History of science Books

Book SynopsisThis text is a study of the origins and development of Greek science, focusing especially on the interactions of scientific and traditional patterns of thought from the 6th to the 4th centuries BC. The starting point is an examination of how certain Greek authors deployed the category of 'magic' and attacked magical beliefs and practices. In the second chapter the book outlines the development and significance of the theory and practice of argument in early Greek science and follows this with a study of the development of empirical research. Finally the author asks why the Greeks invented science: what precisely their contribution was, and what social, economic, ideological and political factors had a bearing on the growth of science in Greece. Designed primarily for students of the history and philosophy of science and classicists, this book also embraces comparative material from anthropology, and from the study of ancient Near Eastern civilisation, and is therefore suitable for anthropologists too.

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Book SynopsisThis lucid and captivating book takes the reader back to the early history of all the sciences, starting from antiquity and ending roughly at the time of Newton — covering the period which can legitimately be called the “dawn” of the sciences. Each of the 24 chapters focuses on a particular and significant development in the evolution of science, and is connected in a coherent way to the others to yield a smooth, continuous narrative. The at-a-glance diagrams showing the “When” and “Where” give a brief summary of what was happening at the time, thereby providing the broader context of the scientific events highlighted in that chapter. Embellished with colourful photographs and illustrations, and “boxed” highlights scattered throughout the text, this book is a must-read for everyone interested in the history of science, and how it shaped our world today.Trade ReviewTable of ContentsIn the Beginning.- The Athenian Contribution.- From the Ishango Bone to Euclid.- Archimedes - the Giant among the Ancients.- The Healing Art and Its Science.- The Legacy from the Arab World.- The Indo-Arabic Numerals.- The Printing of a Page.- Exploring the 'Seven Seas'.- The First Steps of Modern Medicine.- Making the Earth Move.- The Logarithm - An Unsung Hero.- The Way of the Wanderers.- The Galileo and the Dynamical World.- Affairs of the Heart.- The Weight of the Intangible.- Geometry Without Figures.- Life's Infinite Vaiety: Finding Order in Species.- A Measure of the Heavens.- Calculus Developed in South India.- Story of the Calendar.- And Then All was Light - The Thirst for Power.- Chemistry Comes of Age.

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Book SynopsisThis book tells the story of the thousands of corpses that ended up in the hands of anatomists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Composed as a travel story from the point of view of the cadaver, this study offers a full-blown cultural history of death and dissection, with insights that easily go beyond the history of anatomy and the specific case of Belgium. From acquisition to disposal, the trajectories of the corpse changed under the influence of social policies, ideological tensions, religious sensitivities, cultures of death and broader changes in the field of medical ethics. Anatomists increasingly had to reconcile their ways with the diverse meanings that the dead body held. To a certain extent, as this book argues, they started to treat the corpse as subject rather than object. Interweaving broad historical evolutions with detailed case studies, this book offers unique insights into a field dominated by Anglo-American perspectives, evaluating the similarities and differences within other European contexts. Trade Review“Tinne Claes has written a wonderful study on anatomy in fin-de-siècle Belgium. This book is certainly greater than its parts and will provide intellectual sustenance and great pleasure to all those who read it. … What Claes has produced is a fascinating, thought-provoking and extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of the development of the modernist society in the Western World which forms the basis for most current debates about what it is to be a social human.” (Ross L. Jones, Metascience, Vol. 30, 2021)Table of Contents1 Introduction2 Anatomy is Done?3 From Deathbed to Dissecting Table: Acquiring Anatomical Material4 Under the Scalpel: Dividing the Body5 The Jar and the Coffin: Keeping and Disposing of the Dead6 Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThis book takes a historical and anthropological approach to understanding how non-human hosts and vectors of diseases are understood, at a time when emerging infectious diseases are one of the central concerns of global health. The volume critically examines the ways in which animals have come to be framed as ‘epidemic villains’ since the turn of the nineteenth century. Providing epistemological and social histories of non-human epidemic blame, as well as ethnographic perspectives on its recent manifestations, the essays explore this cornerstone of modern epidemiology and public health alongside its continuing importance in today’s world. Covering diverse regions, the book argues that framing animals as spreaders and reservoirs of infectious diseases – from plague to rabies to Ebola – is an integral aspect not only to scientific breakthroughs but also to the ideological and biopolitical apparatus of modern medicine. As the first book to consider the impact of the image of non-human disease hosts and vectors on medicine and public health, it offers a major contribution to our understanding of human-animal interaction under the shadow of global epidemic threat. Table of ContentsIntroduction: Infectious Animals and Epidemic Blame, Christos Lynteris.- Chapter 1. Vermin Landscapes: Suffolk, England, Shaped by Plague, Rat and Flea 1906-1920, Karen Sayer.- Chapter 2. Tarbagan’s Winter Lair: Framing Drivers of Plague Persistence in Inner Asia, Christos Lynteris.- Chapter 3. To Kill or not to Kill? Negotiating Life, Death, and One Health in the Context of Dog-Mediated Rabies Control in Colonial and Independent India, Deborah Nadal.- Chapter 4. Tiger Mosquitoes from Ross to Gates, Maurits Meerwijk.- Chapter 5. A Vector in The (Re)Making: A History of Aedes aegypti as Mosquitoes that Transmit Diseases in Brazil, Gabriel Lopes and Luísa Reis-Castro.- Chapter 6. Contesting the (Super)natural Origins of Ebola in Macenta, Guinea: Biomedical and Popular Approaches, Séverine Thys.- Chapter 7. Zika Outbreak in Brazil: In Times of Political and Scientific Uncertainties Mosquitoes Can be Stronger than a Country, Gustavo Corrêa Matta , Lenir Nascimento da Silva, Elaine Teixeira Rabello, and Carolina de Oliveira Nogueira.- Postscript: Epidemic Villains and the Ecologies of Nuisance, Frédéric Keck.-

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Book SynopsisThe development of science has been an ideological struggle that lasted over three millennia. At and after the times of the Babylonian Empire, however, the pace of scientific evolution was painfully slow. This situation changed after Copernicus kick-started the Scientific Revolution with his heliocentric theory. Newton’s law of universal gravitation transformed natural philosophy, previously focused on mythology and abstract philosophical thinking, into an orderly and rational physical science. Einstein’s redefinition of space and time revealed a new and central principle of the Universe, paving the way for the huge amounts of energy held deep inside physical matter to be released. To this day, many of the our known physical theories represent an accumulation of changing knowledge over the long course of scientific history. But what kind of changes did the scientists see? What questions did they address? What methods did they use? What difficulties did they encounter? And what kind of persecution might they have faced on the road to discovering these beautiful, sometimes almost mystical, ideas? This book’s purpose is to investigate these questions. It leads the reader through the stories behind major scientific advancements and their theories, as well as explaining associated examples and hypotheses. Over the course of the journey, readers will come to understand the way scientists explore nature and how scientific theories are applied to natural phenomena and every-day technology.Table of Contents Prologue: Our Universe.- Ancient Wisdom and Natural Philosophers.- The Heyday of Greek Astronomy.- The Tumultuous Astronomical Revolution.- The Well-Ordered Newtonian Mechanics.- Special Relativity: Fusing Space and Time.- General Relativity: Describing A Curved Spacetime.- The Course of Scientific Development: Evolution of Thought Across a Millennium.- Further Reading

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Book SynopsisThis book focuses on the ancient Near East, early imperial China, South-East Asia, and medieval Europe, shedding light on mathematical knowledge and practices documented by sources relating to the administrative and economic activities of officials, merchants and other actors. It compares these to mathematical texts produced in related school contexts or reflecting the pursuit of mathematics for its own sake to reveal the diversity of mathematical practices in each of these geographical areas of the ancient world. Based on case studies from various periods and political, economic and social contexts, it explores how, in each part of the world discussed, it is possible to identify and describe the different cultures of quantification and computation as well as their points of contact. The thirteen chapters draw on a wide variety of texts from ancient Near East, China, South-East Asia and medieval Europe, which are analyzed by researchers from various fields, including mathematics, history, philology, archaeology and economics. The book will appeal to historians of science, economists and institutional historians of the ancient and medieval world, and also to Assyriologists, Indologists, Sinologists and experts on medieval Europe.Trade Review“Mathematics, Administrative and Economic Activities in Ancient Worlds fills a longstanding need to situate mathematics into its context of administration in which it originated and developed in various societies. … These publications attest to the lively and active community of historians of science working on ancient sources and the potential to learn about the origin and early development of sciences … within societies which–judging by recent developments–has become a point of concern in many parts of the world.” (Annette Imhausen, NTM, Vol. 30 (3), September, 2022)“As an economist, I thoroughly enjoyed and was impressed at the many details and analysis of those examples of these activities in the varied places during these early time periods. … The is book is very comprehensive in its discussion. Math formulas explaining different ways of computing interest and many other types of financial economic analysis are given. Each chapter has an ample number of references.” (Paul Gentle, HEI History of Economic Ideas, Vol. 29 (2), 2021)Table of ContentsChapter ​1. Mathematics, Administrative and Economic Activities in the Ancient Worlds: An introduction (Cécile Michel and Karine Chemla)Part 1: Mathematical Writings, Regulations, Laws and NormsChapter 2. A Comparative Study of Prices and Wages in Royal Inscriptions, Administrative Texts and Mathematical Texts in the Old Babylonian Kingdom of Larsa (Cécile Michel, with contributions by Robert Middeke-Conlin and Christine Proust)Chapter 3. Computation in the Arthaśāstra (Mark McClish)4. Official Salaries and State Taxes as Seen in Qin-Han Manuscripts, with a Focus on Mathematical Texts (Peng Hao)Part 2: Quantifying Work, Quantifying Volume and CapacityChapter 5. Insights into the Administration of Ancient Irrigation Systems in Third Millennium BCE Mesopotamia (Stephanie Rost)Chapter 6. Mathematical Computations in the Management of Public Construction Work in Mesopotamia (End of the Third and Beginning of the Second Millennium BCE) (Martin Sauvage)Chapter 7. The use of volume in the measurement of grain in early imperial China (Karine Chemla and Ma Biao)Part III: Quantifying Lands and SurfacesChapter 8. The Measurement of Fields During the Pre-Sargonic Period (Camille Lecompte)Chapter 9. Early-Dynastic Tables from Southern Mesopotamia, or the Multiple Facets of the Quantification of Surfaces (Christine Proust)Part IV: Prices, Rates, Loans and InterestsChapter 10. Computation Practices of the Assyrian Merchants during the Nineteenth Century BCE (Cécile Michel)Chapter 11. Connecting a Disconnect. Can Evidence for a Scribal Education be Found in a Professional Setting During the Old Babylonian Period? (Robert Middeke-Conlin)Chapter 12. Loans and Interest in Sanskrit Legal and Mathematical Texts (Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma and Takanori Kusuba)Chapter 13. Computational Practices Around Coins and Coinage: John of Murs’ Quadripartitum Nnumerorum and French Money Changers’ Books (Marc Bompaire and Matthieu Husson)

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Book SynopsisFor a brief time in history, it was possible to imagine that a sufficiently advanced intellect could, given sufficient time and resources, in principle understand how to mathematically prove everything that was true. They could discern what math corresponds to physical laws, and use those laws to predict anything that happens before it happens. That time has passed. Gödel’s undecidability results (the incompleteness theorems), Turing’s proof of non-computable values, the formulation of quantum theory, chaos, and other developments over the past century have shown that there are rigorous arguments limiting what we can prove, compute, and predict. While some connections between these results have come to light, many remain obscure, and the implications are unclear. Are there, for example, real consequences for physics — including quantum mechanics — of undecidability and non-computability? Are there implications for our understanding of the relations between agency, intelligence, mind, and the physical world? This book, based on the winning essays from the annual FQXi competition, contains ten explorations of Undecidability, Uncomputability, and Unpredictability. The contributions abound with connections, implications, and speculations while undertaking rigorous but bold and open-minded investigation of the meaning of these constraints for the physical world, and for us as humans.​Table of ContentsIntroduction (Aguirre, Merali, Sloan).- Undecidability and Unpredictability: Not Limitations, but Triumphs of Science (Markus Müller).- Indeterminism and Undecidability (Klaas Landsman).- Unpredictability and Randomness (Rade Vuckovac).- Indeterminism, Causality and Information: Has Physics ever been Deterministic? (Flavio Del Santo).- Undecidability, Fractal Geometry and the Unity of Physics (Tim Palmer).- A Gödelian Hunch from Quantum Theory (Hippolyte Dourdent).- Epistemic Horizons: This Sentence is ..... (Jochen Szangolies).- Why is the Universe Comprehensible? (Ian Durham).- Noisy Deductive Reasoning: How Humans Construct Math, and How Math Constructs Universes (David Wolpert, David Kinney).- Computational Complexity as Anthropic Principle: A Fable (Rick Searle).- Appendix (Aguirre, Merali, Sloan).

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Book SynopsisFor a brief time in history, it was possible to imagine that a sufficiently advanced intellect could, given sufficient time and resources, in principle understand how to mathematically prove everything that was true. They could discern what math corresponds to physical laws, and use those laws to predict anything that happens before it happens. That time has passed. Gödel’s undecidability results (the incompleteness theorems), Turing’s proof of non-computable values, the formulation of quantum theory, chaos, and other developments over the past century have shown that there are rigorous arguments limiting what we can prove, compute, and predict. While some connections between these results have come to light, many remain obscure, and the implications are unclear. Are there, for example, real consequences for physics — including quantum mechanics — of undecidability and non-computability? Are there implications for our understanding of the relations between agency, intelligence, mind, and the physical world? This book, based on the winning essays from the annual FQXi competition, contains ten explorations of Undecidability, Uncomputability, and Unpredictability. The contributions abound with connections, implications, and speculations while undertaking rigorous but bold and open-minded investigation of the meaning of these constraints for the physical world, and for us as humans.​Table of ContentsIntroduction (Aguirre, Merali, Sloan).- Undecidability and Unpredictability: Not Limitations, but Triumphs of Science (Markus Müller).- Indeterminism and Undecidability (Klaas Landsman).- Unpredictability and Randomness (Rade Vuckovac).- Indeterminism, Causality and Information: Has Physics ever been Deterministic? (Flavio Del Santo).- Undecidability, Fractal Geometry and the Unity of Physics (Tim Palmer).- A Gödelian Hunch from Quantum Theory (Hippolyte Dourdent).- Epistemic Horizons: This Sentence is ..... (Jochen Szangolies).- Why is the Universe Comprehensible? (Ian Durham).- Noisy Deductive Reasoning: How Humans Construct Math, and How Math Constructs Universes (David Wolpert, David Kinney).- Computational Complexity as Anthropic Principle: A Fable (Rick Searle).- Appendix (Aguirre, Merali, Sloan).

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Book SynopsisStarting from Newton’s times this follow-up to the author’s Springer book “Our Place in the Universe - Understanding Fundamental Astronomy from Ancient Discoveries” addresses the question of “our place in the Universe” from astronomical, physical, chemical, biological, philosophical and social perspectives.Using the history of astronomy to illustrate the process of discovery, the emphasis is on the description of the process of how we learned and on the exploration of the impacts of discoveries rather than on the presentation of facts. Thus readers are informed of the influence of science on a broad scale.Unlike the traditional way of teaching science, in this book, the author begins by describing the observations and then discusses various attempts to find answers (including unsuccessful ones). The goal is to help students develop a better appreciation of the scientific process and learn from this process to tackle real-life problems.Trade Review“My overall impression is of a very carefully organized book in which clear explanations are seen as the key to understanding the process by which scientific discoveries are made. ... this book is a mostly excellent, carefully constructed, step-by-step educational path through the development of the process of doing science and resulting discoveries. Sun Kwok’s book provides an all-embracing view of how science has enabled a detailed description of our place in the Universe ... .” (Barry Kent, The Observatory, Vol. 142 (1291), December, 2022)Table of ContentsFrom Copernicus to Enlightenment.- Empirical Evidence for the Heliocentric Model.- Resolution of the Theoretical Objections to the Heliocentric Theory.- Size of the Solar System.- Celestial Navigation and Exploration of the Heavens.- New Members of the Solar System.- Is the Sun a Star?.- A New Way of Thinking.- What Are Stars Made of?.- Origin of the Solar System.- Plurality of the World.- The Nature of Nebulae.- Are all Motions Relative?.- The Nature of Light and Matter.- The Human Star Connection.- Is the Universe Finite?.- Early History of the Earth.- Common Ancestors.- Origin of Life.- Complexity in the Universe.- Evolution of the Earth through the Ages.- Earth as an Integrated System.- Life Cycles of Stars.- Life in other Worlds.- Our Place in the Universe.- The Common Link in Our Journey.- Further Reading.- Appendix I: Brightest Stars in the Sky.- Appendix II: Units of Measurement.- Appendix III: Astronomical Measurements.- Appendix IV: Photometric Method to Estimate the Distances of Stars.- Appendix V: Mass of the Milky Way.- Appendix VI: Examples of Inertial Forces.- Appendix VII: Astronomy from other Planetary Systems.- Review Exercises.- Glossary.

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Book SynopsisLearn about commercial spaceflight’s most successful startup in this fully updated book, which follows the extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement that have placed SpaceX at the forefront of the launch industry and positioned it as the most likely candidate for transporting humans to Mars. This second edition emphasizes SpaceX's much-hyped manned mission to the Red Planet. With a plethora of new material gathered from 2013 to the present, the text offers the most up-to-date portrait of the maverick band of scientists and engineers producing some of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the 21st century. Topics covered in this book include: all CRS flights, the challenges of developing retro-propulsion, and the pathway towards realizing the Falcon Heavy and BFR. In addition, the chapters describe SpaceX’s emphasis on simplicity, low-cost, and reliability, and the methods the company employs to reduce its costs while speeding up decision-making and delivery. Detailing the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, the book shows how SpaceX is able to offer a full spectrum of light, medium, and heavy lift launch capabilities to its customers and how it is able to deliver spacecraft into any inclination and altitude, from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit to planetary missions. This book is the perfect go-to guide on SpaceX for anybody working or interested in the commercial space arena.Table of Contents

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Book SynopsisIntroduction (Roberta Corvi and Stefano Gattei).- Editorial Note.- Part I: Feyerabend And The History Of Philosophy.- Chapter 1. Feyerabend, Protagoras and Nietzsche (Helmut Heit).- Chapter 2. Feyerabend, Plato and Aristotle (Gonzalo Munévar).- Chapter 3. Feyerabend and Marx (Rory Kent and Ian James Kidd).- Chapter 4. Feyerabend and Mill (Elisabeth A. Lloyd).- Chapter 5. Feyerabend and Mach (John M. Preston).- Part II: Feyerabend And The History Of Science.- Chapter 6. Feyerabend and Galileo (Stefano Gattei).- Chapter 7. Feyerabend, Bohr and Quantum Physics (John L. Heilbron).- Part III: Feyerabend And His Contemporaries.- Chapter 8. Feyerabend and Brecht (Val Dusek).- Chapter 9. Feyerabend and the Vienna Circle (Friedrich Stadler).- Chapter 10. Feyerabend and Wittgenstein (Vasso Kindi).- Chapter 11. Feyerabend and Popper (Roberta Corvi).- Chapter 12. Feyerabend and Kuhn (Paul Hoyningen-Huene).- Chapter 13. Feyerabend and Lakatos (John Kadvany).- Chapter 14. Paul Feyerabend in Retrospect (Joseph Agassi).- Index.

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