Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

As one of the greatest technological developments in human history, the steam engine was a major...

The nineteenth century produced scientific and cultural revolutions that forever transformed modern European life. Although these critical developments are often studied independently, Richard G. Olson's "Science and Scientism in ""Nineteenth-Century Europe" provides an integrated account of the history of science and its impact on intellectual and social trends of the day. Focusing on the natural scientific foundations underlying liberalism, socialism, positivism, communism, and social Darwinism, Olson explores...

Women of Science is a collection of essays dealing with contributions women have made to various scientific disciplines, written by women scientists in those disciplines. The areas covered are: astronomy, archaeology, biology, chemistry, crystallography, engineering, geology, mathematics, medicine, and physics. The women who have written these essays are, for the most part, not professional historians, but rather scientific professionals who felt the necessity of researching the contributions women have made to the devlopment of their fields.

The essays are unique, not only because...

Boyle's Law, which describes the relation between the pressure and volume of a gas, was worked out by Robert Boyle in the mid-1600s. His experiments are still considered examples of good scientific work and continue to be studied along with their historical and intellectual contexts by philosophers, historians, and sociologists. Now there is controversy over whether Boyle's work was based only on experimental evidence or whether it was influenced by the politics and religious controversies of the time, including especially class and gender politics.

Elizabeth Potter argues that even...

" P.D. Ouspensky s] yearning for a transcendent, timeless reality one that cancels out physical disintegration and death figures into science at some fundamental level.

Einstein found solace in his theory of relativity, which suggested to him that events are ever-present in the space-time continuum. When his friend Michele Besso passed on shortly before his own death, he wrote: 'For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'" from Magic, Mystery, and Science

The triumph of science would appear to have...

..". scholarship of the highest order.... Kendall Bailes s book is destined to become a most valuable contribution to our knowledge of Russian and Soviet culture. It is insightful and eloquent." Douglas R. Weiner

..". an insightful, richly researched portrait of Vernadsky s life and times... " American Scientist

"This biography... not only tells a story full of human drama but also one rich with insights into Russia s higher-education and scientific-research establishments." Washington Post Book World

" This] concise book, with references that stop short of the Gorbachev...

..". a coherent and fascinating social analysis of AIDS-related knowledge, examining the social facts of knowledge production and developments interior to communities of science." Medical Humanities Review

..". a multilayered, composite approach that involves multisited ethnographic research in different spheres of the collective responses to AIDS... " Choice

The response to AIDS from various groups in developing knowledge of and about this health crisis is the focus of this revealing work. Rio de Janeiro serves as an observation point for the study of the intersecting worlds...

"The book provides an excellent historical summary of the debates over continental drift theory in this century." --Contemporary Sociology

"This is a useful discussion of the way that science works. The book will be of value to philosophers of science... " --Choice

..". will find an important place in university and department libraries, and will interest afficionados of the factual and intellectual history of the earth sciences." --Terra Nova

..". an excellent core analysis... " --The Times Higher Education Supplement

..". an ambitious and important contribution to...

This collection explores how technologies become forms of power, how people embed their authority in technological systems, and how the machines and the knowledge that make up technical systems strengthen or reshape social, political, and cultural power. The authors suggest ways in which a more nuanced investigation of technology's complex history can enrich our understanding of the changing meanings of modernity. They consider the relationship among the state, expertise, and authority; the construction of national identity; changes in the structure and distribution of labor; political...

From cathedrals to star wars, Arnold Pacey looks at the interaction of technologies and society over the last thousand years and uses that survey to argue for a more humane form of future technological development. The second edition of The Maze of Ingenuity concentrates on Europe and North America and incorporates recent insights from the history and sociology of technology. A new series of chapters extends Pacey's discussion of the role of ideas and ideals in technology in the period since the industrial revolution. Arnold Pacey has taught the history of science and technology at...

This history of computing focuses not on chronology (what came first and who deserves credit for it) but on the actual architectures of the first machines that made electronic computing a practical reality. The book covers computers built in the United States, Germany, England, and Japan. It makes clear that similar concepts were often pursued simultaneously and that the early researchers explored many architectures beyond the von Neumann architecture that eventually became canonical. The contributors include not only historians but also engineers and computer pioneers.An introductory...

During the Golden Age of Islam (seventh through seventeenth centuries A.D.), Muslim philosophers and poets, artists and scientists, princes and laborers created a unique culture that has influenced societies on every continent. This book offers a fully illustrated, highly accessible introduction to an important aspect of that culture--the scientific achievements of medieval Islam.

Howard Turner opens with a historical overview of the spread of Islamic civilization from the Arabian peninsula eastward to India and westward across northern Africa into Spain. He describes how a passion...

The Manhattan Project--the World War II race to produce an atomic bomb--transformed the entire country in myriad ways, but it did not affect each region equally. Acting on an enduring perception of the American West as an "empty" place, the U.S. government located a disproportionate number of nuclear facilities--particularly the ones most likely to spread pollution--in western states. The Manhattan Project manufactured plutonium at Hanford, Washington; designed and assembled bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico; and detonated the world's first atomic bomb at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on June 16,...

The emergence of genetic science has profoundly shaped how we think about biology. Indeed, it is difficult now to consider nearly any facet of human experience without first considering the gene. But this mode of understanding life is not, of course, transhistorical. Phillip Thurtle takes us back to the moment just before the emergence of genetic rationality at the turn of the twentieth century to explicate the technological, economic, cultural, and even narrative transformations necessary to make genetic thinking possible.

The rise of managerial capitalism brought with it an array...