In March 1979, a prototype of a Compact Disc (CD) digital audio system was publicly presented and demonstrated to an audience of about 300 journalists at Philips in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. This milestone effectively marked the beginning of the digital entertainment era. In the years to follow, the CD-audio system became an astonishing worldwide success, and was followed by successful derivatives such as CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD, and recently Blu-ray Disc. Today, around the thirtieth anniversary of the milestone, it is taken for granted that media content is stored and distributed digitally, and the analog era seems long gone. This book retraces the origins of the CD system and the subsequent evolution of digital optical storage, with a focus on the contributions of Philips to this field. The book contains perspectives on the history and evolution of optical storage, along with reproductions of key technical contributions of Philips to the field.

The present volume grew out of a double session of the Boston Collo quium for the Philosophy of Science held in Boston on March 25, 1983. The papers presented there (by Biezunski, Glick, Goldberg, and Judith Goodstein ) offered both sufficient comparability to establish regulari ties in the reception of relativity and Einstein's impact in France, Spain, the United States and Italy, and sufficient contrast to suggest the salience of national inflections in the process. The interaction among the participants and the added perspectives offered by members of the audience suggested the interest of commissioning articles for a more inclusive volume which would cover as many national cases as we could muster. Only general guidelines were given to the authors: to treat the special or general theories, or both, hopefully in a multidisciplinary setting, to examine the popular reception of relativity, or Einstein's personal impact, or to survey all these topics. In a previous volume, on the 2 comparative reception of Darwinism, one of us devised a detailed set of guidelines which in general were not followed. In our opinion, the studies in this collection offer greater comparability, no doubt because relativity by its nature and its complexity offers a sharper, more easily bounded target. As in the Darwinism volume, this book concludes with an essay intended to draw together in comparative perspective some of many themes addressed by the participants."

In this posthumous book, the late Professor R. Hooykaas (1906-1994) conveys a lifetime of historical thought about modes of scientific advance over the centuries. In what variety of ways has the human mind, with all its subjectivity and its capacity for self-deception, but also its piercing gifts of discovery, managed to come to terms with the whimsical tricks of nature'? Central to this erudite, penetrating, and widely ranging study is Hooykaas's distinction between facts (given by nature yet entirely subject to our mode of interpreting them), faith (broad conceptions like the idea of order, of simplicity, or of harmony), and fictions in the sense of those daring intellectual tools, such as theories and hypotheses and models, which reflect the scientist's creative imagination. Case studies drawn from the history of all branches of science (including chemistry and the earth sciences) and from Antiquity to the present day, serve to widen and to deepen the understanding of every reader (whether a historian of science or not) with a desire to learn more about the realities of the scientific pursuit.

How does science treat evidence from the edges? This fresh and entertaining look at the search for Sasquatch concerns more than just the startling and controversial nature of monsters and monster hunting in the late twentieth century, but the more important relationship between the professional scientists and amateur naturalists who hunt them-and their place in the history of science. The traditional heroic narrative of monster-hunting situates mainstream, academic scientists (the eggheads) as villains rejecting the existence of anomalous primates and cryptozoology as unworthy of study. It gives a privileged place to passionate amateur naturalists (the crackpots) who soldier on against great odds, and the obstinacy of the mainstream to bring knowledge of these creatures to light. Brian Regal shows this model to be inaccurate: many professional scientists eagerly sought anomalous primates, examining their traces and working out evolutionary paradigms to explain them. Even though scientific thinking held that anomalous primates-Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti-did not and could not exist, these scientists risked their careers because they believed these creature to be a genuine biological reality.

Hardbound. Foundations for the Future documents the many significant events that impacted the accounting profession during the years 1980-1995. This time period was critical for our profession. The AICPA membership doubled and the nature of services offered to clients was dramatically transformed. The profession was on the cutting edge of the tremendous changes that occurred within the American business community during this time period.This book tells the story of how the profession adapted to these changes and the challenges that accompanied them. It not only lays down the facts for future generations, but also portrays our profession as an important and exciting field in which to work.

This is a concise introductory textbook for a one semester course in the history and philosophy of mathematics. It is written for mathematics majors, philosophy students, history of science students and secondary school mathematics teachers. The only prerequisite is a solid command of pre-calculus mathematics. It is shorter than the standard textbooks in that area and thus more accessible to students who have trouble coping with vast amounts of reading. Furthermore, there are many detailed explanations of the important mathematical procedures actually used by famous mathematicians, giving more mathematically talented students a greater opportunity to learn the history and philosophy by way of problem solving. Several important philosophical topics are pursued throughout the text, giving the student an opportunity to come to a full and consistent knowledge of their development. These topics include infinity, the nature of motion, and Platonism. This book offers, in fewer pages, a deep penetration into the key mathematical and philosophical aspects of the history of mathematics.

"I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years ...kneeling before you Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals ...I abjure, curse, detest the aforesaid errors and heresies."
Galileo Galilei in Rome, 22 June 1633, before the men of the Inquisition.
In the small village of Arcetri, on a wooded hillside just south of Florence, an old man sat writing his will. He had to make a journey to Rome and wanted to be prepared for every eventuality. If the plague did not get him on the road, the strain of travelling might finish him off; in addition he had been ill most of the autumn, with dizziness, stomach pains and a serious hernia. And even if he survived these difficulties, and the cold winter wind from the Apennines did not give him pneumonia, he had no idea what awaited him in Rome, only that his arrival was unlikely to be celebrated with a special mass.

The mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei is one of the most famous scientists of all times. The story of his life and times, of his epoch-making experiments and discoveries, of his stubbornness and pride, of his patrons in the house of Medici, of his enemies and friends in their struggle for truth - all is brought vividly to life in this book. Atle NA ss has written a gripping account of one of the great figures in European history.
He was awarded the Brage Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Norway.

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Medicine Across Cultures: The History and Practice of Medicine in Non-Western Cultures consists of 19 essays dealing with the medical knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Egyptian, and Tibetan medicine, the book includes essays on comparing Chinese and western medicine and religion and medicine. The essays address the connections between medicine and culture and relate the medical practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay is well illustrated and contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both the history of medicine and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.

The International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms is a new initiative to promote explicitly researches and publications in the field of the History of TMM (Theory of Machines and Mechanisms). It was held at the University of Cassino, Italy, from 11 to 13 May 2000. The Symposium was devoted mainly to the technical aspects of historical developments and therefore it has been addressed mainly to the IFToMM Community. In fact, most the authors of the contributed papers are experts in TMM and related topics. This has been, indeed, a challenge: convincing technical experts to go further in-depth into the background of their topics of expertise. We have received a very positive response, as can be seen by the fact that these Proceedings contain contributions by authors from all around the world. We received about 50 papers, and after review about 40 papers were accepted for both presentation and publishing in the Proceedings. This means also that the History of TMM is of interest everywhere and, indeed, an in-depth knowledge of the past can be of great help in working on the present and in shaping the future with new ideas. I believe that a reader will take advantage of the papers in these Proceedings with further satisfaction and motivation for her or his work (historical or not). These papers cover the wide field of the History of Mechanical Engineering and particularly the History of TMM.

We live in an age in which one can easily think that our generation has invented and discovered almost everything; but the truth is quite the opposite. Progress cannot be considered as sudden unexpected spurts of individual brains: such a genius, the inventor of everything, has never existed in the history of humanity. What did exist was a limitless procession of experiments made by men who did not waver when faced with defeat, but were inspired by the rare successes that have led to our modern comfortable reality. And that continue to do so with the same enthusiasm. The study of the History of Engineering is valuable for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it can help us to understand the genius of the scientists, engineers and craftsmen who existed centuries and millenniums before us; who solved problems using the devices of their era, making machinery and equipment whose concept is of such a surprising modernity that we must rethink our image of the past.

Gravity, a Geometrical Course presents general relativity (GR) in a systematic and exhaustive way, covering three aspects that are homogenized into a single texture: i) the mathematical, geometrical foundations, exposed in a self consistent contemporary formalism, ii) the main physical, astrophysical and cosmological applications, updated to the issues of contemporary research and observations, with glimpses on supergravity and superstring theory, iii) the historical development of scientific ideas underlying both the birth of general relativity and its subsequent evolution. The book is divided in two volumes.

Volume Two is covers black holes, cosmology and an introduction to supergravity. The aim of this volume is two-fold. It completes the presentation of GR and it introduces the reader to theory of gravitation beyond GR, which is supergravity. Starting with a short history of the black hole concept, the book covers the Kruskal extension of the Schwarzschild metric, the causal structures of Lorentzian manifolds, Penrose diagrams and a detailed analysis of the Kerr-Newman metric. An extensive historical account of the development of modern cosmology is followed by a detailed presentation of its mathematical structure, including non-isotropic cosmologies and billiards, de Sitter space and inflationary scenarios, perturbation theory and anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The last three chapters deal with the mathematical and conceptual foundations of supergravity in the frame of free differential algebras. Branes are presented both as classical solutions of the bulk theory and as world-volume gauge theories with particular emphasis on the geometrical interpretation of kappa-supersymmetry. The rich bestiary of special geometries underlying supergravity lagrangians is presented, followed by a chapter providing glances on the equally rich collection of special solutions of supergravity.

Pietro Fre is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Torino, Italy and is currently serving as Scientific Counsellor of the Italian Embassy in Moscow. His scientific passion lies in supergravity and all allied topics, since the inception of the field, in 1976. He was professor at SISSA, worked in the USA and at CERN. He has taught General Relativity for 15 years. He has previously two scientific monographs, Supergravity and Superstrings and The N=2 Wonderland, He is also the author of a popular science book on cosmology and two novels, in Italian."

Principles of Anatomy according to the Opinion of Galen is a translation of Johann Guinter's textbook as revised and annotated by Guinter's student, Andreas Vesalius, in 1538. Despite Vesalius' fame as an anatomist, his 1538 revision has attracted almost no attention. However, this new translation shows the significant rewrites and additional information added to the original based on his own dissections. 250 newly discovered annotations by Vesalius himself, published here in full for the first time, also show his working methods and ideas. Together they offer remarkable insights into Vesalius' intellectual biography and the development of his most famous work: De humani corporis fabrica, 1543. An extensive introduction by Vivian Nutton also provides new information on Johann Guinter, and his substantial use of Vesalius' work for his own revised version of the text in 1539. Their joint production, a student textbook, is set against a background of the development of Renaissance anatomy, and of attitudes to their ancient Greek predecessor, Galen of Pergamum. This text will be of great interest to historians of science and medicine, as well as to Renaissance scholars.

A definitive historical study of this scientific work and the human struggles that accompanied it from the very beginning. Drawing on such materials as the resources of the Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, the Niels Bohr Archives, and the archives and scientific correspondence of the principal quantum physicists, as well as Jagdish Mehras personal discussions over many years with most of the architects of quantum theory, the authors have written a rigorous scientific history in a deeply human context. This multivolume work presents a rich account of an intellectual triumph: a unique analysis of the creative scientific process, wrapped in the story of a great human enterprise. Its lessons will be an aid to those working in the sciences and humanities alike.

The way mankind has responded to the dark sky throughout history has determined humanity's scientific - and cultural - progress. In this way, astronomy is in some way connected to everything. This fascinating theme is explored in Dark Sky Legacy.
George Reed examines the powerful influence of the cosmos on cultural and societal development, reviewing mankind's historical propensity for projecting human experience into a cosmic framework and the centuries-old relationship between astronomy and astrology, the result of which is the emergence of the age of science. Since then, he writes, the purpose of astronomy has been to observe celestial objects for the advancement of scientific knowledge, while astrology deals only in the possibility that celestial bodies influence events on Earth.
Reed asserts that the movement away from an inward-looking, "meaningful" cosmos toward an outward-gazing, impersonal one is a shift that has had enormous repercussions in every aspect of human life. He points out that astrology provides a scheme in which the believer is an integral component of an animistic, cyclical universe. Conversely, the pursuit of science and astronomy is a mechanistic, linear activity, which seeks extrinsic answers in terms of precise relationships between sense perceptions.
Dark Sky Legacy probes the divergent approaches to the universe that compel individuals and cultures to pursue astrology or astronomy, the intuitive or the analytical. Blending modern science, ancient science, mythology, history, literature, and naked-eye astronomy, and spiced with fascinating detail about astronomy, astrology, celestial mythology, and calendar development, the book is an engrossing study of the profound impact of mankind's relationship with the universe.

This volume, honoring the renowned historian of science, Allen G Debus, explores ideas of science - experiences of nature' - from within a historiographical tradition that Debus has done much to define. As his work shows, the sciences do not develop exclusively as a result of a progressive and inexorable logic of discovery. A wide variety of extra-scientific factors, deriving from changing intellectual contexts and differing social millieus, play crucial roles in the overall development of scientific thought. These essays represent case studies in a broad range of scientific settings - from sixteenth-century astronomy and medicine, through nineteenth-century biology and mathematics, to the social sciences in the twentieth-century - that show the impact of both social settings and the cross-fertilization of ideas on the formation of science. Aimed at a general audience interested in the history of science, this book closes with Debus's personal perspective on the development of the field. Audience: This book will appeal especially to historians of science, of chemistry, and of medicine.

This book is intended as a historical and critical study on the origin of the equations of motion as established in Newton's Principia. The central question that it aims to answer is whether it is indeed correct to ascribe to Galileo the inertia principle and the law of falling bodies. In order to accomplish this task, the study begins by considering theories on the motion of bodies from classical antiquity, and especially those of Aristotle. The theories developed during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are then reviewed, with careful analysis of the contributions of, for example, the Merton and Parisian Schools and Galileo's immediate predecessors, Tartaglia and Benedetti. Finally, Galileo's work is examined in detail, starting from the early writings. Excerpts from individual works are presented, to allow the texts to speak for themselves, and then commented upon. The book provides historical evidence both for Galileo's dependence on his forerunners and for the major breakthroughs that he achieved. It will satisfy the curiosity of all who wish to know when and why certain laws have been credited to Galileo.

Though the publication of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions seemed to herald the advent of a unified study of the history and philosophy of science, it is a hard fact that history of science and philosophy of science have increasingly grown apart. Recently, however, there has been a series of workshops on both sides of the Atlantic (called '&HPS') intended to bring historians and philosophers of science together to discuss new integrative approaches. This is therefore an especially appropriate time to explore the problems with and prospects for integrating history and philosophy of science. The original essays in this volume, all from specialists in the history of science or philosophy of science, offer such an exploration from a wide variety of perspectives. The volume combines general reflections on the current state of history and philosophy of science with studies of the relation between the two disciplines in specific historical and scientific cases.

The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively early -- though not always under that name -- in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne imme diately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appointments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the 1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia and in New Zealand. 'Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science' aims to provide a distinctive publication outlet for Australian and New Zealand scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social studies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a connected theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with special expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues, however, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Further more, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no means ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact -- they are actively encour aged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in question."

Philanthropies funded by the Rockefeller family have been prominent in the social history of the twentieth century for their involvement in medicine and applied science. This book provides the first detailed study of their relatively brief but nonetheless influential foray into the field of mathematics. The careers of a generation of pathbreakers in modern mathematics, such as S.Banach, B.L.van der Waerden and Andre Weil, were decisively affected by their becoming fellows of the Rockefeller-funded International Education Board in the 1920s. To help promote cooperation between physics and mathematics Rockefeller funds supported the erection of the new Mathematical Institute in Gottingen between 1926 and 1929, while the rise of probability and mathematical statistics owes much to the creation of the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris by American philanthropy at about the same time. This account draws upon the documented evaluation processes behind these personal and institutional involvements of philanthropies. It not only sheds light on important events in the history of mathematics and physics of the 20th century but also analyzes the comparative developments of mathematics in Europe and the United States. Several of the documents are given in their entirety as significant witnesses to the gradual shift of the centre of world mathematics to the USA. This shift was strengthened by the Nazi purge of German and European mathematics after 1933 to which the Rockefeller Foundation reacted with emergency programs that subsequently contributed to the American war effort. The general historical and political background of the events discussed in this book is the mixture of competition and cooperation between the various European countries and the USA after World War I, and the consequences of the Nazi dictatorship after 1933. Ideological positions of both the philanthropists and mathematicians mattered heavily in that process. Cultural bias in the selection of fellows and of disciplines supported, and the economic predominance of American philanthropy, led among other things to a restriction of the programs to Europe and America, to an uneven consideration of European candidates, and to preferences for Americans. Political self-isolation of the Soviet Union contributed to an increasing alienation of that important mathematical culture from Western mathematics. By focussing on a number of national cultures the investigation aims to represent a step toward a true inter-cultural comparison in mathematics."

Based upon the proceedings of the First International Conference on the History of General Relativity, held at Boston University's Osgood Hill Conference Center, North Andover, Massachusetts, 8-11 May 1986, this volume brings together essays by twelve prominent historians and philosophers of science and physicists. The topics range from the development of general relativity (John Norton, John Stachel) and its early reception (Carlo Cattani, Michelangelo De Maria, Anne Kox), through attempts to understand the physical implications of the theory (Jean Eisenstaedt, Peter Havas) and to quantize it (Peter G. Bergmann), to elaborations of the theory into a unified theory of electromagnetism and gravitation (Vladimir P. Vizgin, Michel Biezunski), and considerations of its cosmological extensions (Pierre Kerszberg, George F.R. Ellis).

This is the first volume to survey many of the most important questions in the history of general relativity, with many of the contributions drawing upon such original resources as the Einstein Archive. It is hoped that it will stimulate much-needed further research in this hitherto neglected area.

By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed Gino), a 23-year-old explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious journey to the east coast of Greenland and its vast and forbidding interior. Their mission: chart and survey the region and establish a permanent meteorological base 8,000 feet high on the ice cap. That plan turned into an epic survival ordeal when August Courtauld, manning the station solo through the winter, became entombed by drifting snow. David Roberts, "veteran mountain climber and chronicler of adventures" (Washington Post), draws on firsthand accounts and rich archival materials to tell the story of this daring expedition and of the ingenious young explorer at its helm.

Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge delves into how the Cold War, as a global phenomenon, shaped local conditions and decisions for science in light of US-Europe relationships. The articles in this volume, edited by Jeroen van Dongen, show how the western network in which science was circulated and produced was strongly conditioned by the state and its international relations. The workings of secrecy, the consequences of US hegemony and decolonization, and the ambitions of post-war recovery attempts were all mediated through the interference of the state and through its relative position in the network. At the same time, hubristic expectations prefigured in the state's relation to science.