Showing titles in History

A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the 14 engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre - a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called "system" to compete with the essay and the treatise.

By the end of World War I, Albert Einstein had become the face of the new science of theoretical physics and had made some powerful enemies. One of those enemies, Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard, spent a career trying to discredit him. Their story of conflict, pitting Germany's most widely celebrated Jew against the Nazi scientist who was to become Hitler's chief advisor on physics, had an impact far exceeding what the scientific community felt at the time.

Pour la première fois, l'édition phonographique propose une histoire vivante des expéditions polaires françaises. Dès le début des années 50, des enseignants ont voulu utiliser le sonore comme moyen pédagogique, en faisant réaliser les entretiens par les enfants eux-mêmes dont le besoin de comprendre en fait souvent de meilleurs interviewers, car ils sont capables d'aller du particulier au fondamental. Rétrospectivement, ce travail effectué sous la direction de Pierre Guérin (dans la lignée de Célestin Freinet) devient pour de nombreux sujets un travail historiographique et sociologique extrêmement passionnant.

Why do compass needles point north - but not quite north? What guides the migration of birds, whales, and fish across the world's oceans? How is Earth able to sustain life under an onslaught of solar wind and cosmic radiation? For centuries, the world's great scientists have grappled with these questions, all rooted in the same phenomenon: Earth's magnetism. Over 2000 years after the invention of the compass, Einstein called the source of Earth's magnetic field one of greatest unsolved mysteries of physics.

La Ilustración, que se prolongó durante todo el siglo XVIII, provocó cambios cruciales en el pensamiento de la gente y transformó todo el entramado de la sociedad.

Ein großes Buch, das viel mittelalterlichen Staub aufwirbelt! Sie kämpften gegen Wikinger, vergifteten ihre Feinde und waren Spioninnen - die vergessenen Frauen des europäischen Mittelalters kümmerten sich beileibe nicht nur um Haus und Hof. Dennoch ist es genau dieses Bild einer patriarchalen Gesellschaft, die Frauen unterdrückte, das unsere Vorstellung vom Mittelalter prägt. Es waren Männer, die diese Geschichte schrieben und die Frauen des Mittelalters aus unserem kollektiven Gedächtnis verbannten.

Bruxelles, 29 ottobre 1927. Si è appena concluso il V Congresso Solvay della Fisica, che ha visto riuniti i fisici più illustri dell'epoca, gli stessi che ora si apprestano a partecipare a una cena di gala, ospiti dei reali del Belgio. C'è Albert Einstein, scherzoso come suo solito; Marie Curie, saggia e composta; Niels Bohr, che maschera bene la tensione sotto un'aria gioviale; e poi ancora Arthur Compton, William Bragg, Irving Langmuir...

By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change—including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours.

Ignác Semmelweis is remembered for the now-commonplace notion that doctors must wash their hands before examining patients. In mid-19th century Vienna, however, this was a subversive idea. With deaths from childbed fever exploding, Semmelweis discovered that doctors themselves were spreading the disease. While his simple reforms worked immediately - childbed fever in Vienna all but disappeared - they brought down upon Semmelweis the wrath of the establishment, and led to his tragic end.

William L. Laurence was fascinated with atomic science and its militarization. When the Manhattan Project drew near to perfecting the atomic bomb, he was recruited to write much of the government's press materials that were distributed on the day that Hiroshima was obliterated. That instantly crowned Laurence as one of the leading journalistic experts on the atomic bomb.

Who hasn't feared the math Minotaur in its labyrinth of abstractions? Now, in Out of the Labyrinth, Robert and Ellen Kaplan - the founders of The Math Circle, the popular learning program begun at Harvard in 1994 - reveal the secrets behind their highly successful approach, leading listeners out of the labyrinth and into the joyous embrace of mathematics.

The acrid stench of asphalt and sulfur singes the hairs of people’s nostrils, and when the blustering winds subside, the potent miasma lingers in the air. To the untrained eye, the La Brea Tar Pits seem to be nothing more than simply pools of thick, viscous black sludge...The pit’s contents have spelled the doom for a countless number of creatures both large and small, from legions of insects to mighty mastodons, mammoths, and snarling saber-toothed cats from the Pleistocene Era. La Brea Tar Pits are considered by many scientists to be among the greatest finds in modern history.

Nuclear Russia probes the juncture of history of science and technology, political and cultural history, and environmental history. It considers the atom in Russian society as a reflection of Leninist technological utopianism, Cold War imperatives, scientific hubris, public acceptance, and a state desire to conquer nature. Furthermore the audiobook examines the vital – and perhaps unexpected – significance of ethnicity and gender in nuclear history by looking at how Kazakhs and Nenets lost their homelands and their health in Russia in the wake of nuclear testing.

In the last 350-odd years, the international “scientific community” has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate change, and a deadly pandemic. How did “the scientific community” come into existence, and why does it work? Rivals is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview, from the late seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

Since the dawn of civilization, humans had believed comets were evil portents. In 1705, Edmond Halley liberated humanity from these primordial superstitions, proving that Newtonian mechanics rather than the will of the gods brought comets into our celestial neighborhood. Despite this scientific advance, when Halley's Comet returned in 1910, newspapers gleefully provoked a global hysteria that unfolded with tragic consequences. Richard J. Goodrich examines the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet and the ensuing frenzy sparked by media manipulation, bogus science, and outright deception.

Is it possible for something or someone to be made invisible? This question, which has intrigued authors of science fiction for over a century, has become a headline-grabbing topic of scientific research. In this book, science writer and optical physicist Gregory J. Gbur traces the science of invisibility from its sci-fi origins in the nineteenth-century writings of authors such as H. G. Wells and Fitz James O'Brien to modern stealth technology, invisibility cloaks, and metamaterials. He explores the history of invisibility and its science and technology connections.

Immortality: A User's Guide takes listeners on a thrilling journey through recent scientific history and reveals the cutting-edge technology that may help us live deep into our second centuries. Featuring insightful conversations with longevity experts, archival footage, immersive sound design, and Johnson's trademark storytelling, Immortality explores the recent paradigm shift in our understanding of aging and wrestles with what we should do, as a society, to prepare for advances in science and technology that may radically transform the potential length of human life.

If you've replaced a computer lately - or a cell phone, a camera, a television - chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won't last as long as the one it replaced. Welcome to the world of planned obsolescence - a business model, a way of life, and a uniquely American invention that this eye-opening book explores from its beginnings to its perilous implications for the very near future.

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science’s credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the Internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerful computers.

The Scientific Revolution was a chain of events that unfolded during the 16th and 17th centuries, which brought about drastic changes in scientific thought. Modern science emerged as advances in astronomy, biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics transformed society’s perceptions of nature.