The Taton's Orb

The Taton's Orb PDF Author: Roy Henkel
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 0738861499
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
To both his and Brak’s surprise, the stone glowed brightly for an instance and Brak abruptly halted his advance. Eyes wide in fear, Urak stared confusingly at Brak. His adversary froze into a zombie-like state, his eyes filled with indescribable terror. Urak, still holding the stone, curiously waved his hand in front of Brak’s face. Receiving no response, and recognizing an opportunity to ensure his own survival, Urak withdrew his short dagger from its sheath and plunged it into Brak’s belly. The dagger penetrated the yellowish skin without resistance and Brak fell dead to the floor with only a quiet moan escaping his lips. The stone pulsed brightly at the deed and Urak experienced a sense of power flowing through his limbs. He had never before experienced such satisfaction. At that moment he realized that he had a weapon whose secret would gain him the power that he had always craved. This secret would assure his rise to chieftain of the clans.

The Taton's Orb

The Taton's Orb PDF Author: Roy Henkel
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 0738861499
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
To both his and Brak’s surprise, the stone glowed brightly for an instance and Brak abruptly halted his advance. Eyes wide in fear, Urak stared confusingly at Brak. His adversary froze into a zombie-like state, his eyes filled with indescribable terror. Urak, still holding the stone, curiously waved his hand in front of Brak’s face. Receiving no response, and recognizing an opportunity to ensure his own survival, Urak withdrew his short dagger from its sheath and plunged it into Brak’s belly. The dagger penetrated the yellowish skin without resistance and Brak fell dead to the floor with only a quiet moan escaping his lips. The stone pulsed brightly at the deed and Urak experienced a sense of power flowing through his limbs. He had never before experienced such satisfaction. At that moment he realized that he had a weapon whose secret would gain him the power that he had always craved. This secret would assure his rise to chieftain of the clans.

The Man in the Moone

The Man in the Moone PDF Author: Francis Godwin
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1460401301
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Arguably the first work of science fiction in English, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone was published in 1638, pseudonymously and posthumously. The novel, which tells the story of Domingo Gonsales, a Spaniard who flies to the moon by geese power and encounters an advanced lunar civilization, had an enormous impact on the European imagination for centuries after its initial publication. With its discussion of advanced ideas about astronomy and cosmology, the novel is an important example of both popular fiction and scientific speculation. This Broadview Edition includes a critical introduction that places the text in its scientific and historical contexts. The rich selection of appendices includes related writings by Godwin and his predecessors and contemporaries on magnetism, human flight, voyages to real and unreal lands, and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

The Science of Pleasure

The Science of Pleasure PDF Author: Harvie Ferguson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134949871
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
In this rich and original work, the author argues that science is the highest expression of bourgeois thought and whilst it may have liberated mankind, it has also devised new forms of repression, discipline and control.

Planets, Stars, and Orbs

Planets, Stars, and Orbs PDF Author: Edward Grant
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521565097
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 852

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Book Description
Edward Grant describes the extraordinary range of themes, ideas, and arguments that constituted scholastic cosmology for approximately five hundred years, from around 1200 to 1700. Primary emphasis is placed on the world as a whole, what might lie beyond it, and the celestial region, which extended from the Moon to the outermost convex surface of the cosmos.

The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution PDF Author: Steven Shapin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639848X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This scholarly and accessible study presents “a provocative new reading” of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advances in scientific inquiry (Kirkus Reviews). In The Scientific Revolution, historian Steven Shapin challenges the very idea that any such a “revolution” ever took place. Rejecting the narrative that a new and unifying paradigm suddenly took hold, he demonstrates how the conduct of science emerged from a wide array of early modern philosophical agendas, political commitments, and religious beliefs. In this analysis, early modern science is shown not as a set of disembodied ideas, but as historically situated ways of knowing and doing. Shapin shows that every principle identified as the modernizing essence of science—whether it’s experimentalism, mathematical methodology, or a mechanical conception of nature—was in fact contested by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practitioners with equal claims to modernity. Shapin argues that this contested legacy is nevertheless rightly understood as the origin of modern science, its problems as well as its acknowledged achievements. This updated edition includes a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. “An excellent book.” —Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part A, Tycho Brahe to Newton

Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Part A, Tycho Brahe to Newton PDF Author: R. Taton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521542050
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
The International Astronomical Union and the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science have sponsored a major work on the history of astronomy, which the Press publishs are in four volumes, three of which will be divided into two parts. Publication commenced with volume 4, part A. The history of astronomy has never been tackled on this scale and depth and this major synthesis breaks wholly new ground. The individual chapters of each volume have been prepared by leading experts in every field of the history of astronomy.

Knowledge and Cosmos

Knowledge and Cosmos PDF Author: Robert K. DeKosky
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761874038
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
In Knowledge and Cosmos: Development and Decline of the Medieval Perspective, 2nd Edition, Robert K. DeKosky focuses on issues in astronomy, cosmology, physics, matter theory, philosophy, and theology vital to the “Copernican Revolution.” This book describes efforts among individuals advocating different world views to fit new ideas compatibly into broad perspectives reflecting four traditional patterns of interpretation: teleological, mechanical, occultist, and mathematico-descriptive. These four modes had guided medieval accounts of heavenly phenomena, material process, and motion. The teleological explanation, prevalent in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, posited “final causes” (ends or goals toward which objects strove or attempted to become). Ancient classical atomists had emphasized strictly mechanical explanations, invoking direct material contact and collision of moving matter as agents of physical change. Traditions of astrology, magic, and alchemy embraced an occultist pattern of interpretation—citing hidden forces opaque to both sensual detection and rational understanding as explanations of various phenomena. Finally, the mathematico-descriptive approach interpreted natural phenomena according to geometric or arithmetic relationships; unlike the other three, this did not involve causal explanation of a process. Part I discusses development of the four patterns in the ancient period and their uneasy medieval relationships with each other and with basic Judaeo-Muslim-Christian exigencies of faith. Theory of the heavens follows, including the mathematico-descriptive approach of Ptolemaic astronomy, the teleological and mechanical cosmology of Aristotle, and occultist interpretations of astrologers and magicians. Part I then turns to matter and materiality, discussing differences among the mechanical philosophy of classical atomism, teleological emphases in Aristotle’s material theory, and occultist assumptions of some alchemists. Finally, Part I analyzes conceptions of motion, focusing on Aristotelian interpretations and critical commentaries thereon during the Middle Ages. Part II relates struggles of leading early-modern figures to adapt new concepts (e.g., Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomy/cosmology, Galileo’s inertial theories of motion, and Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbit) to an allegiance to two or more of the four patterns of interpretation. By this approach, it identifies decreasing dependence on teleological explanation of physical phenomena as crucial to decline of medieval interpretations of those phenomena, followed by rejection of teleology in the natural philosophy of Descartes, and subsequent fruitful confluence of the mechanical, mathematico-descriptive, and occultist patterns in the physics and cosmology of Isaac Newton.

Heliocentrism

Heliocentrism PDF Author:
Publisher: PediaPress
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description


The Ages of Two-faced Janus

The Ages of Two-faced Janus PDF Author: Tabitta Van Nouhuys
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004112049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
This volume deals with the tracts - Latin and vernacular - published in the Netherlands on the comets of 1577 and 1618. Central to the book is the question of how these cometary appearances influenced the Aristotelian world view. This is the first lengthy examination of the decline of Aristotelian cosmology in the Netherlands. Its demonstration of the connection between cosmological and political views renders the book useful to historians of general Dutch history, as well as historians of science.

History of Astronomy

History of Astronomy PDF Author: John Lankford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136508341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description
This Encyclopedia traces the history of the oldest science from the ancient world to the space age in over 300 entries by leading experts.