Download or read book Cosmos Culture Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context written by Steven J. Dick and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on 2012-01-27 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRINT PRODUCT--OVERSTOCK SALE -- Significantly reduced list price During the last 50 years, coincident with the Space Age, cosmic evolution has been recognized as the master narrative of the universe, history writ large. Cosmic evolution includes physical, biological, and cultural evolution, and of these the latter is by far the most rapid. In this volume, authors with diverse backgrounds in science, history, anthropology, and more, consider culture in the context of the cosmos. How does our knowledge of cosmic evolution affect terrestrial culture? Conversely, how does our knowledge of cultural evolution affect our thinking about possible cultures in the cosmos? Are life, mind, and culture of fundamental significance to the grand story of the cosmos that has generated its own self-understanding through science, rational reasoning, and mathematics? Might this lead to cultural evolution on a large enough scale to allow the universe to both create and steer itself toward its own destiny? Related products: NASA's First 50 Years: Historical Perspectives; NASA 50 Anniversary Proceedings can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/033-000-01336-1 Bringing the Future Within Reach: Celebrating 75 Years of the NASA John H. Glenn Research Center, 1941-2016 can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/033-000-01377-9 Other products produced by National Aerounautics and Space Administration (NASA) can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/agency/550

Download or read book Masks of the Universe written by Edward Harrison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-08 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the ancient Greeks the universe consisted of earth, air, fire, and water. To Saint Augustine it was the Word of God. To many modern scientists it is the dance of atoms and waves, and in years to come it may be different again. What then is the real Universe? History shows that in every age each society constructs its own universe, believing it to be the real and final Universe. Yet each universe is only a model or mask of the unknown Universe. Originally published in 2003, this book brings together fundamental scientific, philosophical, and religious issues in cosmology, raising thought-provoking questions. In every age people have pitied the universes of their ancestors, convinced that they have at last discovered the ultimate truth. Does the modern model stand at the threshold of discovering everything, or will it, like all the rest, come to be pitied?

Download or read book Cosmos Culture written by Steven J. Dick and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From GPO Bookstore's Website: Authors with diverse backgrounds in science, history, anthropology, and more, consider culture in the context of the cosmos. How does our knowledge of cosmic evolution affect terrestrial culture? Conversely, how does our knowledge of cultural evolution affect our thinking about possible cultures in the cosmos? Are life, mind, and culture of fundamental significance to the grand story of the cosmos that has generated its own self-understanding through science, rational reasoning, and mathematics? Book includes bibliographical references and an index.

Download or read book Earth Cosmos and Culture written by Oliver Tristan Dunnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of diverse British cultures of outer space, utilizing key geographical concepts such as landscape, place, and national identity. It examines the early visionary ideas of writers H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, the ambitious British space programme of the 1960s, and narrations of British cultural identity that accompanied the space missions of Helen Sharman, Beagle 2 and Tim Peake. The exploration of British cultures of outer space throughout the book helps understand the emergence of the British Interplanetary Society. It also explains its significance in pre-war and post-war periods through an analysis of the roles of influential figures such as Arthur C. Clarke and Patrick Moore. The chapters explore utopian and dystopian representations of space exploration, examine the mysterious phenomenon of UFO culture, and consider plans for humanity’s imagined future across interstellar space. Throughout the book geography is advocated as a home for critical studies of outer space, illuminating its significance in terms of the reciprocal relationships between exploration and the sublime, science and the imagination, Earth and cosmos. As an emergent field of research in the social sciences, this book makes an excellent contribution to the study of the outer space in Britain and abroad developing a distinctive kind of outer spatial geography with major implications for future teaching and research.

Download or read book Into the Cosmos written by James T. Andrews and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2011-09-25 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957 changed the course of human history. In the span of a few years, Soviets sent the first animal into space, the first man, and the first woman. These events were a direct challenge to the United States and the capitalist model that claimed ownership of scientific aspiration and achievement. The success of the space program captured the hopes and dreams of nearly every Soviet citizen and became a critical cultural vehicle in the country's emergence from Stalinism and the devastation of World War II. It also proved to be an invaluable tool in a worldwide propaganda campaign for socialism, a political system that could now seemingly accomplish anything it set its mind to. Into the Cosmos shows us the fascinating interplay of Soviet politics, science, and culture during the Khrushchev era, and how the space program became a binding force between these elements. The chapters examine the ill-fitted use of cosmonauts as propaganda props, the manipulation of gender politics after Valentina Tereshkova's flight, and the use of public interest in cosmology as a tool for promoting atheism. Other chapters explore the dichotomy of promoting the space program while maintaining extreme secrecy over its operations, space animals as media darlings, the history of Russian space culture, and the popularity of space-themed memorabilia that celebrated Soviet achievement and planted the seeds of consumerism.

Download or read book Cosmos Culture Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context written by Steven J. Dick and published by US National Aeronautics and Space Admin. This book was released on 2010-03-09 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Product Description: During the last 50 years, coincident with the Space Age, cosmic evolution has been recognized as the master narrative of the universe, history writ large. Cosmic evolution includes physical, biological, and cultural evolution, and of these the latter is by far the most rapid. In this volume, authors with diverse backgrounds in science, history, anthropology, and more, consider culture in the context of the cosmos. How does our knowledge of cosmic evolution affect terrestrial culture? Conversely, how does our knowledge of cultural evolution affect our thinking about possible cultures in the cosmos? Are life, mind, and culture of fundamental significance to the grand story of the cosmos that has generated its own self-understanding through science, rational reasoning, and mathematics? Might this lead to cultural evolution on a large enough scale to allow the universe to both create and steer itself toward its own destiny?

Download or read book Sociophysics written by Paris Arnopoulos and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New transdisciplinary studies have been appearing not only in such established areas as biochemistry or social psychology; there are presently emerging inter-scientific fields such as sociobiology, econophysics and last but not least sociophysics. The latter is a renewed attempt to combine the latest natural and social science theories and come up with significant generalisations for both. Using the powerful physics metaphor as an inertial guidance system, sociophysics emphasises the underlying similarities between all systems. This new scientific hybrid is raising much controversy as well as revealing great promise; for this reason, it has been chosen to provide the core and focus for this book. The holistic scope of this book makes it an appropriate reference work in many courses, such as: Global Ecology; Evolutionary Biology; Macroeconomics; Sociological Theory; Philosophy of Social Science; Theoretical Physics; Thermodynamics; Macro-history; Behavioural Science; General Systems Theory; and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Download or read book Lost in the Cosmos written by Walker Percy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy’s humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life’s biggest questions. One part parody and two parts philosophy, Lost in the Cosmos is an enlightening guide to the dilemmas of human existence, and an unrivaled spin on self-help manuals by one of modern America’s greatest literary masters.

Download or read book Light of the Stars Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth written by Adam Frank and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Award for Science "A valuable perspective on the most important problem of our time." —Adam Becker, NPR Light of the Stars tells the story of humanity’s coming of age as we realize we might not be alone in this universe. Astrophysicist Adam Frank traces the question of alien life from the ancient Greeks to modern thinkers, and he demonstrates that recognizing the possibility of its existence might be the key to save us from climate change. With clarity and conviction, Light of the Stars asks the consequential question: What can the likely presence of life on other planets tell us about our own fate?

Download or read book Mind and Cosmos written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.

Download or read book Cosmos Culture written by National Aeronautics and Space Administration and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmic evolution, the idea that the universe and its constituent parts are constantly evolving, has become widely accepted only in the last 50 years. It is no coincidence that this acceptance parallels the span of the Space Age. Although cosmic evolution was first recognized in the physical universe early in the 20th century, with hints even earlier, the relationships among planets, stars, and galaxies, and the evolution of the universe itself, became much better known through the discoveries by planetary probes and space telescopes in the latter half of the century. It was also during the last 50 years—a century after Darwin proposed that evolution by natural selection applies to life on our own planet—that researchers from a variety of disciplines began to seriously study the possibilities of extraterrestrial life and “the biological universe.” Considering biology from this broader cosmological perspective has expanded biological thinking beyond its sample-of-one straightjacket, incorporating biology into cosmic evolution. Astrobiology is now a robust discipline even though it has yet to find any life beyond Earth. But there is a third component to cosmic evolution beyond the physical and the biological. Even if we only know of culture on one planet so far, cultural evolution has been an important part of cosmic evolution on Earth, and perhaps on many other planets. Moreover, it also dominates the other two forms of evolution in terms of its rapidity. Humans were not much different biologically 10,000 years ago, but one need only look around to see how much we have changed culturally. Yet, unlike the study of biological evolution, which has made great progress since Darwin's Origin of Species, the scientific study of cultural evolution languished after Darwin's death for the better part of a century. Only within the past few decades has significant progress been made, and concerned with advancing their fledging science, cultural evolutionists have yet to expand their thinking beyond their current planetary sample-of-one concerns. But if life and intelligence do exist beyond Earth, it is likely that culture will arise and evolve. In this volume authors with diverse backgrounds in science, history, and anthropology consider culture in the context of the cosmos, including the implications of the cosmos for our own culture.

Download or read book African Cosmos written by Christine M. Kreamer and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking scholarly publication, accompanying an exhibition organized by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, African Cosmos: Stellar Arts brings together exceptional works of art, dating from ancient times to the present, and essays by leading scholars and contemporary artists to consider African cultural astronomy: creativity and artistic practice in Africa as it is linked to celestial bodies and atmospheric phenomena. African concepts of the universe are intensely personal, placing human beings in relation to the earth and sky, and with the sun, moon, and stars. At the core of creation myths and the foundation of moral values, celestial bodies are often accorded sacred capacities and are part of the “cosmological map” that allows humans to chart their course through life.

Download or read book Astronomy written by Adam Frank and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A textbook that is not written like a textbook.

Download or read book Cosmos written by Roberta J. M. Olson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charts the human love affair with the heavens in art and astronomy, based on sound science, insightful art, and cultural history. Olson and Pasachoff also recount the story about the quest to discover the mysteries of the universe. Embellished with new information, interpretations, and anecdotes, the authors weave a rich tapestry about the interconnections in the cosmos and the efforts to understand them. They showcase the superstars of the firmament and universe in illustrations featuring paintings, sculpture, drawings, watercolours, prints, as well as plates from books, celestial diagrams, and astronomical photography. --Adapted from publisher description.

Download or read book Soviet Space Culture written by E. Maurer and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with the first man-made satellite 'Sputnik' in 1957 and culminating four years later with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, space became a new utopian horizon. This book explores the profound repercussions of the Soviet space exploration program on culture and everyday life in Eastern Europe, especially in the Soviet Union itself.

Download or read book People and the Sky written by Anthony Aveni and published by Thames and Hudson. This book was released on 2008-04-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anthony Aveni reveals how !Kung and Mursi hunter-gatherers depended on signals in the sky for their survival and sustenance; how Polynesian sailors navigated a seemingly limitless watery world by star bearings; how social cohesion in cultures as diverse as the Pawnee and the Inca was mirrored in celestial imagery; and how the cosmic connection between the arrangement of Chinese and Aztec cities and the constellations served as an expression of political authority." "For most of human history, people found meaning in the dance of the cosmic denizens. Today, many aspects of this intimate contact between daily life and what happens in the sky have disappeared. Did our ancestors have an understanding of the cosmos that we ourselves lack? How and why did it all happen? These are the questions addressed in this engaging and erudite book."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Culture and Cosmos Vol 1 Number 1 written by Nicholas Campion and published by . This book was released on 1997-03 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First issue of the Culture and Cosmos journal