Download or read book Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics written by Peter Damerow and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of when and how the basic concepts that characterize modern science arose in Western Europe has long been central to the history of science. This book examines the transition from Renaissance engineering and philosophy of nature to classical mechanics oriented on the central concept of velocity. For this new edition, the authors include a new discussion of the doctrine of proportions, an analysis of the role of traditional statics in the construction of Descartes' impact rules, and go deeper into the debate between Descartes and Hobbes on the explanation of refraction. They also provide significant new material on the early development of Galileo's work on mechanics and the law of fall.
Download or read book Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics written by Peter Damerow and published by Springer. This book was released on 1991-12-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of when and how the basic concepts that characterize modern science arose in Western Europe has long been central to the history of science. This book examines the transition from Renaissance engineering and philosophy of nature to classical mechanics oriented on the central concept of velocity. For this new edition, the authors include a new discussion of the doctrine of proportions, an analysis of the role of traditional statics in the construction of Descartes' impact rules, and go deeper into the debate between Descartes and Hobbes on the explanation of refraction. They also provide significant new material on the early development of Galileo's work on mechanics and the law of fall.
Download or read book Discovering the Principles of Mechanics 1600 1800 written by David Speiser and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-09-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assembles 21 essays on the history of mechanics and mathematical physics written by David Speiser. Covering a period from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, the essays discuss developments in elasticity, rigid bodies, gravitation, the principle of relativity, optics, and first principles. They examine the work of Galileo, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz, the Bernoullis, Euler, Maupertuis, and Lambert.
Download or read book Thomas Harriot and His World written by Robert Fox and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second volume of papers on Thomas Harriot edited by Professor Robert Fox is based on the annual Harriot lectures delivered at Oriel College, Oxford between 2000 and 2009. It complements the previous volume, published as Thomas Harriot: An Elizabethan Man of Science in 2000. The focus in several of the papers is on Harriot's outstanding achievements as a mathematician; others consider why he has never received the recognition accorded to his great contemporary, Galileo; others again examine his association with his entrepreneurial patron Walter Ralegh and his contributions to the intensely practical world of exploration and seamanship, as exemplified in his voyage to the coast of present-day North Carolina in 1585. The volume adds significantly to our understanding of a true Renaissance man who wrote accomplished Latin, earned the respect of Europe's leading mathematicians and astronomers, and moved easily in circles close to the English court and whose 'Brief and true report of the new found land of Virginia' (1588) was the first detailed description of America to be published in the English language.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy written by Robert Pasnau and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 1520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy comprises over fifty specially commissioned essays by experts on the philosophy of this period. Starting in the late eighth century, with the renewal of learning some centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, a sequence of chapters takes the reader through developments in many and varied fields, including logic and language, natural philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and theology. Close attention is paid to the context of medieval philosophy, with discussions of the rise of the universities and developments in the cultural and linguistic spheres. A striking feature is the continuous coverage of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian material. There are useful biographies of the philosophers, and a comprehensive bibliography. The volumes illuminate a rich and remarkable period in the history of philosophy and will be the authoritative source on medieval philosophy for the next generation of scholars and students alike.
Download or read book Reader s Guide to the History of Science written by Arne Hessenbruch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 965 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reader's Guide to the History of Science looks at the literature of science in some 550 entries on individuals (Einstein), institutions and disciplines (Mathematics), general themes (Romantic Science) and central concepts (Paradigm and Fact). The history of science is construed widely to include the history of medicine and technology as is reflected in the range of disciplines from which the international team of 200 contributors are drawn.
Download or read book Honor Fabri and the Concept of Impetus A Bridge between Conceptual Frameworks written by Michael Elazar and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-05-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the impetus-based physics of the Jesuit natural philosopher and mathematician Honoré Fabri (1608-1688), a senior representative of Jesuit scientists during the period between Galileo's death (1642) and Newton's Principia (1687). It shows how Fabri, while remaining loyal to a general Aristotelian outlook, managed to reinterpret the old concept of “impetus” in such a way as to assimilate into his physics building blocks of modern science, like Galileo’s law of fall and Descartes’ principle of inertia. This account of Fabri’s theory is a novel one, since his physics is commonly considered as a dogmatic rejection of the New Science, not essentially different from the medieval impetus theory. This book shows how New Science principles were taught in Jesuit Colleges in the 1640s, thus depicting the sophisticated manner in which new ideas were settling within the lion’s den of Catholic education.
Download or read book Truthlikeness for Multidimensional Quantitative Cognitive Problems written by I.A. Kieseppä and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers of science have produced a variety of definitions for the notion of one sentence, theory or hypothesis being closer to the truth, more verisimilar, or more truthlike than another one. The definitions put forward by philosophers presuppose at least implicitly that the subject matter with which the compared sentences, theories or hypotheses are concerned has been specified,! and the property of closeness to the truth, verisimilitude or truth likeness appearing in such definitions should be understood as closeness to informative truth about that subject matter. This monograph is concerned with a special case of the problem of defining verisimilitude, a case in which this subject matter is of a rather restricted kind. Below, I shall suppose that there is a finite number of interrelated quantities which are used for characterizing the state of some system. Scientists might arrive at different hypotheses concerning the values of such quantities in a variety of ways. There might be various theories that give different predictions (whose informativeness might differ , too) on which combinations of the values of these quantities are possible. Scientists might also have measured all or some of the quantities in question with some accuracy. Finally, they might also have combined these two methods of forming hypotheses on their values by first measuring some of the quantities and then deducing the values of some others from the combination of a theory and the measurement results.
Download or read book From Galileo s Occhialino To Optoelectronics written by Paolo Mazzoldi and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1993-09-01 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of the Conference was to emphasize the state-of-art in the development of new materials and processes for use in optoelectronics, the technological innovations and applications of optical materials and systems in different disciplines, the potential and actual transfer of technologies and industrial know-how among different countries, the perspectives of new applications and industrial needs for optical materials and systems, the need for a “forum” for cooperation between Laboratories and Industries of different countries.The papers in the proceedings discuss the complexity in nonlinear optics, potentiality of molecular optoelectronics, the development of novel optical fabrication techniques, such as sol-gel and ion implantation, of glasses and glass ceramics materials for modern optical applications, of active glasses for integrated optics, laser glasses, electrochromic coatings.
Download or read book Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science written by Pietro Daniel Omodeo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume considers contingency as a historical category resulting from the combination of various intellectual elements – epistemological, philosophical, material, as well as theological and, broadly speaking, intellectual. With contributions ranging from fields as diverse as the histories of physics, astronomy, astrology, medicine, mechanics, physiology, and natural philosophy, it explores the transformation of the notion of contingency across the late-medieval, Renaissance, and the early modern period. Underpinned by a necessitated vision of nature, seventeenth century mechanism widely identified apparent natural irregularities with the epistemological limits of a certain explanatory framework. However, this picture was preceded by, and in fact emerged from, a widespread characterization of contingency as an ontological trait of nature, typical of late-Scholastic and Renaissance science. On these bases, this volume shows how epistemological categories, which are preconditions of knowledge as “historically-situated a priori” and, seemingly, self-evident, are ultimately rooted in time. Contingency is intrinsic to scientific practice. Whether observing the behaviour of a photon, diagnosing a patient, or calculating the orbit of a distant planet, scientists face the unavoidable challenge of dealing with data that differ from their models and expectations. However, epistemological categories are not fixed in time. Indeed, there is something fundamentally different in the way an Aristotelian natural philosopher defined a wonder or a “monstrous” birth as “contingent”, a modern scientist defines the unexpected result of an experiment, and a quantum physicist the behavior of a photon. Although to each inquirer these instances appeared self-evidently contingent, each also employs the concept differently.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Galileo written by Peter Machamer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-13 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not only a hero of the scientific revolution, but after his conflict with the church, a hero of science, Galileo is today rivalled in the popular imagination only by Newton and Einstein. But what did Galileo actually do, and what are the sources of the popular image we have of him? This 1998 collection of specially-commissioned essays is unparalleled in the depth of its coverage of all facets of Galileo's work. A particular feature of the volume is the treatment of Galileo's relationship with the church. It will be of interest to philosophers, historians of science, cultural historians and those in religious studies.
Download or read book The Eye of the Master written by Matteo Pasquinelli and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A social history of AI that finally reveals its roots in the spatial computation of industrial factories and the surveillance of collective behaviour. What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence," a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage's "calculating engines" of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surveillance. The idea that AI may one day become autonomous (or "sentient", as someone thought of Google's LaMDA) is pure fantasy. Computer algorithms have always imitated the form of social relations and the organisation of labour in their own inner structure and their purpose remains blind automation. The Eye of the Master urges a new literacy on AI for scientists, journalists and new generations of activists, who should recognise that the "mystery" of AI is just the automation of labour at the highest degree, not intelligence per se.
Download or read book Reading Galileo written by Renée Raphael and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did early modern scientists interpret Galileo’s influential Two New Sciences? In 1638, Galileo was over seventy years old, blind, and confined to house arrest outside of Florence. With the help of friends and family, he managed to complete and smuggle to the Netherlands a manuscript that became his final published work, Two New Sciences. Treating diverse subjects that became the foundations of mechanical engineering and physics, this book is often depicted as the definitive expression of Galileo’s purportedly modern scientific agenda. In Reading Galileo, Renée Raphael offers a new interpretation of Two New Sciences which argues instead that the work embodied no such coherent canonical vision. Raphael alleges that it was written—and originally read—as the eclectic product of the types of discursive textual analysis and meandering descriptive practices Galileo professed to reject in favor of more qualitative scholarship. Focusing on annotations period readers left in the margins of extant copies and on the notes and teaching materials of seventeenth-century university professors whose lessons were influenced by Galileo’s text, Raphael explores the ways in which a range of early-modern readers, from ordinary natural philosophers to well-known savants, responded to Galileo. She highlights the contrast between the practices of Galileo’s actual readers, who followed more traditional, “bookish” scholarly methods, and their image, constructed by Galileo and later historians, as “modern” mathematical experimenters. Two New Sciences has not previously been the subject of such rigorous attention and analysis. Reading Galileo considerably changes our understanding of Galileo’s important work while offering a well-executed case study in the reception of an early-modern scientific classic. This important text will be of interest to a wide range of historians—of science, of scholarly practices and the book, and of early-modern intellectual and cultural history.
Download or read book Cultural Evolution written by Peter J. Richerson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, however, has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this, in this volume leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together to explore the central role of cultural evolution in different aspects of human endeavor. The contributors take as their guiding principle the idea that cultural evolution can provide an important integrating function across the various disciplines of the human sciences, as organic evolution does for biology. The benefits of adopting a cultural evolutionary perspective are demonstrated by contributions on social systems, technology, language, and religion. Topics covered include enforcement of norms in human groups, the neuroscience of technology, language diversity, and prosociality and religion. The contributors evaluate current research on cultural evolution and consider its broader theoretical and practical implications, synthesizing past and ongoing work and sketching a roadmap for future cross-disciplinary efforts. Contributors Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrea Baronchelli, Robert Boyd, Briggs Buchanan, Joseph Bulbulia, Morten H. Christiansen, Emma Cohen, William Croft, Michael Cysouw, Dan Dediu, Nicholas Evans, Emma Flynn, Pieter François, Simon Garrod, Armin W. Geertz, Herbert Gintis, Russell D. Gray, Simon J. Greenhill, Daniel B. M. Haun, Joseph Henrich, Daniel J. Hruschka, Marco A. Janssen, Fiona M. Jordan, Anne Kandler, James A. Kitts, Kevin N. Laland, Laurent Lehmann, Stephen C. Levinson, Elena Lieven, Sarah Mathew, Robert N. McCauley, Alex Mesoudi, Ara Norenzayan, Harriet Over, Jürgen Renn, Victoria Reyes-García, Peter J. Richerson, Stephen Shennan, Edward G. Slingerland, Dietrich Stout, Claudio Tennie, Peter Turchin, Carel van Schaik, Matthijs Van Veelen, Harvey Whitehouse, Thomas Widlok, Polly Wiessner, David Sloan Wilson
Download or read book Thomas Harriot written by Robyn Arianrhod and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Robyn Arianrhod shows in this new biography, the most complete to date, Thomas Harriot was a pioneer in both the figurative and literal sense. Navigational adviser and loyal friend to Sir Walter Ralegh, Harriot--whose life was almost exactly contemporaneous to Shakespeare's--took part in the first expedition to colonize Virginia in 1585. Not only was he responsible for getting Ralegh's ships safely to harbor in the New World, he was also the first European to acquire a working knowledge of an indigenous language from what is today the US, and to record in detail the local people's way of life. In addition to his groundbreaking navigational, linguistic, and ethnological work, Harriot was the first to use a telescope to map the moon's surface, and, independently of Galileo, recorded the behavior of sunspots and discovered the law of free fall. He preceded Newton in his discovery of the properties of the prism and the nature of the rainbow, to name just two more of his unsung "firsts." Indeed many have argued that Harriot was the best mathematician of his age, and one of the finest experimental scientists of all time. Yet he has remained an elusive figure. He had no close family to pass down records, and few of his letters survive. Most importantly, he never published his scientific discoveries, and not long after his death in 1621 had all but been forgotten. In recent decades, many scholars have been intent on restoring Harriot to his rightful place in scientific history, but Arianrhod's biography is the first to pull him fully into the limelight. She has done it the only way it can be done: through his science. Using Harriot's re-discovered manuscripts, Arianrhod illuminates the full extent of his scientific and cultural achievements, expertly guiding us through what makes them original and important, and the story behind them. Harriot's papers provide unique insight into the scientific process itself. Though his thinking depended on a more natural, intuitive approach than those who followed him, and who achieved the lasting fame that escaped him, Harriot helped lay the foundations of what in Newton's time would become modern physics. Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science puts a human face to scientific inquiry in the Elizabethan and Jacobean worlds, and at long last gives proper due to the life and times of one of history's most remarkable minds.
Download or read book Reworking the Bench written by F.L. Holmes and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-04-11 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book that addresses the issue of research notes for writing history of science in a comprehensive manner. Its case studies range from the early modern period to present and cover a broad range of different disciplines. The contributions are based on papers presented at the workshop entitled "Reworking the Bench: Laboratory Notebooks in the History of Science", held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin or written after the workshop.
Download or read book Model Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery written by L. Magnani and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume is based on the papers that were presented at the Interna tional Conference Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery (MBR'98), held at the Collegio Ghislieri, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in December 1998. The papers explore how scientific thinking uses models and explanatory reasoning to produce creative changes in theories and concepts. The study of diagnostic, visual, spatial, analogical, and temporal rea soning has demonstrated that there are many ways of performing intelligent and creative reasoning that cannot be described with the help only of tradi tional notions of reasoning such as classical logic. Traditional accounts of scientific reasoning have restricted the notion of reasoning primarily to de ductive and inductive arguments. Understanding the contribution of model ing practices to discovery and conceptual change in science requires ex panding scientific reasoning to include complex forms of creative reasoning that are not always successful and can lead to incorrect solutions. The study of these heuristic ways of reasoning is situated at the crossroads of philoso phy, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and logic; that is, at the heart of cognitive science. There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model based reasoning to be considered in this book. The models are intended as in terpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations. The models are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain.
