Why are most gases invisible, odourless and tasteless? Why do some poison us and others make us laugh? And why do some power our engines while others make drinks fizzy? In It's a Gas, Mark Miodownik masterfully reveals an invisible world through his unique brand of scientific storytelling.

Taking us back to that exhilarating – and often dangerous – moment when scientists tried to work out exactly what they had discovered, Miodownik shows that gases are the formative substances of our modern world, each with its own weird and wonderful personality.

We see how seventeenth-century laughing gas parties led to the first use of anaesthetics in surgery, how the invention of the air valve in musical instruments gave us bicycles, cars and trainers, and how gases made us masters of the sea (by huge steamships) and skies (via extremely flammable balloons). This delight of a book reveals the immense importance of gases to modern civilisation.

The role of natural magic in the rise of seventeenth-century experimental science has been the subject of lively controversy for several decades. Now Penelope Gouk introduces a new element into the debate: how music mediated between these two domains. Arguing that changing musical practice in sixteenth-century Europe affected seventeenth-century English thought on science and magic, she maps the various relationships among these apparently separate disciplines. Gouk explores these relationships in several ways. She adopts the methods of social geography to discuss the disciplinary, social, and intellectual overlapping of music, science, and natural magic. She gives a historical account of the emergence of acoustics in English science, the harmonically based physics of Robert Hooke, and the position of harmonics within Newton's transformation of natural philosophy. And she provides a gallery of images in which contemporary representations of instruments, practices, and concepts demonstrate the way in which musical models informed and transformed those of natural philosophy. Gouk shows that as the "occult" features of music became subject to the new science of experimentation, and as their causes became evident, so natural magic was pushed outside the realms of scientific discourse.

The 19th century is known as the modern era of science. Many of the ideas, theories, and inventions developed during this time are used everyday in today's society. Windelspecht investigates the century's tremendous discoveries, inventions, and inquiries in more than 60 alphabetical entries. This reference presents familiar subjects, such as the telephone and elevator, as well as those less frequently studied, such as the spectroscope and Pasteur's development of the germ theory.

Readers will find a thorough discussion of each entry's scientific impact and gain an understanding of the lasting social and political importance of these advancements. Narratives enrich many of the entries by adding perspective to the century's fascinating history. Students and researchers will find this reference book easy to use. An appendix of entries listed by scientific field, a glossary of terms, and name and subject indexes make this the perfect, easy-to-use reference for anyone interested in the scientific revolutions of the 19th.

Duns Scotus, along with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, was one of the three most talented and influential of the medieval schoolmen, and a highly original thinker. This book examines the central concepts in his physics, including matter, space, time, and unity.

Arc welding is one of the key processes in industrial manufacturing, with welders using two types of processes - gas metal arc welding (GMAW) and gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW). This new book provides a survey-oriented account of the modeling, sensing, and automatic control of the GMAW process.
Researchers are presented with the most recent information in the areas of modeling, sensing and automatic control of the GMAW process, collecting a number of original research results on the topic from the authors and colleagues.

Providing an overview of a variety of topics, this book looks at the classification of various welding processes; the modeling aspects of GMAW; physics of welding; metal transfer characteristics; weld pool geometry; process voltages and variables; power supplies; sensing (sensors for arc length, weld penetration control, weld pool geometry, using optical and intelligent sensors); control techniques of PI, PID, multivariable control, adaptive control, and intelligent control. Finally, the book illustrates a case study presented by the authors and their students at Idaho State University, in collaboration with researchers at the Idaho National Engineering and Environment Laboratory.

The Catholic theological faculty at the Tubingen school in Germany in the first half of the 19th century are today widely regarded as some of the most significant figures in the development of modern Catholic thought. Up until now, however, little of their work has been available to non-German readers. This English translation makes available Johann Sebastian Drey's ""Brief Introduction to the Study of Theology with Reference to the Scientific Standpoint and the Catholic System"" (1819). In this text, Drey presented an encyclopaedic introduction to the study of theology and its methods, which provided not only a programme for the way Catholic theology would be studied at Tubingen but also related Catholic theology to the scientific views of German idealist and romantic philosophy, especially that of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling. In the first part of the book, Drey examines the fundamental concepts of Christian theology - religion, revelation, Christianity, theology - and corrects some erroneous notions about them. In the second and more important part of the book, the ""encyclopaedia"", Drey focuses on how theology as a whole relates to other fields of knowledge and how its various subdisciplines relate to and affect one another. Theology's scholarly growth in the 18th century and its branching out into many new fields, such as biblical exegesis, textual criticism, and the new historical methods, has stimulated interest in works such as this volume. Anyone concerned with the role of theology and theologians in the Church today should find this book important because Drey was one of the first to insist that the theologian must be responsible to the scholarly and academic world as well as to the Church. In this text he demonstrated that Catholic thought could open itself without fear to modernity and profit from the experience.