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Author: Martín López Corredoira
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1612336345
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
This book gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in decline. After centuries of great achievements, the exhaustion of new forms and fatigue have reached our culture in all of its manifestations including the pure sciences. Our society is saturated with knowledge which does not offer people any sense in their lives. There is a loss of ideals in the search for great truths and a shift towards an anodyne specialized industry whose main goal is the sustenance and procreation of an endogamic professional caste. A wide audience of educated people interested in these topics will most likely respond to the ideas expressed here as things they have thought about or observed, but have not dared to say out loud.
Author: Martín López Corredoira
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1612336345
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in decline. After centuries of great achievements, the exhaustion of new forms and fatigue have reached our culture in all of its manifestations including the pure sciences. Our society is saturated with knowledge which does not offer people any sense in their lives. There is a loss of ideals in the search for great truths and a shift towards an anodyne specialized industry whose main goal is the sustenance and procreation of an endogamic professional caste. A wide audience of educated people interested in these topics will most likely respond to the ideas expressed here as things they have thought about or observed, but have not dared to say out loud.
Author: John Horgan
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465050859
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.
Author: Andrew Holster
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1627340769
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Modern science is in unprecedented crisis. It is a crisis at many levels, continuous with larger crises of modern society. It is a crisis for the vocation of the scientist working within the modern institutionalised structures of science. It is a crisis for our capacity to use science benevolently to help solve larger material, organisational, and ultimately political problems of the modern era. And it is a crisis for philosophy, for the role of natural science to help inform our world-view. The Death of Science is an account of deeper causes of this malaise. It starts by taking up the reins of López Corredoira's (2013) The Twilight of the Scientific Age, a recent critique that concludes with modern science on its death bed. It dissects key themes in detail, illustrated in the same frank style, drawing on personal examples. It starts with deep issues in the philosophy of science, recounting failed modern concepts of scientific progress, method and truth, going on to failures of peer review and gate-keeping as quality control systems, the domination of propaganda and marketing channels as the critical tools for professional success, and the major outcome for creative scientists themselves: the destruction of scientific creativity and exclusion of heterodox thinkers in this degraded environment. It connects the behavioural symptoms with a psycho-social analysis of the bureaucratic mode of organisation under which science, like all other modern vocations, is now subsumed. The account supports López Corredoira's appraisal, which sees a modern science industry driven by greed and ambition, repressing imagination and freedom, destructive of novelty and diversity of ideas, controlled by bureaucratic-academic power hierarchies. While science is irrevocably corrupted by its modern mass-institutionalisation, the true spirit of science can only be sustained by individuals with a real vocation as scientists, or natural philosophers, who seek understanding and meaning and wisdom, rather than technocratic specialisation and careers. But it is increasingly impossible for scientists to withstand forces of professional conformity, and maintain their personal sense of value. A number of current controversies in some core sciences are also discussed, and it is argued that the greatest revelations of real science are yet to come. While Establishment Science has locked itself into dogmatic paradigms, the failures of present theories show that we are really on the cusp of major revolutions, spanning sciences of physics and cosmology, information and intelligence, biology and evolution, and mind and consciousness. If these are realised, they will profoundly change our understanding of the nature of the world and ourselves. But any such revolutions challenge a Science Establishment locked into the self-interest of its power-brokers, and are unlikely to occur except through independent scientists working outside the institutional system. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the place of independent scientists.
Author: David Archibald
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
ISBN: 1621571580
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Baby boomers enjoyed the most benign period in human history: fifty years of relative peace, cheap energy, plentiful grain supply, and a warming climate due to the highest solar activity for 8,000 years. The party is over—prepare for the twilight of abundance.
Author: John David Ebert
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Brian Swimme, RalphAbraham, Stanislav Grof,Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, LynnMargulis, Terence McKenna, and WilliamIrwin Thompson present their ideasconcerning the evolution of consciousness.
Author: Mark Wolverton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429953284
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
A Life in Twilight reveals the least-known and most enigmatic period of J. Robert Oppenheimer's life, from the public humiliation he endured after the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission's investigation into his alleged communist leanings and connections to his death in 1967. It covers Oppenheimer's continued work as a scientist and philosopher and head of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, his often controversial public appearances, as well as parts of his private life. What emerges is a portrait of a man who was toppled from the highest echelons of politics and society, had to see his honor and name blackened, but succeeded in maintaining his dignity and rebuilding a shattered life, although he never truly recovered from the McCarthy-inspired persecution he suffered. Previously unpublished FBI files round out the picture and cast a sinister cloud over Oppenheimer's final years, during which he remained under occasional surveillance. Mark Wolverton has succeeded in presenting an evenhanded and very well- researched account of a life that ended in twilight. It reads like a written version of the acclaimed film Good Night, and Good Luck, and indeed Murrow's interview with Oppenheimer is one of the central elements of the story. A Life in Twilight is an important exploration, not only of a prominent scientist and philosopher, but also of an unforgettable era in American history.
Author: George Marsden
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465069770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular, liberal elites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course. Their failure lost them the faith of their constituents, paving the way for a Christian revival that offered America a firm new moral vision -- one rooted in the Protestant values of the founders. A groundbreaking reappraisal of the country's spiritual reawakening, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment shows how America found new purpose at the dawn of the Cold War.
Author: Paul S. Martin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520252438
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
"Paul S. Martin's innovative ideas on late quaternary extinctions and wildlife restoration have fueled one of science's most stimulating recent debates. He expounds them vividly here, and defends them eloquently. A must-read."—David Rains Wallace, author of Beasts of Eden "This is a marvelous read, by a giant in American prehistory, about one of the greatest mysteries in the earth sciences."—Tim Flannery, author of The Eternal Frontier "Whether or not you agree with Paul Martin, he has shaped how we think about our Pleistocene ancestors and their role in transforming this planet."—Ross D. E. MacPhee, Curator of Mammalogy, American Museum of Natural History
Author: Charles Robert Knight
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253339286
Category : Paleontology
Languages : en
Pages : 102
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Book Description
A new edition of a classic first book about the life of the past
Author: Andreas Blühm
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Light
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Of all the revolutionary changes brought about by the industrial age perhaps the most extraordinary and far-reaching was the transformation of light. Scientists described its hidden laws to the public for the first time. Artists found radical ways of depicting it. Inventors found new ways of making it. The lives of ordinary people changed forever as streets, shops, theaters, and their own homes were brilliantly illuminated, first by gas, and then, even more dazzlingly, by electricity. The story is told here for the first time in its entirety. The book describes the inventions still with us, like electric light, the microscope, and photography, as well as arcane reminders of a vanished world, such as the heliostat, the lithophane, and the magic lantern. It portrays a revolution in the arts: Caspar David Friedrich depicting twilight, the Impressionists conjuring up sunlight. And it debates the changing symbolism of light: the meaning of the Enlightenment, the light of God' truth, the nightmarish light of the furnace by night. Above all, it delineates the changing lives of people. Setting masterpieces of painting alongside contemporary scientific instruments, theater paraphernalia, and domestic articles, Light! captures the history of human perception, understanding, and ingenuity.
