Four hundred years ago, on 25 September 1608, the lens maker Hans Lipperhey from Middelburg in the Netherlands traveled to The Hague to apply for a patent regarding his invention of the "spyglass." The Commander in Chief of the Dutch armed forces, Prince Maurice of Nassau, was quite impressed. However, since the instrument could be easily copied, Lipperhey was not granted the patent. Nevertheless, within a year Galileo Galilei aimed a telescope that he had built based on the principals of Lipperhey's device on the skies, forever changing the way astronomy was done.

To celebrate the invention of the telescope and the resulting developments, Leiden Observatory, in cooperation with ESTEC, organized an international meeting on "400 Years of Astronomical Telescopes." The meeting took place from 29 September - 2 October 2008 at the ESTEC conference centre. This book presents the highlights of this meeting under the following categories: History of Optical Telescopes, History of Non-Optical Telescopes, Miscellaneous Aspects and Projects, Fundamental Telescope Technologies, Political and Sociological Aspects, Perspectives for Future Telescopes.

The topical reviews have been written by internationally recognized leaders of the field. This book is intended as a first reference to many technical, historical and social aspects concerning astronomical telescopes. It is equally well suited to professional astronomers as to the interested public.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license This book explores the magical and medical history of executions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century by looking at the afterlife potency of criminal corpses, the healing activities of the executioner, and the magic of the gallows site. The use of corpses in medicine and magic has been recorded back into antiquity. The lacerated bodies of Roman gladiators were used as a source of curative blood, for instance. In early modern Europe, a great trade opened up in ancient Egyptian mummies and the fat of executed criminals, plundered as medicinal cure-alls. However, this is the first book to consider the demand for the blood of the executed, the desire for human fat, the resort to the hanged man's hand, and the trade in hanging rope in the modern era. It ends by look at the spiritual afterlife of dead criminals.

In this enlightening and provocative exploration, Dave Pruett sets out a revolutionary new understanding of our place in the universe, one that reconciles the rational demands of science with the deeper tugs of spirituality. Defining a moment in human self-awareness four centuries in the making, Reason and Wonder: A Copernican Revolution in Science and Spirit offers a way to move beyond the either/or choice of reason versus intuition-a dichotomy that ultimately leaves either the mind or the heart wanting. In doing so, it seeks to resolve an age-old conflict at the root of much human dysfunction, including today's global ecological crisis. An outgrowth of C. David Pruett's breakthrough undergraduate honors course, "From Black Elk to Black Holes: Shaping Myth for a New Millennium," Reason and Wonder embraces the insights of modern science and the wisdom of spiritual traditions to "re-enchant the universe." The new "myth of meaning" unfolds as the story of three successive "Copernican revolutions"-cosmological, biological, and spiritual-offers an expansive view of human potential as revolutionary as the work of Copernicus, Galilleo, and Darwin.

Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

Horrified by the Holocaust, social psychologist Stanley Milgram wondered if he could recreate the Holocaust in the laboratory setting. Unabated for more than half a century, his (in)famous results have continued to intrigue scholars. Based on unpublished archival data from Milgram's personal collection, volume one of this two-volume set introduces readers to a behind the scenes account showing how during Milgram's unpublished pilot studies he step-by-step invented his official experimental procedure-how he gradually learnt to transform most ordinary people into willing inflictors of harm. Volume two then illustrates how certain innovators within the Nazi regime used the very same Milgram-like learning techniques that with increasing effectiveness gradually enabled them to also transform most ordinary people into increasingly capable executioners of other men, women, and children. Volume two effectively attempts to capture how step-by-step these Nazi innovators attempted to transform the Fuhrer's wish of a Jewish-free Europe into a frightening reality. By the books' end the reader will gain an insight into how the seemingly undoable can become increasingly doable.

Olli-Pekka Vainio, a leading expert in science and theology, explores questions concerning the place and significance of humans in the cosmos. Vainio introduces cosmology from a "state of the question" perspective, examining the history of the idea in dialogue with C. S. Lewis. This work, which is related to a NASA-funded project on astrobiology, ties into the ongoing debate on the relationship between Christian theism and scientific worldview and shows what the stakes are for religion and theology in the rise of modern science.

The first volume of the graphic adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari's global phenomenon and smash Sunday Times #1 bestseller, with gorgeous full-colour illustrations and a beautiful package - the perfect gift for the curious beings in your life.

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one-homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

In this first volume of the full-colour illustrated adaptation of his groundbreaking book, renowned historian Yuval Harari tells the story of humankind's creation and evolution, exploring the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human". From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens challenges us to reconsider accepted beliefs, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and view specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Featuring 256 pages of full-colour illustrations and easy-to-understand text covering the first part of the full-length original edition, this adaptation of the mind-expanding book furthers the ongoing conversation as it introduces Harari's ideas to a wider new readership.

Limiting Outer Space propels the historicization of outer space by focusing on the Post-Apollo period. After the moon landings, disillusionment set in. Outer space, no longer considered the inevitable destination of human expansion, lost much of its popular appeal, cultural significance and political urgency. With the rapid waning of the worldwide Apollo frenzy, the optimism of the Space Age gave way to an era of space fatigue and planetized limits. Bringing together the history of European astroculture and American-Soviet spaceflight with scholarship on the 1970s, this cutting-edge volume examines the reconfiguration of space imaginaries from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives. Rather than invoking oft-repeated narratives of Cold War rivalry and an escalating Space Race, Limiting Outer Space breaks new ground by exploring a hitherto underrated and understudied decade, the Post-Apollo period.

The period between World War I and World War II was one of intense change. Everything was modernizing, including our technology for making war witness machine guns, trench warfare, biological agents, and ultimately The Final Solution. This modernization and eye toward the future was reflected in many facets of pop culture, including fashion, home-wear design, and the popular literature of the time. In sci-fi, a specific genre emerged that of the future war.

Fred Krome has collected many of these future war stories together for the first time in Fighting the Future War. Bolstered by a comprehensive introduction, and introduced with historical information about both the authors of the stories and the historical time period, these stories provide a view into the field of pulp science fiction writing, the issues that informed the time period between the world wars, and the way people envisioned the wars of tomorrow. Revealing anxieties about society, technology, race and politics, the genre of the future war story is important material for students of history and literature.

Darwin provoked Jewish as well as Christian thinkers so that many felt obliged to establish oppositional, alternative, synthetic, or complimentary models relating Jewish religion to his theory of natural selection. This book examines a range of leading nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American progressive Jewish thinkers, with the primary focus being rabbis Kohler, Wise, Hirsch, Krauskopf, and Hahn, although many others are covered. Key themes include the widespread commitment to universal evolutionism, that is, the application of biological evolutionary theory to other realms (e.g. history, religion, cosmic), and the particular fascination with the evolution of ethical systems within human societies, bearing in mind mankind's bestial origins and the new challenges for understanding religious authority and revelation. It is argued that Reform Jewish discussions about the nature of God have been more profoundly shaped by engagement with evolutionary theory than has been recognized before, and that evolutionary thought provides the key framework for understanding Reform Judaism itself. The precise nature of Jewish Reform engagement with Christian proponents of theistic evolution are important, as are their interest in alternative evolutionists to Darwin, such as Spencer and Haeckel.

This book examines the theoretical foundations underpinning the field of strength of materials/theory of elasticity, beginning from the origins of the modern theory of elasticity. While the focus is on the advances made within Italy during the nineteenth century, these achievements are framed within the overall European context. The vital contributions of Italian mathematicians, mathematical physicists and engineers in respect of the theory of elasticity, continuum mechanics, structural mechanics, the principle of least work and graphical methods in engineering are carefully explained and discussed. The book represents a work of historical research that primarily comprises original contributions and summaries of work published in journals. It is directed at those graduates in engineering, but also in architecture, who wish to achieve a more global and critical view of the discipline and will also be invaluable for all scholars of the history of mechanics.

H.G. Wells was acclaimed during his lifetime as one of the most original and creative thinkers of the 20th century, and retains to this day a position of considerable importance in the history of ideas. In 1928 when he wrote this cry for a new age of worldwide knowledge networking, there was no Internet. Yet Wells was already convinced that if only thinking people across the planet could somehow pull together and pool their expertise, energy, and insights into sort of "cerebrum for humanity," then the world would be a saner, safer, better, fairer place. Anyone aware of how the Internet already reflects both the vices and the virtues of society and wonders how a world-renowned visionary like H.G. Wells envisaged knowledge networking as working in practice will enjoy this book. It is a hymn to the practical possibilities of world group action.

Never before has such a history of the pancreas been presented. From antiquity until today, "rediscovery," translation and sequential presentation, in step with cultural changes in society, make this a unique contribution. Only from the perspective of the two octogenarian-authors could such a narrative have been produced. Discoveries resulting either from chance observation or careful scientific inquiry "come alive" as the authors present not only the people who made them but the setting in which they occurred.

Key Features:
*From the pre-Christian era of Asia Minor, to Greece, Rome, Europe and America, to the explosive progress in Japan, the dreams, near-misses and great discoveries have been traced to their sources.
*The great discoveries of the anatomists, WirsA1/4ng, Santorini, Oddi, Vater and their colleagues have been recreated from their original reports.
*Physiology is traced through the discovery of the digestive enzymes; the islets, by the Berlin student for whom they were named; the hormones, beginning with the dramatic discoveries of insulin, gastrin and their fascinating tumors.
*Diseases of the pancreas, particularly pancreatitis and cancer, but also congenital anomalies and trauma, are described from the era preceding the microscope to the dawn of the 21st Century.
*The explosive developments of imaging, diagnosis and pancreatic transplantation are presented, leading to the development of the challenging field of Pancreatology - its science and clinical practice.
*Finally the authors, having spent many years distilling the contribution of the giants of the past and present, present a thought provoking Chapter entitled "Lessons from Historyand their Application to the Future."

The articles in this volume of ARCHIMEDES examine particular cases of reception' in ways that emphasize pressing historiographical and methodological issues. Such issues arise in any consideration of the transmission and appropriation of scientific concepts and practices that originated in the several centers' of European learning, subsequently to appear (often in considerably altered guise) in regions at the European periphery. They discuss the transfer of new scientific ideas, the mechanisms of their introduction, and the processes of their appropriation at the periphery. The themes that frame the discussions of the complex relationship between the origination of ideas and their reception include the ways in which the ideas of the Scientific Revolution were introduced, the particularities of their expression in each place, the specific forms of resistance encountered by these new ideas, the extent to which such expression and resistance displays national characteristics, the procedures through which new ways of dealing with nature were made legitimate, and the commonalities and differences between the methods developed by scholars for handling scientific issues.

This book discusses the history of nuclear decommissioning as a science and industry. It explores the early, little-known period when the term "decommissioning" was not used in the nuclear context and the end-of-life operations of a nuclear facility were a low priority. It then describes the subsequent period when decommissioning was recognized as a separate phase of the nuclear lifecycle, before bringing readers up to date with today's state of the art. The author addresses decommissioning as a mature industry in an era in which large, commercial nuclear reactors and other fuel-cycle installations have been fully dismantled, and their sites returned to other uses. The book also looks at the birth, growth and maturity of decommissioning, focusing on how new issues emerged, how these were gradually addressed, and the lessons learned from them. Further, it examines the technologies and management advances in science and industry that followed these solutions. Nuclear Decommissioning is a point of reference for industry researchers and decommissioning practitioners looking to enrich their knowledge of decommissioning in recent decades as well as the modern industry. The book is also of interest to historians and students who wish to learn more about the history of nuclear decommissioning.

This biography sheds new light on the life and work of physicist Ettore Majorana (including unpublished contributions), as well as on his mysterious disappearance in March 1938. Majorana is held by many, including Nobel Laureate, Enrico Fermi, to have been a genius of the rank of Galilei and Newton. In this intriguing story, the author, himself a leading expert on the work of Majorana, supplements the existing literature with new insights, anecdotes and personal accounts of contemporaries of Majorana.

[the text below needs editing and we must be careful not to say things about Dan Brown's book that could get Springer in legal trouble] Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, was first published in 2003; its sales have reached 40 million worldwide. The book mixes a small spice of fact into a large dollop of fiction to create an entertaining novel of intrigue, adventure, romance, danger and conspiracy, which have been imaginatively worked together to cook up the successful bestseller. Most interest in the book's origins has centred on the sensational religious aspects. Dan Brown has written: 'All of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies, all of that is historical fact.' This gives an air of authenticity to the book. Brown has, however, made up the religious doctrines, or based them on questionable accounts by others. The locations of the actions of The Da Vinci Code are not, however, made up. The present book is the scientific story behind the scene of several of the book's actions that take place on the axis of France that passes through Paris. The Paris Meridian is the name of this location. It is the line running north-south through the astronomical observatory in Paris. One of the original intentions behind the founding of the Paris Observatory was to determine and measure this line. The French government financed the Paris Academy of Sciences to do so in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It employed both astronomers - people who study and measure the stars - and geodesists - people who study and measure the Earth. This book is about what they did and why. It is a true story behind Dan Brown's fiction. This is the first English language presentation of this historical material. It is attractively written and it features the story of the community of scientists who created the Paris Meridian. They knew each other well - some were members of the same families, in one case of four generations. Like scientists everywhere they collaborated and formed alliances; they also split into warring factions and squabbled. They travelled to foreign countries, somehow transcending the national and political disputes, as scientists do now, their eyes fixed on ideas of accuracy, truth and objective, enduring values - save where the reception given to their own work is concerned, when some became blind to high ideals and descended into petty politics. To establish the Paris Meridian, the scientists endured hardship, survived danger and gloried in amazing adventures during a time of turmoil in Europe, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War between France and Spain. Some were accused of witchcraft. Some of their associates lost their heads on the guillotine. Some died of disease. Some won honour and fame. One became the Head of State in France, albeit for no more than a few weeks. Some found dangerous love in foreign countries. One scientist killed in self defence when attacked by a jealous lover, another was himself killed by a jealous lover, a third brought back a woman to France and then jilted her, whereupon she joined a convent. The scientists worked on practical problems of interest to the government and to the people. They also worked on one of the important intellectual problems of the time, a problem of great interest to their fellow scientists all over the world, nothing less than the theory of universal gravitation. They succeeded in their intellectual work, while touching politics and the affairs of state. Their endeavours have left their marks on the landscape, in art and in literature.

This book tackles the difficult challenge of uncovering the pathogenic cause, epidemiological mechanics and broader historical impacts of an extremely deadly third-century ancient Roman pandemic. The core of this research is embodied in a novel systems synthesis methodology that allows for ground-breaking historical-scientific problem-solving. Through precise historical and scientific problem-solving, analysis and modelling, the authors piece together a holistic puzzle portrait of an ancient plague that is fully consistent, in turn, with both the surviving ancient evidence and the latest in cutting edge twenty-first-century modern medical and molecular phylogenetic science. Demonstrating the broader relevance of the crisis-beset world of the third-century Roman Empire in providing guiding and cautionary historical lessons for the present, this innovative book provides fascinating insights for students and scholars across a range of disciplines.

John Stachel, the author of this collection of 37 published and unpublished articles on Albert Einstein, has written about Einstein and his work for over 40 years. Trained as a theoretical physicist specializing in the theory of relativity, he was chosen as the founding editor of The Collected papers of Albert Einstein 25 years ago, and is currently Director of the Boston University Center for Einstein Studies. Based on a detailed study of documentary evidence, much of which was newly discovered in the course of his work, Stachel debunks many of the old (and some new) myths about Einstein and offers novel insight into his life and work. Throughout the volume, a new, more human picture of Einstein is offered to replace the plaster saint of popular legend. In particular, a youthful Einstein emerges from the obscurity that previously shrouded his early years, and much new light is shed on the origins of the special and general theories of relativity. Also discussed in some detail are Einstein's troubled relationship with his first wife, his friendships with other physicists such as Eddington, Bose, and Pauli, and his Jewish identity. The essays are grouped thematically into the following areas: * The Human Side * Editing the Einstein Papers * Surveys of Einstein's Work * Special Relativity * General Relativity * Quantum Theory * Einstein and Other Scientists * Book Reviews Because the essays are independent of one another, readers will be able to dip into this collection to satisfy varying interests. It will be of particular interest to historians of 20th century science, working physicists, and students, as well as to the many members of the general reading public who continue to be fascinated by aspects of Einstein's life and work.

This new survey of scientific endeavor within the British Empire is the most wide-ranging yet published, examining the interconnections between science, the British Empire, and the emergence of a globalized world. It identifies and analyzes the web of scientific networks crisscrossing the British Empire through which scientific knowledge and authority were produced, circulated and legitimated, critically engaging with new ways of thinking about networked connections across space. It offers a comparative perspective that surveys a variety of scientific initiatives and circuits, including networks of agronomists, anatomists, botanists, foresters, geologists, marine biologists, oceanographers and physicists. As they chart the evolving practices, strategies, theoretical ideas and agendas among research scientists, technical advisers, imperial administrators, and native peoples in Africa, Australia, Britain, India and elsewhere; each chapter combines rigorous research with theoretical reflection based on the latest literature, as well as serving as a useful introduction to that literature.

Islam developed over the course of its history one of the world's most innovative and interesting scientific and medical traditions. In this context, the term Islam should not simply be understood as referring to the religion of the prophet Muhammad, but rather to a civilization which was once surprisingly open to foreign influences, and eager to engage with the proverbial Other. Yet Islam is often perceived as being opposed to (Western) science and methodology. Islamic Medical and Scientific Tradition presents a selection of works that illustrate the intellectual curiosity and theoretical vigour with which Arabs and non-Arabs living in the medieval Muslim world pursued scientific endeavours. The focus is firmly on scholarship published within the last twenty years, during which period the discipline has enjoyed a new bloom. Starting with the theoretical framework of the sciences in Islamic philosophy and theology, this new collection from Routledge elucidates the position of mathematics, physics, and medicine within the hierarchy of the sciences. Another topic discussed is Ancient (or Greek) versus traditional (or Muslim) sciences; and Islamic theological views on the pure pursuit of knowledge. The life sciences of Biology, Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine are examined, as are those of the physical sciences: Physics and Astronomy. The occult 'sciences' of Astrology, Alchemy, and Geomancy are also discussed. Close attention is paid to the mathematical sciences of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Optics (including the introduction of zero, the invention of algebra, the squaring of the circle, conics, and the nature of vision). The practical sciences, Agriculture, Engineering, and Horticulture, are also examined in detail. Fully indexed, and with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editor, that places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, this is an essential work destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital one-stop reference resource.