrated MIT professor -- the fiftieth anniversary edition of a classic -- describes how we learn to live and work with innovation. Elting Morison considers, among other things, the three stages of users' resistance to change: ignoring it; rational rebuttal; and name-calling. He recounts the illustrative anecdote of the World War II artillerymen who stood still to hold the horses despite the fact that the...