Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

From Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll, the image of the mad scientist surrounded by glass vials, copper coils, and electrical apparatus remains a popular fixture. In films and fiction, he's comically misguided, tragically misunderstood, or pathologically evil. But the origins of this stereotype can be found in the sometimes-eccentric real life men and women who challenged our view of the world and broke new scientific frontiers.

They Called Me Mad recounts the amazing true stories of such historical...

In 1954, Charles Townes invented the laser's microwave cousin, the maser. The next logical step was to extend the same physical principles to the shorter wavelengths of light, but the idea did not catch fire until October 1957, when Townes asked Gordon Gould about Gould's research on using light to excite thallium atoms. Each took...

Award-winning cultural historian Iain McCalman tells the stories of Charles Darwin and his staunchest supporters: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Beginning with the somber morning of April 26, 1882--the day of Darwin's funeral--Darwin's Armada steps back and recounts the lives and scientific discoveries of each of these explorers, who campaigned passionately in the war of ideas over evolution and advanced the scope of Darwin's work.

One animal left India in 1515, caged in the hold of a Portuguese ship, and sailed around Africa to Lisbon--the first of its species to see Europe for more than a thousand years. The other crossed the Atlantic from South America to Madrid in 1789, its huge fossilized bones packed in crates, its species unknown. How did Europeans three centuries apart respond to these two mysterious beasts--a rhinoceros, known only from ancient texts, and a nameless monster? As Juan Pimentel explains, the reactions reflect deep intellectual changes but also the enduring power of image and imagination to...

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 traditional accounts. Here, in Reconfiguring the World, Margaret J. Osler treats the development of the sciences in Europe from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries as a complex and multifaceted process.

The worldview embedded in modern science is a relatively recent development. Osler aims to convey a nuanced...