Download or read book Einstein s Clocks and Poincare s Maps Empires of Time written by Peter Galison and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-09-14 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others . . . Galison has unearthed fascinating material." ("New York Times").
Download or read book Einstein s Clocks Poincar s Maps written by Peter Galison and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2003 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Esteemed historian of science Galison has culled new information from photos, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time. Illustrations.
Download or read book Einstein s Clocks and Poincare s Maps Empires of Time written by Peter Galison and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-09-14 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others . . . Galison has unearthed fascinating material." ("New York Times").
Download or read book Einstein s Clocks and Poincare s Maps Empires of Time written by Peter Galison and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "More than a history of science; it is a tour de force in the genre." —New York Times Book Review A dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps is "part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others.…Galison has unearthed fascinating material" (New York Times). Clocks and trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two giants at the foundations of modern science were converging, step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure German physicist experimenting with measuring time using telegraph networks and with the coordination of clocks at train stations; and the renowned mathematician Henri Poincaré, president of the French Bureau of Longitude, mapping time coordinates across continents. Each found that to understand the newly global world, he had to determine whether there existed a pure time in which simultaneity was absolute or whether time was relative. Esteemed historian of science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time.
Download or read book The Physics of Wall Street written by James Owen Weatherall and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young scholar tells the story of the physicists and mathematicians who created the models that have become the basis of modern finance and argues that these models are the "solution" to--not the source of--our current economic woes.
Download or read book Einstein and the Quantum written by A. Douglas Stone and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of Albert Einstein's role as the father of quantum theory Einstein and the Quantum reveals for the first time the full significance of Albert Einstein's contributions to quantum theory. Einstein famously rejected quantum mechanics, observing that God does not play dice. But, in fact, he thought more about the nature of atoms, molecules, and the emission and absorption of light—the core of what we now know as quantum theory—than he did about relativity. A compelling blend of physics, biography, and the history of science, Einstein and the Quantum shares the untold story of how Einstein—not Max Planck or Niels Bohr—was the driving force behind early quantum theory. It paints a vivid portrait of the iconic physicist as he grappled with the apparently contradictory nature of the atomic world, in which its invisible constituents defy the categories of classical physics, behaving simultaneously as both particle and wave. And it demonstrates how Einstein's later work on the emission and absorption of light, and on atomic gases, led directly to Erwin Schrödinger's breakthrough to the modern form of quantum mechanics. The book sheds light on why Einstein ultimately renounced his own brilliant work on quantum theory, due to his deep belief in science as something objective and eternal.
Download or read book The Dilemmas of an Upright Man written by J. L. Heilbron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this moving and eloquent portrait, John Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. With great understanding, he shows how Max Planck suffered morally and intellectually as his lifelong habit of service to his country and to physics was confronted by the realities of World War I and the brutalities of the Third Reich. In an afterword written for this edition, Heilbron weighs the recurring questions among historians and scientists about the costs to others, and to Planck himself, of the painful choices he faced in attempting to build an “ark” to carry science and scientists through the storms of Nazism.
Download or read book A Tenth of a Second written by Jimena Canales and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was profound. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, A Tenth of a Second sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries. Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies—telegraphy, photography, cinematography—Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this “perceptual moment” throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Astronomers and physicists struggled to control the profound consequences of results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general inquiry into time, consciousness, and sensory experience that involved rethinking the contributions of Descartes and Kant. Considering its impact on much longer time periods and featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others, A Tenth of a Second is ultimately an important contribution to history and a novel perspective on modernity.
Download or read book History of the Hour written by Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text provides an overview of the history of the mechanical clock and its effects on European society from the late Middle Ages to the industrial revolution. The book provides a discussion of how mechanical clocks functioned in cities and dispels many
Download or read book Intelligent Love written by Marga Vicedo and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the History of Science Society's 2022 Davis Prize How one mother challenged the medical establishment and misconceptions about autistic children and their parents In the early 1960s, Massachusetts writer and homemaker Clara Park and her husband took their 3-year-old daughter, Jessy, to a specialist after noticing that she avoided connection with others. Following the conventional wisdom of the time, the psychiatrist diagnosed Jessy with autism and blamed Clara for Jessy’s isolation. Experts claimed Clara was the prototypical “refrigerator mother,” a cold, intellectual parent who starved her children of the natural affection they needed to develop properly. Refusing to accept this, Clara decided to document her daughter’s behaviors and the family’s engagement with her. In 1967, she published her groundbreaking memoir challenging the refrigerator mother theory and carefully documenting Jessy’s development. Clara’s insights and advocacy encouraged other parents to seek education and support for their autistic children. Meanwhile, Jessy would work hard to expand her mother’s world, and ours. Drawing on previously unexamined archival sources and firsthand interviews, science historian Marga Vicedo illuminates the story of how Clara Park and other parents fought against medical and popular attitudes toward autism while presenting a rich account of major scientific developments in the history of autism in the US. Intelligent Love is a fierce defense of a mother’s right to love intelligently, the value of parents’ firsthand knowledge about their children, and an individual’s right to be valued by society.
Download or read book Objectivity written by Lorraine Daston and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences — and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences — from anatomy to crystallography — are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity — or truth-to-nature or trained judgment — is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity — and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.
Download or read book Einstein in Love written by Dennis Overbye and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-10-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Einstein in Love, Dennis Overbye has written the first profile of the great scientist to focus exclusively on his early adulthood, when his major discoveries were made. It reveals Einstein to be very much a young man of his time-draft dodger, self-styled bohemian, poet, violinist, and cocky, charismatic genius who left personal and professional chaos in his wake. Drawing upon hundreds of unpublished letters and a decade of research, Einstein in Love is a penetrating portrait of the modern era's most influential thinker.
Download or read book Einstein s War written by Matthew Stanley and published by Viking. This book was released on 2019 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Stanley is a storyteller par excellence."--The Washington Post Kirkus Review starred review; Publishers Weekly starred review; Booklist starred review The birth of a world-changing idea in the middle of a bloodbath Einstein's War is a riveting exploration of both the beauty of scientific creativity and enduring horrors of human nature. These two great forces battle in a story that culminates with a victory now a century old, the mind-bending theory of general relativity. Few recognize how the Great War, the industrialized slaughter that bled Europe from 1914 to 1918, shaped Einstein's life and work. While Einstein never held a rifle, he formulated general relativity blockaded in Berlin, literally starving. He lost fifty pounds in three months, unable to communicate with his most important colleagues. Some of those colleagues fought against rabid nationalism; others were busy inventing chemical warfare--being a scientist trapped you in the power plays of empire. Meanwhile, Einstein struggled to craft relativity and persuade the world that it was correct. This was, after all, the first complete revision of our conception of the universe since Isaac Newton, and its victory was far from sure. Scientists seeking to confirm Einstein's ideas were arrested as spies. Technical journals were banned as enemy propaganda. Colleagues died in the trenches. Einstein was separated from his most crucial ally by barbed wire and U-boats. This ally was the Quaker astronomer and Cambridge don A. S. Eddington, who would go on to convince the world of the truth of relativity and the greatness of Einstein. In May of 1919, when Europe was still in chaos from the war, Eddington led a globe-spanning expedition to catch a fleeting solar eclipse for a rare opportunity to confirm Einstein's bold prediction that light has weight. It was the result of this expedition--the proof of relativity, as many saw it--that put Einstein on front pages around the world. Matthew Stanley's epic tale is a celebration of how bigotry and nationalism can be defeated and of what science can offer when they are.
Download or read book The Investigation of Difficult Things written by Peter Michael Harman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-07 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of twenty original essays on the history of science and mathematics. The topics covered embrace the main themes of Whiteside's scholarly work, emphasising Newtonian topics: mathematics and astronomy to Newton; Newton's manuscripts; Newton's Principia; Newton and eighteenth-century mathematics and physics; after Newton: optics and dynamics. The focus of these themes gives the volume considerable coherence. This volume of essays makes available important original work on Newton and the history of the exact sciences. This volume has been published in honour of D. T. Whiteside, famous for his edition of The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton.
Download or read book The Principles of Mathematical Physics written by Henri Poincaré and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-04-10 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You will marvel at these principles of mathematical physics written by Henri Poincare, one of the most famous French mathematicians. Contents: History of Mathematical Physics, The Present Crisis of Mathematical Physics, The Future of Mathematical Physics.
Download or read book Galileo Unbound written by David D. Nolte and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-12 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes. This book tells the history of spaces of expanding dimension and increasing abstraction and how they continue today to give new insight into the physics of complex systems. Galileo published the first modern law of motion, the Law of Fall, that was ideal and simple, laying the foundation upon which Newton built the first theory of dynamics. Early in the twentieth century, geometry became the cause of motion rather than the result when Einstein envisioned the fabric of space-time warped by mass and energy, forcing light rays to bend past the Sun. Possibly more radical was Feynman's dilemma of quantum particles taking all paths at once — setting the stage for the modern fields of quantum field theory and quantum computing. Yet as concepts of motion have evolved, one thing has remained constant, the need to track ever more complex changes and to capture their essence, to find patterns in the chaos as we try to predict and control our world.
Download or read book Thing Knowledge written by Davis Baird and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-02-10 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, Thing Knowledge demands that we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more.
