Download or read book Great Feuds in Science written by Hal Hellman and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversy is central to scientific development. This book recounts ten major disputes that riled the world of intellectual research since the seventeenth century. It discusses Galileo's censure by the Catholic Church for his theories of astronomy, the furore over Darwin's proposals concerning evolution, and other historic quarrels about the nature of the universe.
Download or read book Scientific Feuds written by Joel Levy and published by Fox Chapel Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most science chronicles present a triumphant march through time, with revolutionary thinkers and their discoveries following in orderly progression. The truth, however, is somewhat different. Scientific Feuds is a collection of the most vicious battles among the greatest minds of our time. It features such contests as Huxley and Wilberforce's debate on Darwin's theory of evolution, Franklin and Wilkins' fight over the discovery of DNA, and the “War of Currents” between Tesla and Edison (which ended with Edison electrocuting dogs and horses in a vain attempt to discredit Tesla's work). From passionate competition to vindictive sniping, these rivalries prove that the world of science is far from cold and methodical.
Download or read book Great Feuds in Mathematics written by Hal Hellman and published by Wiley. This book was released on 2006-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for Hal Hellman Great Feuds in Mathematics ""Those who think that mathematicians are cold, mechanical proving machines will do well to read Hellman's book on conflicts in mathematics. The main characters are as excitable and touchy as the next man. But Hellman's stories also show how scientific fights bring out sharper formulations and better arguments."" -Professor Dirk van Dalen, Philosophy Department, Utrecht University Great Feuds in Technology ""There's nothing like a good feud to grab your attention. And when it comes to describing the battle, Hal Hellman is a master."" -New Scientist Great Feuds in Science ""Unusual insight into the development of science . . . I was excited by this book and enthusiastically recommend it to general as well as scientific audiences."" -American Scientist ""Hellman has assembled a series of entertaining tales . . . many fine examples of heady invective without parallel in our time."" -Nature Great Feuds in Medicine ""This engaging book documents [the] reactions in ten of the most heated controversies and rivalries in medical history. . . . The disputes detailed are . . . fascinating. . . . It is delicious stuff here."" -The New York Times ""Stimulating."" -Journal of the American Medical Association
Download or read book Great Feuds in History written by Colin Evans and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2001-04-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Everyone loves a good fight, especially on the world stage, and Evans calls these contests with skill and flair.""--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The dramatic stories of ten high-stakes feuds that changed history foreverIn this spicy follow-up to the successful Great Feuds in Science and Great Feuds in Medicine, author Colin Evans offers blow-by-blow accounts of ten of the nastiest and most consequential feuds in history, from Elizabeth I's lengthy spat with royal pain Mary, Queen of Scots, to Aaron Burr's bloody battle with Alexander Hamilton, to Stalin and Trotsky's ferocious, intercontin.
Download or read book Prize Fight written by Morton Meyers, M.D. and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We often think of scientists as dispassionate and detached, nobly laboring without any expectation of reward. But scientific research is much more complicated and messy than this ideal, and scientists can be torn by jealousy, impelled by a need for recognition, and subject to human vulnerability and fallibility. In Prize Fight , Emeritus Chair at SUNY School of Medicine Morton Meyers pulls back the curtain to reveal the dark side of scientific discovery. From allegations of stolen authorship to fabricated results and elaborate hoaxes, he shows us how too often brilliant minds are reduced to petty jealousies and promising careers cut short by disputes over authorship or fudged data. Prize Fight is a dramatic look at some of the most notable discoveries in science in recent years, from the discovery of insulin, which led to decades of infighting and even violence, to why the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine exposed how often scientific objectivity is imperiled.
Download or read book Great Feuds in Science written by Hal Hellman and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-04-21 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic stories of ten historic feuds: How they altered the course of discovery-and shaped the modern world Hall Hellman tells the lively stories of ten of the most outrageous and intriguing disputes from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Bringing the cataclysmic clash of ideas and personalities to colorful life, Hellman explores both the science and the spirit of the times. Along the way, he reveals that scientific feuds are fueled not only by the purest of intellectual disagreements, but also by intransigence, ambition, jealousy, politics, faith, and the irresistible human urge to be right. Unusual insight into the development of science . . . I was excited by this book and enthusiastically recommend it to general as well as scientific audiences. -American Scientist Hellman has assembled a series of entertaining tales. . . . many fine examples of heady invective without parallel in our time. -Nature An entertaining and informative account of the unusual personalities and sometimes bitter rivalries of some of the world's greatest scientific minds. -Publishers Weekly A fascinating new book which details some of the most famous disputes of the ages.-Courier Mail Dry science history turns into entertaining reading without sacrificing historical accuracy. -The Christchurch Press Great Feuds in Science is wonderful history, as the reader learns how scientists had to fight with religious leaders and other scientists to get their work recognized, accepted, and even get the credit for it! -Bookviews
Download or read book Great Power Rivalries written by William R. Thompson and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines interstate rivalries of the past 500 years, providing case studies of those between land powers with continental orientations, and leading maritime powers and challengers. The contributors focus on the transition from commercial to strategic rivalry.
Download or read book Bernoulli s Fallacy written by Aubrey Clayton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations. Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the seventeenth-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it. He highlights how influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures developed a statistical methodology they claimed was purely objective in order to silence critics of their political agendas, including eugenics. Clayton provides a clear account of the mathematics and logic of probability, conveying complex concepts accessibly for readers interested in the statistical methods that frame our understanding of the world. He contends that we need to take a Bayesian approach—that is, to incorporate prior knowledge when reasoning with incomplete information—in order to resolve the crisis. Ranging across math, philosophy, and culture, Bernoulli’s Fallacy explains why something has gone wrong with how we use data—and how to fix it.
Download or read book Fevers Feuds and Diamonds written by Paul Farmer and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Paul Farmer brings his considerable intellect, empathy, and expertise to bear in this powerful and deeply researched account of the Ebola outbreak that struck West Africa in 2014. It is hard to imagine a more timely or important book.” —Bill and Melinda Gates "[The] history is as powerfully conveyed as it is tragic . . . Illuminating . . . Invaluable." —Steven Johnson, The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea suffered the worst epidemic of Ebola in history. The brutal virus spread rapidly through a clinical desert where basic health-care facilities were few and far between. Causing severe loss of life and economic disruption, the Ebola crisis was a major tragedy of modern medicine. But why did it happen, and what can we learn from it? Paul Farmer, the internationally renowned doctor and anthropologist, experienced the Ebola outbreak firsthand—Partners in Health, the organization he founded, was among the international responders. In Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, he offers the first substantive account of this frightening, fast-moving episode and its implications. In vibrant prose, Farmer tells the harrowing stories of Ebola victims while showing why the medical response was slow and insufficient. Rebutting misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly, he traces West Africa’s chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice. Under formal colonial rule, disease containment was a priority but care was not – and the region’s health care woes worsened, with devastating consequences that Farmer traces up to the present. This thorough and hopeful narrative is a definitive work of reportage, history, and advocacy, and a crucial intervention in public-health discussions around the world.
Download or read book The Art of Naming written by Michael Ohl and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Tyrannosaurus rex to Heteropoda davidbowie: scientific naming as a joyful and creative act. Tyrannosaurus rex. Homo sapiens. Heteropoda davidbowie. Behind each act of scientific naming is a story. In this entertaining and illuminating book, Michael Ohl considers scientific naming as a joyful and creative act. There are about 1.8 million discovered and named plant and animal species, and millions more still to be discovered. Naming is the necessary next step after discovery; it is through the naming of species that we perceive and understand nature. Ohl explains the process, with examples, anecdotes, and a wildly varied cast of characters. He describes the rules for scientific naming; the vernacular isn't adequate. These rules—in standard binomial nomenclature, the generic name followed by specific name—go back to Linnaeus; but they are open to idiosyncrasy and individual expression. A lizard is designated Barbaturex morrisoni (in honor of the Doors' Jim Morrison, the Lizard King); a member of the horsefly family Scaptia beyonceae. Ohl, a specialist in “winged things that sting,” confesses that among the many wasp species he has named is Ampulex dementor, after the dementors in the Harry Potter novels. Scientific names have also been deployed by scientists to insult other scientists, to make political statements, and as expressions of romantic love: “I shall name this beetle after my beloved wife.” The Art of Naming takes us on a surprising and fascinating journey, in the footsteps of the discoverers of species and the authors of names, into the nooks and crannies and drawers and cabinets of museums, and through the natural world of named and not-yet-named species.
Download or read book Vital Forces written by Graeme K. Hunter and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2000-11-03 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vital Forces tells the history of the 'biochemical revolution', a period of unprecedentedly rapid advance in human knowledge that profoundly affected our view of life and laid the foundation for modern medicine and biotechnology. The story is told in a clear, engaging, and absorbing manner. This delightful work relates the fascinating and staggering advances in concepts and theories over the last 200 years and introduces the major figures of the times. Vital Forces also describes the discovery of the molecular basis of life through the stories of the scientists involved, including such towering figures as Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, Linus Pauling, and Francis Crick. Combining science and biography into a seamless chronological narrative, the author brings to life the successes and failures, collaborations and feuds, and errors and insights that produced the revolution in biology. * Vividly describes dramatic scientific discoveries, personalities, feuds and rivalries * Answers a general readers quest to understand the nature of life, and the relevance of biochemistry/molecular biology to modern medicine, industry and agriculture.
Download or read book The Great Paleolithic War written by David J. Meltzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only a few years after the discovery in Europe in the late 1850s that humanity had roots predating history and the Biblical chronicles, and reaching deep into the Pleistocene, came the suggestion that North American prehistory might be just as old. And why not? There seemed to be an "exact synchronism [of geological strata] between Europe and America," and so by extension there ought to be a "parallelism as to the antiquity of man." That triggered an eager search for traces of the people who may have occupied North America in the recesses of the Ice Age. "The Great Paleolithic War "is the history of the longstanding and bitter dispute in North America over whether people had arrived here in Ice Age times.
Download or read book Ludwig Boltzmann written by Carlo Cercignani and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-01-12 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the life and personality, the scientific and philosophical work of Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the great scientists who marked the passage from 19th- to 20th-Century physics. His rich and tragic life, ending by suicide at the age of 62, is described in detail. A substantial part of the book is devoted to discussing his scientific and philosophical ideas and placing them in the context of the second half of the 19th century. The fact that Boltzmann was the man who did most to establish that there is a microscopic, atomic structure underlying macroscopic bodies is documented, as is Boltzmann's influence on modern physics, especially through the work of Planck on light quanta and of Einstein on Brownian motion. Boltzmann was the centre of a scientific upheaval, and he has been proved right on many crucial issues. He anticipated Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions and proposed a theory of knowledge based on Darwin. His basic results, when properly understood, can also be stated as mathematical theorems. Some of these have been proved: others are still at the level of likely but unproven conjectures. The main text of this biography is written almost entirely without equations. Mathematical appendices deepen knowledge of some technical aspects of the subject.
Download or read book Empire of the Stars written by Arthur I. Miller and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the idea of "black holes" explores the tumultuous debate over the existence of this now well-accepted phenomenon, focusing particular attention on Indian scientist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Download or read book Blood Feuds written by Jerry Pournelle and published by Baen Books. This book was released on 1993 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blasted back into savagery by nuclear weapons, divided among themselves by bitter feuds, the human inhabitants of Haven were helpless when the Saurons invaded the planet.
Download or read book Great Physicists written by William H. Cropper and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a lively history of modern physics, as seen through the lives of thirty men and women from the pantheon of physics. William H. Cropper vividly portrays the life and accomplishments of such giants as Galileo and Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, right up to contemporary figures such as Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, and Stephen Hawking. We meet scientists--all geniuses--who could be gregarious, aloof, unpretentious, friendly, dogged, imperious, generous to colleagues or contentious rivals. As Cropper captures their personalities, he also offers vivid portraits of their great moments of discovery, their bitter feuds, their relations with family and friends, their religious beliefs and education. In addition, Cropper has grouped these biographies by discipline--mechanics, thermodynamics, particle physics, and others--each section beginning with a historical overview. Thus in the section on quantum mechanics, readers can see how the work of Max Planck influenced Niels Bohr, and how Bohr in turn influenced Werner Heisenberg. Our understanding of the physical world has increased dramatically in the last four centuries. With Great Physicists, readers can retrace the footsteps of the men and women who led the way.
Download or read book Family Feuds written by Eileen Hunt Botting and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family Feuds is the first sustained comparative study of the place of the family in the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Wollstonecraft recognized both Rousseau's and Burke's influential stature in late eighteenth-century debates about the family. Wollstonecraft critically identified them as philosophical and political partners in the defense of the patriarchal structure of the family, yet she used Rousseau's conceptions of childhood education and maternal empowerment and Burke's understanding of the family as the affective basis for political socialization as a theoretical foundation for her own egalitarian vision of the family. It is this ideal of the egalitarian family, Botting contends, that is one of the most important yet least appreciated legacies of Enlightenment political thought.
