Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Philosophy & Social Aspects

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Newton and his influence. His thought, like that of Aristotle and every other great thinker, underwent development which contemporary scholars are seeking to understand more clearly than did their predecessors, awed as they were by the overwhelming Newtonian achievement.

As the titles indicate, the range of essays included in this volume is wide, but most are concerned not so much with explaining Newton's development as with assessing his contribution to the thought of others. They explore all aspects of the conceptual...

This book contains contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR012), held on June 21-23 in Sestri Levante, Italy. Interdisciplinary researchers discuss in this volume how scientific cognition and other kinds of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. Some of the contributions analyzed the problem of model-based reasoning in technology and stressed the issues of scientific and technological innovation. The book is divided in three main parts:...

Until a few decades ago, the ocean depths were almost as mysterious and inaccessible as outer space. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth's surface with an average depth of more than two miles--yet humans had never ventured more than a few hundred feet below the waves. One of the great scientific and archaeological feats of our time has been finally to cast light on the "eternal darkness" of the deep sea. This is the story of that achievement, told by the man who has done more than any other to make it possible: Robert Ballard.

Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic. He led...

On Freedom: Organizational Science Examined Philosophically

Scientific Freedom, Intellectual Freedom, Moral Freedom, Political Freedom, Spiriitual Freedom

A few words about the organization of this book. It follows what can be described as a narrative, in that it moves in stages, each of which combines more than one objective. This is evident, for example, in the first chapter on Scientific Freedom, which endeavors to situate "organization" within a philosophical tradition, the introduction of concepts that have moved organization to science, and the struggle of this science...

This book concentrates on the properties of the stationary states in chaotic systems of particles or fluids, leaving aside the theory of the way they can be reached. The stationary states of particles or of fluids (understood as probability distributions on microscopic configurations or on the fields describing continua) have received important new ideas and data from numerical simulations and reviews are needed. The starting point is to find out which time invariant distributions come into play in physics. A special feature of this book is the historical approach. To identify the problems...

It's happened to all of us at some point. You walk into the kitchen, or flip open your laptop, or stride confidently up to a lectern, filled with purpose--and suddenly haven't the foggiest idea what you're doing. Welcome to your idiot brain.

Yes, it is an absolute marvel in some respects--the seat of our consciousness, the pinnacle (so far) of evolutionary progress, and the engine of all human experience--but your brain is also messy, fallible, and about 50,000 years out-of-date. We cling to superstitions, remember faces but not names, miss things sitting right in front of us, and...

Over the last fifty years, humanity has developed an extraordinary shared utility: the Global Positioning System. Even as it guides us across town, GPS helps land planes, route mobile calls, anticipate earthquakes, predict weather, locate oil deposits, measure neutrinos, grow our food, and regulate global finance. It is as ubiquitous and essential as another Cold War technology, the Internet. In Pinpoint, Greg Milner takes us on a fascinating tour of a hidden system that touches almost every aspect of our modern life.

While GPS has brought us breathtakingly accurate...

Truth has always been a thorny topic. How does it work? Who decides what it is? And why is it seen as so important? In this lucid introduction to the topic, leading scholar Simon Blackburn describes the main approaches to the notion of truth and considers how these relate to different perspectives on belief, interpretation, facts, knowledge and action. He then looks at how these ideas can be applied to:

- aesthetics, taste and the judgement of art;
- ethics and how people decide how they should (or should not) live;
-...

In this volume Pierre Duhem first gives an overview of 19^th century electricity and magnetism. Next, he applies his keen historical, philosophical, and physical intuition to critiquing Maxwell's theories, especially his electromagnetic theory of light and the ad hoc introduction of displacement current, which he considers too much a product of the "esprit de geometrie" than the "esprit de finesse," as Pascal calls it.

In this book, Duhem is guided by the principle that a theory that offers contradictions, even if the theory is posed by a genius,...