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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > History of science
Women engineers have been in the public limelight for decades, yet
we have surprisingly little historically grounded understanding of
the patterns of employment and education of women in this field.
Most studies are either policy papers or limited to statistical
analyses. Moreover, the scant historical research so far available
emphasizes the individual, single and unique character of those
women working in engineering, often using anecdotal evidence but
ignoring larger issues like the patterns of the labour market and
educational institutions.
Women engineers have been in the public limelight for decades, yet
we have surprisingly little historically grounded understanding of
the patterns of employment and education of women in this field.
Most studies are either policy papers or limited to statistical
analyses. Moreover, the scant historical research so far available
emphasizes the individual, single and unique character of those
women working in engineering, often using anecdotal evidence but
ignoring larger issues like the patterns of the labour market and
educational institutions.
This book provides a breadth of innovative and impactful research in the field computational intelligence led by women investigators. Topics include intelligent data analytics, optimization of complex systems, approximation of human reasoning, robotic path planning, and intelligent control systems. These topics touch on many of the technological challenges facing the world today and these solutions by women researcher teams are valuable for their excellence and their non-traditional perspective. As an important part of the Women in Science and Engineering book series, the work highlights the contribution of women leaders in computational intelligence, inspiring women and men, girls, and boys to enter and apply themselves to this exciting multi-disciplinary field.
Demonstrating the vibrancy of an Early Modern Muslim society through a study of the natural sciences in seventeenth-century Morocco, Revealed Sciences examines how the natural sciences flourished during this period, without developing in a similar way to the natural sciences in Europe. Offering an innovative analysis of the relationship between religious thought and the natural sciences, Justin K. Stearns shows how nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Middle Eastern scholars jointly developed a narrative of the decline of post-formative Islamic thought, including the fate of the natural sciences in the Muslim world. Challenging these depictions of the natural sciences in the Muslim world, Stearns uses numerous close readings of works in the natural sciences to a detailed overview of the place of the natural sciences in scholarly and educational landscapes of the Early Modern Magreb, and considers non-teleological possibilities for understanding a persistent engagement with the natural sciences in Early Modern Morocco.
The epistemological synthesis of the various theories of evolution, since the first formulation in 1802 with the transmission of the inherited characters by J.B. Lamarck, shows the need for an alternative synthesis to that of Princeton (1947). This new synthesis integrates the scientific models of self-organization developed during the second half of the 20th century based on the laws of physics, thermodynamics, and mathematics with the emergent evolutionary problematics such as self-organized memory. This book shows, how self-organization is integrated in modern evolutionary biology. It is divided in two parts: The first part pays attention to the modern observations in paleontology and biology, which include major theoreticians of the self-organization (d'Arcy Thompson, Henri Bergson, Rene Thom, Ilya Prigogine). The second part presents different emergent evolutionary models including the sciences of complexity, the non-linear dynamical systems, fractals, attractors, epigenesis, systemics, and mesology with different examples of the sciences of complexity and self-organization as observed in the human lineage, from both internal (embryogenesis-morphogenesis) and external (mesology) viewpoints.
This book provides the reader with a detailed and captivating account of the story where, for the first time, physicists ventured into proposing a new force of nature beyond the four known ones - the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, and gravitation - based entirely on the reanalysis of existing experimental data. Back in 1986, Ephraim Fischbach, Sam Aronson, Carrick Talmadge and their collaborators proposed a modification of Newton's Law of universal gravitation. Underlying this proposal were three tantalizing pieces of evidence: 1) an energy dependence of the CP (particle-antiparticle and reflection symmetry) parameters, 2) differences between the measurements of G, the universal gravitational constant, in laboratories and in mineshafts, and 3) a reanalysis of the Eoetvos experiment, which had previously been used to show that the gravitational mass of an object and its inertia mass were equal to approximately one part in a billion. The reanalysis revealed that, contrary to Galileo's position, the force of gravity was in fact very slightly different for different substances. The resulting Fifth Force hypothesis included this composition dependence and also added a small distance dependence to the inverse-square gravitational force. Over the next four years numerous experiments were performed to test the hypothesis. By 1990 there was overwhelming evidence that the Fifth Force, as initially proposed, did not exist. This book discusses how the Fifth Force hypothesis came to be proposed and how it went on to become a showcase of discovery, pursuit and justification in modern physics, prior to its demise. In this new and significantly expanded edition, the material from the first edition is complemented by two essays, one containing Fischbach's personal reminiscences of the proposal, and a second on the ongoing history and impact of the Fifth Force hypothesis from 1990 to the present.
A collection in 12 volumes of all the published works of Robert Boyle (1627-1691), who was one of the most influential scientific and theological thinkers of his time. Discoverer of Boyle's Law, which still pertains in modern science, his writings range around the greatest scientific issues of his day. Works originally in Latin are presented in their contemporary English translations. There is a general introduction with explanatory notes to the texts. A bibliography and general index permits access to all Boyle's work.
Sir Norman Lockyer left "Nature," the world's leading scientific journal, as his lasting memorial. But his life, and controversial theories, are an important part of science history. His ideas were at the forefront of public debate, and ranged from the brilliant to the perverse. This entertaining book is a fascinating insight into his eventful life.
This book contains papers from a conference held to celebrate the 70th birthday of one of the world's foremost astronomical historians, Professor F. Richard Stephenson, the latest recipient of the American Astronomical Society's highest award for research in astronomical history, the LeRoy Doggett Prize. Reflecting Professor Stephenson's extensive research portfolio, this book brings together under one cover papers on four different areas of scholarship: applied historical astronomy (which Stephenson founded); Islamic astronomy; Oriental astronomy and amateur astronomy. These papers are penned by astronomers from Canada, China, England, France, Georgia, Iran, Japan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Portugal, Thailand and the USA. Its diverse coverage represents a wide cross-section of the history of astronomy community. Under discussion are ways in which recent research using historical data has provided new insights into auroral and solar activity, supernovae and changes in the rotation rate of the Earth. It also presents readers with results of recent research on leading historical figures in Islamic and Oriental astronomy, and aspects of eighteenth and nineteenth century Australian, British, German and Portuguese amateur astronomy, including the fascinating 'amateur-turned-professional syndrome'.
A new and innovative account of British sociology's intellectual origins that uses previously unknown archival resources to show how the field's forgotten roots in a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century debate about biology can help us understand both its subsequent development and future potential.
This book has been defined around three important issues: the first sheds light on how people, in various philosophical, religious, and political contexts, understand the natural environment, and how the relationship between the environment and the body is perceived; the second focuses on the perceptions that a particular natural environment is good or bad for human health and examines the reasons behind such characterizations ; the third examines the promotion, in history, of specific practices to take advantage of the health benefits, or avoid the harm, caused by certain environments and also efforts made to change environments supposed to be harmful to human health. The feeling and/or the observation that the natural environment can have effects on human health have been, and are still commonly shared throughout the world. This led us to raise the issue of the links observed and believed to exist between human beings and the natural environment in a broad chronological and geographical framework. In this investigation, we bring the reader from ancient and late imperial China to the medieval Arab world up to medieval, modern, and contemporary Europe. This book does not examine these relationships through the prism of the knowledge of our modern contemporary European experience, which, still too often, leads to the feeling of totally different worlds. Rather, it questions protagonists who, in different times and in different places, have reflected, on their own terms, on the links between environment and health and tries to obtain a better understanding of why these links took the form they did in these precise contexts. This book targets an academic readership as well as an "informed audience", for whom present issues of environment and health can be nourished by the reflections of the past.
The biggest challenges in public health today are often related to attitudes, diet and exercise. In many ways, this marks a return to the state of medicine in the eighteenth century, when ideals of healthy living were a much more central part of the European consciousness than they have become since the advent of modern clinical medicine. Enlightenment advice on healthy lifestyle was often still discussed in terms of the six non-naturals - airs and places, food and drink, exercise, excretion and retention, and sleep and emotions. This volume examines what it meant to live healthily in the Enlightenment in the context of those non-naturals, showing both the profound continuities from Antiquity and the impact of newer conceptions of the body. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429465642
This book provides a detailed history of the United States National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNC/TAM) of the US National Academies, the relationship between the USNC/TAM and IUTAM, and a review of the many mechanicians who developed the field over time. It emphasizes the birth and growth of USNC/TAM, the birth and growth of the larger International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM), and explores the work of mechanics from Aristotle to the present. Written by the former Secretary of USNC/TAM, Dr. Carl T. Herakovich of the University of Virginia, the book profiles luminaries of mechanics including Galileo, Newton, Bernoulli, Euler, Cauchy, Prandtl, Einstein, von Karman, Timoshenko, and in so doing provides insight into centuries of scientific and technologic advance.
This book sheds light on the variety of mathematical cultures in general. To do so, it concentrates on cultures of computation and quantification in the ancient world, mainly in ancient China, South Asia, and the Ancient Near East and offers case studies focused on numbers, quantities, and operations, in particular in relation to mathematics as well as administrative and economic activities. The various chapters focus on the different ways and contexts of shaping numbers and quantities, and on the procedures applied to them. The book places special emphasis on the processes of emergence of place-value number systems, evidenced in the three geographical areas under study All these features yield essential elements that will enable historians of mathematics to further capture the diversity of computation practices in their contexts, whereas previous historical approaches have tended to emphasize elements that displayed uniformity within "civilizational" blocks. The book includes editions and translations of texts, some of them published here for the first time, maps, and conventions for editions of ancient texts. It thereby offers primary sources and methodological tools for teaching and learning. The volume is aimed at historians and philosophers of science and mathematics, historians of the ancient worlds, historians of economics, sinologists, indologists, assyriologists, as well as undergraduate, graduate students and teachers in mathematics, the history and philosophy of science and mathematics, and in the history of ancient worlds.
This book explores the relevance of naturalism and theories of nature to Classical German Philosophy. It presents new readings on Kant, Jacobi, Goethe, the Romantic tradition, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Marx, which highlight the relevance of Classical German Philosophy's considerations of nature and naturalism for contemporary concerns.
The lecture series on the Theory of the Top was originally given as a dedication to Goettingen University by Felix Klein in 1895, but has since found broader appeal. The Theory of the Top: Volume I. Introduction to the Kinematics and Kinetics of the Top is the first of a series of four self-contained English translations that provide insights into kinetic theory and kinematics.
Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite books-Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worlds-and the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.
This book deals with the rise of mathematics in physical sciences, beginning with Galileo and Newton and extending to the present day. The book is divided into two parts. The first part gives a brief history of how mathematics was introduced into physics-despite its "unreasonable effectiveness" as famously pointed out by a distinguished physicist-and the criticisms it received from earlier thinkers. The second part takes a more philosophical approach and is intended to shed some light on that mysterious effectiveness. For this purpose, the author reviews the debate between classical philosophers on the existence of innate ideas that allow us to understand the world and also the philosophically based arguments for and against the use of mathematics in physical sciences. In this context, Schopenhauer's conceptions of causality and matter are very pertinent, and their validity is revisited in light of modern physics. The final question addressed is whether the effectiveness of mathematics can be explained by its "existence" in an independent platonic realm, as Goedel believed. The book aims at readers interested in the history and philosophy of physics. It is accessible to those with only a very basic (not professional) knowledge of physics.
The Vinland Map, dated to about A.D. 1440 - at least fifty years before Columbus landed in the Americas - is a unique map of the world that shows an outline of the northeast American coast and a legend describing its discovery in about 1000 by Leif Eiriksson, the Norseman from Greenland. The map was published by Yale University Press in 1965 and generated an enormous amount of debate. Chemical analysis of the ink later suggested that the map might be a forgery, but recent appraisals of both scientific and humanist evidence argue that it is indeed authentic. Now, on the thirtieth anniversary of its original publication, here is this classic of historical cartography in a new edition. It reprints unaltered the original text on the Vinland Map and an account of Friar John of Plano Carpini's mission to the Mongols from 1245 to 1247 (the Tartar Relation), with which the map had at some stage been bound. To this have been added a new introduction by George D. Painter, sole survivor of the original team of editors, who discusses the verification of the map's authenticity; a new essay by Wilcomb E. Washburn, director of the Smithsonian's American Studies Program, on the map's provenance and scientific testing; and a new discussion of the map's compositional and structural aspects by Thomas A. Cahill and Bruce H. Kusko, of the Crocker Historical and Archaeological Projects at the University of California, Davis. There is also an account by the rare-book dealer Laurence C. Witten II, who died while this new edition was in preparation, of his acquisition of the map in 1957.
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.
This book casts new light on the process that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a profound transformation in the study of nature with the emergence of mechanistic philosophy, the new mixed mathematics, and the establishment of the experimental approach. It is argued that modern European science originated from Hellenistic mathematics not so much because of rediscovery of the latter but rather because its "applied" components, namely mechanics, optics, harmonics, and astronomy, and their methodologies continued to be transmitted throughout the Middle Ages without serious interruption. Furthermore, it is proposed that these "applied" components played a role in their entirety; thus, for example, "new" mechanics derived not only from "old" mechanics but also from harmonics, optics, and astronomy. Unlike other texts on the subject, the role of mathematicians is stressed over that of philosophers of nature and the focus is particularly on epistemological aspects. In exploring Galilean and post-Galilean epistemology, attention is paid to the contributions of Galileo's disciples and also the impact of his enemies. The book will appeal to both historians of science and scientists. |
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