Download or read book Freezing Physics written by Dirk van Delft and published by History of Science and Scholar. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1908, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853–1926) liquefied helium for the first time, briefly rendering his Dutch laboratory "the coldest place on earth." Freezing Physics is the first book to tell the story of Leiden University’s famed cryogenics laboratory and the man behind it, whose scientific accomplishments earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1913.The central question in this book is how Kamerlingh Onnes was able to succeed so brilliantly in developing his cryogenics laboratory – undoubtedly an exceptional feat in terms of its scale and its almost industrial approach in the Netherlands of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A related question is what determined his success – his abilities as a scientist, his organisational talent, or his personality?This fascinating portrayal of Kamerlingh Onnes, the man and the scientist, traces his storied career from his first experiments with helium to his later work that opened up unexplored territories of extreme cold, magnetism, and thermodynamics — and cleared the path for the eventual discovery of superconductivity in 1911. Dirk van Delft studied physics at the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory. He is director of Museum Boerhaave for the History of Science and Medicine in Leiden and professor in the history of science at Leiden University.

Download or read book The Calvinist Copernicans written by R. H. Vermij and published by Edita Publishing House of the Royal. This book was released on 2002 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it was published in 1543, Copernicus's new astronomy had an enormous impact on intellectual life in early modern Europe, but the reception of his new ideas differed fundamentally from one country to another. Rienk Vermij discusses how—unlike in Roman Catholic lands—discussion in the heavily Calvinist Dutch Republic was initially dominated by humanist scholars who judged Copernicus's work on its mathematical merits. Yet even in this environment, it could not escape eventual philosophical, religious, and political controversies. This book shows how Copernicus's astronomy changed from an alternative cosmology into an established worldview in the Dutch Republic.