Download or read book Kelvin Life Labours and Legacy written by Raymond Flood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "On the 23rd of December 1907, with all the pomp that the British Empire could muster, William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs was buried in Westminster Abbey beside the nation's most venerated scientist, Sir Isaac Newton. In his lifetime Thomson was seen as the most important natural philosopher of the Victorian age, but the waxing and waning of the twentieth century and the supplanting of classical physics have eroded his reputation, so that for many scientists he is remembered as little more than a unit of temperature." "This collection of essays seeks to reevaluate and rehabilitate Lord Kelvin, setting both the man and his work in historical and scientific context. Distinctive in bringing the expertise of a range of authors, historians of science and of mathematics, physicists, mathematicians, and engineers to bear on Kelvin's life, labours, and legacy, this text is suitable for those with interests in any of these areas. The diversity of contributors in itself testifies to the extent of Kelvin's work, and will enable the reader to view the subject from a variety of perspectives, each of which complements and enriches the others, although each essay is self contained and can be read independently."--Résumé de l'éditeur.
Download or read book Kelvin Thermodynamics and the Natural World written by M.W. Collins and published by WIT Press. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume looks afresh at the life and works of Lord Kelvin including his standing and relationships with Charles Darwin, T. S Huxley and the X-club, thereby throwing new light on the nineteenth-century conflict between the British energy and biology specialists. It focuses on two principal issues. Firstly, there is the contribution made by Kelvin to the formulation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, both personal and in the content of the scientific communications exchanged with other workers, such as Joule and Clausius. Secondly, there is Kelvin’s impact on the wider field of science such as thermoelectricity and geology (determination of the age of the earth). Of late a number of studies and initiatives, including the Centenary celebrations of Kelvin’s death and exhibits such as that of the ‘Revolutionary Scientist’ in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, have been undertaken aiding the redefinition of Kelvin’s greatness and achievements. The book also raises awareness to ‘improve our approach to the teaching of elementary thermodynamics by attempting to empathise with Kelvin’s perspective’. It is completed by a full biography, overviews of various monuments to his memory, and short ‘Stories in Pictures’ on the Atlantic cable, Maxwell’s Demon, the universities associated with the development of thermodynamics and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Scientists and engineers with an interest in thermodynamics and anyone interested in the work of Lord Kelvin will find benefit in Kelvin, Thermodynamics and the Natural World.
Download or read book Western Technology and China s Industrial Development written by Hsien-ch'un Wang and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-04-22 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how steam engine technology was transferred into nineteenth-century China in the second half of the nineteenth century by focusing on the transmission of knowledge and skills. It takes on the long-term problem in historiography that puts too much emphasis on politics but ignores the techno-scientific and institutional requirements for launching such an endeavor. It examines how translations broke linguistic and conceptual barriers and brought new a understanding of heat to the Chinese readership. It also explores how the Fuzhou Navy Yard’s shipbuilding and training program trained China’s first generation of shipbuilding workers and engineers. It argues that conservatism against technology was not to blame for China’s slow development in steamship building. Rather, it was government officials’ failure to realize the scale of institutional and techno-scientific changes required in importing and disperse new knowledge and skills.
Download or read book Vector written by Robyn Arianrhod and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The stars of the latest book by award-winning science writer and mathematician Robyn Arianrhod are unlikely celebrities--vectors and tensors. If you took a high school physics course, the word "vector" might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, say; or of cross products, a special kind of multiplication using a bespoke table and a right-hand rule. You might also remember the introductory definition of a vector as a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. Velocity--for example, 25 miles per hour northwest--is a vector; speed, such as 25 miles per hour, is not. Put another way, a velocity vector in space contains not one number, but three-a measurement of speed along each of three dimensions. It sounds simple, in hindsight--yet, as Arianrhod shows in this intriguing story, the idea of a single symbol expressing several things at once is a sophisticated one, millennia in the making. Vectors are examples of an even more sophisticated idea, the tensor. And it's not just space that vectors and tensors can represent, but information, too. Which means that whenever you use a search engine, say, or AI bot, computer graphics, or a host of other digital applications, vectors and tensors are there somewhere in the software. As for physics, there's much more to it than velocities and simple forces! Arianrhod shows how the discovery of vectors and tensors enabled physicists and mathematicians to think brand new thoughts-such as Maxwell did when he ushered in the wireless electromagnetic age, and Einstein when he predicted the curving of four-dimensional space-time and the existence of gravitational waves. Quantum theory, too, makes fine use of these ideas. In other words, vectors and tensors have been critical not only to the way we see our universe, but also to the invention of Wi-Fi, GPS, micro-technology, and so much else that we take for granted today. In exploring the history and significance of vectors and tensors-and introducing the fascinating people who gave them to us--Arianrhod takes readers on an extraordinary, five-thousand-year journey through the human imagination. A celebration of an idea, Vector shows the genius required to imagine the world in new dimensions-and how a clever mathematical construct can direct the future of discovery"--
Download or read book John Stewart Bell and Twentieth Century Physics written by Andrew Whitaker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-08 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Stewart Bell (1928-1990) was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century physics, famous for his work on the fundamental aspects of the century's most important theory, quantum mechanics. While the debate over quantum theory between the supremely famous physicists, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, appeared to have become sterile in the 1930s, Bell was able to revive it and to make crucial advances - Bell's Theorem or Bell's Inequalities. He was able to demonstrate a contradiction between quantum theory and essential elements of pre-quantum theory - locality and causality. The book gives a non-mathematical account of Bell's relatively impoverished upbringing in Belfast and his education. It describes his major contributions to quantum theory, but also his important work in the physics of accelerators, and nuclear and elementary particle physics.
Download or read book James Clerk Maxwell written by Raymond Flood and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Clerk Maxwell (1831 -1879) was one of the most important mathematical physicists of all time. In scientific terms his immortality is enshrined in electromagnetism and Maxwell's equations, but as this book shows, there was much more to Maxwell than electromagnetism, both in terms of his science and his wider life.
Download or read book The History of Mathematics A Source Based Approach Volume 2 written by June Barrow-Green and published by American Mathematical Society. This book was released on 2022-05-26 with total page 703 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The History of Mathematics: A Source-Based Approach is a comprehensive history of the development of mathematics. This, the second volume of a two-volume set, takes the reader from the invention of the calculus to the beginning of the twentieth century. The initial discoverers of calculus are given thorough investigation, and special attention is also paid to Newton's Principia. The eighteenth century is presented as primarily a period of the development of calculus, particularly in differential equations and applications of mathematics. Mathematics blossomed in the nineteenth century and the book explores progress in geometry, analysis, foundations, algebra, and applied mathematics, especially celestial mechanics. The approach throughout is markedly historiographic: How do we know what we know? How do we read the original documents? What are the institutions supporting mathematics? Who are the people of mathematics? The reader learns not only the history of mathematics, but also how to think like a historian. The two-volume set was designed as a textbook for the authors' acclaimed year-long course at the Open University. It is, in addition to being an innovative and insightful textbook, an invaluable resource for students and scholars of the history of mathematics. The authors, each among the most distinguished mathematical historians in the world, have produced over fifty books and earned scholarly and expository prizes from the major mathematical societies of the English-speaking world.
Download or read book The Great Mathematicians written by Raymond Flood and published by Arcturus Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did Florence Nightingale introduce pie charts? How did Lewis Carroll regard Pythagoras? Who learned calculus from her nursery wallpaper? Spanning from the ancient world to the modern age, The Great Mathematicians tells fascinating and unusual tales of the men and women who transformed mathematics. We meet the mathematician who knew eight languages by the time he was 11, the one who was sent to jail for gambling and the one who published a lot yet never existed. As well as providing rich bibliographic detail, Professors Raymond Flood and Robin Wilson explain various theorems using concise and accessible language. These include the Pythagorean theorem, Gödel's Incompleteness theorem, Fermat's Last Theorem and many more. Flood and Wilson are both former presidents of the British Society for the History of Mathematics and are uniquely qualified to lay out this incredible tale. This entertaining and rigorously accurate book presents mathematics with a human face, celebrating the achievements of the greatest mathematicians across history.
Download or read book George Gabriel Stokes written by Mark McCartney and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features a biographical sketch of the British mathematician and physicist George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903), presented by the School of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. Notes that Stokes developed the modern theory of motion of viscous fluids.
Download or read book Quantum Nonlocality and Reality written by Mary Bell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collaboration between distinguished physicists and philosophers of physics, this important anthology surveys the deep implications of Bell's nonlocality theorem.
Download or read book Archibald Liversidge FRS written by Roy MacLeod and published by Sydney University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-14 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Archibald Liversidge first arrived at Sydney University in 1872 as reader in geology and assistant in the laboratory he had about ten students and two rooms in the main building. In 1874 he became professor of geology and mineralogy and by 1879 he had persuaded the senate to open a faculty of science. He became its first dean in 1882. Liversidge also played a major role in the setting up of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science which held its first congress in 1888. For anyone interested in Archibald Liversidge, his contribution to crystallography, mineral chemistry, chemical geology, strategic minerals policy and a wider field of colonial science.
Download or read book The Birth of Energy written by Cara New Daggett and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-13 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Birth of Energy Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resource-based concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work. As Daggett shows, thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion, in part through a hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans. By systematically excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only by transforming the politics of work—most notably, the veneration of waged work—will we be able to confront the Anthropocene's energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled.
Download or read book Mathematicians and their Gods written by Snezana Lawrence and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-07-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To open a newspaper or turn on the television it would appear that science and religion are polar opposites - mutually exclusive bedfellows competing for hearts and minds. There is little indication of the rich interaction between religion and science throughout history, much of which continues today. From ancient to modern times, mathematicians have played a key role in this interaction. This is a book on the relationship between mathematics and religious beliefs. It aims to show that, throughout scientific history, mathematics has been used to make sense of the 'big' questions of life, and that religious beliefs sometimes drove mathematicians to mathematics to help them make sense of the world. Containing contributions from a wide array of scholars in the fields of philosophy, history of science and history of mathematics, this book shows that the intersection between mathematics and theism is rich in both culture and character. Chapters cover a fascinating range of topics including the Sect of the Pythagoreans, Newton's views on the apocalypse, Charles Dodgson's Anglican faith and Gödel's proof of the existence of God.
Download or read book History of Universities written by Mordechai Feingold and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-29 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume XXIV of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, and bibliographical information, which makes this publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. Its contributions range widely geographically, chronologically, and in subject-matter.
Download or read book Embracing Beauty written by John Heard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-11 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development of pure mathematics during the long nineteenth century in Britain, with extensive references and primary sources.
Download or read book Chaos written by Richard Kautz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaos: The Science of Predictable Random Motion bridges the gap between introductions for the layman and college-level texts with an account of chaos theory based on elementary mathematics. It develops the science of dynamics in terms of small time steps, describes the phenomenon of chaos through simple examples, and concludes with a close look at a homoclinic tangle, the mathematical monster at the heart of chaos. The presentation is enhanced by numerousfigures, animations of chaotic motion (available on a companion CD), and biographical sketches of the pioneers of dynamics and chaos theory.
Download or read book The Equations of Materials written by Brian Cantor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This primer describes important equations of materials and the scientists who derived them. It provides an excellent introduction to the subject by making the material accessible and enjoyable. The book is dedicated to a number of propositions: 1. The most important equations are often simple and easily explained; 2. The most important equations are often experimental, confirmed time and again; 3. The most important equations have been derived by remarkable scientists who lived interesting lives. Each chapter covers a single equation and materials subject, and is structured in three sections: first, a description of the equation itself; second, a short biography of the scientist after whom it is named; and third, a discussion of some of the ramifications and applications of the equation. The biographical sections intertwine the personal and professional life of the scientist with contemporary political and scientific developments. Topics included are: Bravais lattices and crystals; Bragg's law and diffraction; the Gibbs phase rule and phases; Boltzmann's equation and thermodynamics; the Arrhenius equation and reactions; the Gibbs-Thomson equation and surfaces; Fick's laws and diffusion; the Scheil equation and solidification; the Avrami equation and phase transformations; Hooke's law and elasticity; the Burgers vector and plasticity; Griffith's equation and fracture; and the Fermi level and electrical properties. The book is written for students interested in the manufacture, structure, properties and engineering application of materials such as metals, polymers, ceramics, semiconductors and composites. It requires only a working knowledge of school maths, mainly algebra and simple calculus.
