Great Essays in Science

Great Essays in Science PDF Author: Martin Gardner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780879758530
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Martin Gardner, author of numerous books on science, mathematics, and pseudo-science, has assembled thirty-four extraordinary essays by eminent philosophers, scientists, and writers on the fundamental aspects of modern science. As Gardner makes clear in his preface to the formerly titled Sacred Beetle and Other Great Essays in Science, his intent is not to teach the reader science or to report on the latest trends and discoveries. "Rather, the purpose of this book is to spread before the reader, whether his or her interest in science be passionate or mild, a sumptuous feast of great writing - absorbing, thought-disturbing pieces that have something to say about science and say it forcibly and well." Gardner's entertaining biographical commentaries make Great Essays in Science a rich store of good reading and an informal history of the people and ideas that have shaped our culture and transformed our everyday lives. This collection includes works by Isaac Asimov, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Jean Henri Fabre, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Jay Gould, Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, William James, Ernest Nagel, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Lewis Thomas, H.G. Wells, and others.

Great Essays in Science

Great Essays in Science PDF Author: Martin Gardner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780879758530
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Martin Gardner, author of numerous books on science, mathematics, and pseudo-science, has assembled thirty-four extraordinary essays by eminent philosophers, scientists, and writers on the fundamental aspects of modern science. As Gardner makes clear in his preface to the formerly titled Sacred Beetle and Other Great Essays in Science, his intent is not to teach the reader science or to report on the latest trends and discoveries. "Rather, the purpose of this book is to spread before the reader, whether his or her interest in science be passionate or mild, a sumptuous feast of great writing - absorbing, thought-disturbing pieces that have something to say about science and say it forcibly and well." Gardner's entertaining biographical commentaries make Great Essays in Science a rich store of good reading and an informal history of the people and ideas that have shaped our culture and transformed our everyday lives. This collection includes works by Isaac Asimov, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Jean Henri Fabre, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Jay Gould, Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, William James, Ernest Nagel, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Lewis Thomas, H.G. Wells, and others.

Future Science

Future Science PDF Author: Max Brockman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191628182
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The next wave of science writing is here. Editor Max Brockman has talent-spotted 19 young scientists, working on leading-edge research across a wide range of fields. Nearly half of them are women, and all of them are great communicators: their passion and excitement makes this collection a wonderfully invigorating read. We hear from an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the solar system (and the universe); from the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory about why we keep making the same mistakes; from a Cambridge lab about DNA synthesis; from the Tanzanian savannah about what lies behind attractiveness; we hear about how to breed plants to withstand disease, about ways to extract significance from the Interne's enormous datasets, about oceanography, neuroscience, microbiology, and evolutionary psychology.

Essays in Science

Essays in Science PDF Author: Albert Einstein
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453204792
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
The Authorized Albert Einstein Archives Edition: An homage to the men and women of science, and an exposition of Einstein’s place in scientific history. In this fascinating collection of articles and speeches, Albert Einstein reflects not only on the scientific method at work in his own theoretical discoveries, but also eloquently expresses a great appreciation for his scientific contemporaries and forefathers, including Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr. While Einstein is renowned as one of the foremost innovators of modern science, his discoveries uniquely his own, through his own words it becomes clear that he viewed himself as only the most recent in a long line of scientists driven to create new ways of understanding the world and to prove their scientific theories. Einstein’s thoughtful examinations explain the “how” of scientific innovations both in his own theoretical work and in the scientific method established by those who came before him. This authorized ebook features a new introduction by Neil Berger, PhD, and an illustrated biography of Albert Einstein, which includes rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier

I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier PDF Author: Max F. Perutz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198590279
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This collection of essays from Nobel Laureate Max Perutz explores a wide range of scientific and personal topics with insight and lucidity. It includes lively anecdotes about key figures in 20th-century science.

Hanging on to the Edges

Hanging on to the Edges PDF Author: Daniel Nettle
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783745835
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
I love this book. I love the essays and I love the overall form. Reading these essays feels like entering into the best kind of intellectual conversation—it makes me want to write essays in reply. It makes me want to get everyone else reading it. I almost never feel this enthusiastic about a book. —Rebecca Saxe, Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT What does it mean to be a scientist working today; specifically, a scientist whose subject matter is human life? Scientists often overstate their claim to certainty, sorting the world into categorical distinctions that obstruct rather than clarify its complexities. In this book Daniel Nettle urges the reader to unpick such distinctions—biological versus social sciences, mind versus body, and nature versus nurture—and look instead for the for puzzles and anomalies, the points of connection and overlap. These essays, converted from often humorous, sometimes autobiographical blog posts, form an extended meditation on the possibilities and frustrations of the life scientific. Pragmatically arguing from the intersection between social and biological sciences, Nettle reappraises the virtues of policy initiatives such as Universal Basic Income and income redistribution, highlighting the traps researchers and politicians are liable to encounter. This provocative, intelligent and self-critical volume is a testament to the possibilities of interdisciplinary study—whose virtues Nettle stridently defends—drawing from and having implications for a wide cross-section of academic inquiry. This will appeal to anybody curious about the implications of social and biological sciences for increasingly topical political concerns. It comes particularly recommended to Sciences and Social Sciences students and to scholars seeking to extend the scope of their field in collaboration with other disciplines.

An Idiot’s Fugitive Essays on Science

An Idiot’s Fugitive Essays on Science PDF Author: C. Truesdell
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461381851
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
When, after the agreeable fatigues of solicitation, Mrs Millamant set out a long bill of conditions subject to which she might by degrees dwindle into a wife, Mirabell offered in return the condition that he might not thereby be beyond measure enlarged into a husband. With age and experience in research come the twin dangers of dwindling into a philosopher of science while being enlarged into a dotard. The philosophy of science, I believe, should not be the preserve of senile scientists and of teachers of philosophy who have themselves never so much as understood the contents of a textbook of theoretical physics, let alone done a bit of mathematical research or even enjoyed the confidence of a creating scientist. On the latter count I run no risk: Any reader will see that I am untrained (though not altogether unread) in classroom philosophy. Of no ignorance of mine do I boast, indeed I regret it, but neither do I find this one ignorance fatal here, for few indeed of the great philosophers to explicate whose works hodiernal professors of phil osophy destroy forests of pulp were themselves so broadly and specially trained as are their scholiasts. In attempt to palliate the former count I have chosen to collect works written over the past thirty years, some of them not published before, and I include only a few very recent essays.

Science in Culture

Science in Culture PDF Author: Peter Louis Galison
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412833721
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Twenty-five years ago, Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought introduced a wide audience to his ideas. Holton argued that from ancient times to the modern period, an astonishing feature of innovative scientific work was its ability to hold, simultaneously, deep and opposite commitments of the most fundamental sort. Over the course of Holton's career, he embraced both the humanities and the sciences. Given this background, it is fitting that the explorations assembled in this volume reflect both individually and collectively Holton's dual roots. In the opening essay, Holton sums up his long engagement with Einstein and his thematic commitment to unity. The next two essays address this concern. In historicized form, Lorraine Daston returns the question of the scientific imagination to the Enlightenment period when both sciences and art feared imagination. Daston argues that the split whereby imagination was valued in the arts and loathed in the sciences is a nineteenth-century divide. James Ackerman on Leonardo da Vinci meshes perfectly with Daston's account, showing a form of imaginative intervention where it is irrelevant to draw analogies between art and science. Historians of religion Wendy Doniger and Gregory Spinner pursue the imagination into the bedroom with literary-theological representations. Science, culture, and the imagination also intersect with biologist Edward Wilson and physicist Steven Weinberg. Both tackle the big question of the unity of knowledge and worldviews from a scientific perspective while art historian Ernst Gombrich does the same from the perspective of art history. To emphasize the nitty-gritty of scientific practice, chemists Bretislav Fredrich and Dudley Herschback provide a remarkable historical tour at the boundary of chemistry and physics. In the concluding essay, historian of education Patricia Albjerg Graham addresses pedagogy head-on. In these various reflections on science, art, literature, philosophy, and education, this volume gives us a view in common: a deep and abiding respect for Gerald Holton's contribution to our understanding of science in culture. Peter Galison is Mallinckrodt Professor of History of Science and of physics at Harvard University. Stephen R. Graubard is editor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its journal, Daedalus, and professor of history emeritus at Brown University. Everett Mendelsohn is director of the History of Science Program at Harvard University.

Images of Science

Images of Science PDF Author: Bas C. Van Fraassen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226106543
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Churchland and Hooker have collected ten papers by prominent philosophers of science which challenge van Fraassen's thesis from a variety of realist perspectives. Together with van Fraassen's extensive reply . . . these articles provide a comprehensive picture of the current debate in philosophy of science between realists and anti-realists."—Jeffrey Bub and David MacCallum, Foundations of Physics Letters

Essays in Science and Philosophy

Essays in Science and Philosophy PDF Author: Alfred North Whitehead
Publisher: London ; New York : Rider
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description


Science Bought and Sold

Science Bought and Sold PDF Author: Philip Mirowski
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226538563
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
From essays examining economic welfare to the idea of scientists as agents to the digital aspects of higher education, presents a comprehensive overview of the new directions of this expanding area.