Can we prove the necessity of our best physical theories by rational means, without appeal to experience? This book recounts a few ingenious attempts to derive physical theories by reason only, beginning with Descartes' geometric construction of the world, and finishing with recent derivations of quantum mechanics from natural axioms. Deductions based on theological, metaphysical, or transcendental arguments are worth remembering for the ways they motivated and structured physical theory, even though we would now criticize their excessive confidence in the power of the mind. Other deductions more modestly relied on criteria for the comprehensibility of nature, including forms of measurability, causality, homogeneity, and correspondence. The central thesis of this book is that such criteria, when properly applied to idealized systems, effectively determine some of our most important theories as well as the mathematical character of the laws of physics. The relevant arguments are not purely rational, because only experience can tell us to which extent nature is comprehensible in a given way. Nor do they block the possibility of ever more varied forms of comprehensibility. They nonetheless suggest the inevitability of much of our theoretical physics.

The subject of Christology has been a struggle for the church from the very beginning. It has resulted in divisions, crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and a wide range of creeds. Each group claims it possesses the truth-a truth revealed to them, a particular turn on belief they alone rightly proclaim. In "And Jacob Digged a Well," author Pastor Theodore M. Snider provides a commentary on religion-where it's been, where it's headed, and how it fits in the modern world. He seeks to answer this question: why do we believe what we believe?

Snider discusses how scientific and technological discoveries have changed not only our worldviews but also our Godviews and how consciousness and brain research are altering the way we understand each other and how beliefs are formed. He compiles a diverse amount of information on topics relevant to both secular and religious audiences, including creationism, evolution, intelligent design, and artificial intelligence through historical, scientific, cognitive, and psychological avenues.

And Jacob Digged a Well reminds us that "natural" may not be as clear as we once thought. Faith in the twenty-first century needs to look quite different from the past century.

The name of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is inscribed in almost every flora and fauna published from the mid-eighteenth century onwards; in this respect he is virtually immortal. In this book a group of specialists argue for the need to re-centre Linnaean science and de-centre Linnaeus the man by exploring the ideas, practices and people connected to his taxonomic innovations. Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the 'Linnaean workshop': paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus's work in Paris, Koenigsberg, Edinburgh and beyond offer a window on the local contexts of knowledge transfer, including new perspectives on the history of anthropology and stadial theory. The global implications and negotiated nature of these intellectual, social and material developments are further investigated in chapters tracing the experiences and encounters of Linnaean travellers in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. Through focusing on the circulation of Linnaean knowledge and placing it within the context of eighteenth-century globalization, authors provide innovative and important contributions to our understanding of the early modern history of science.

'This is an an absolutely wonderful book that is full of gems about the elements and the periodic table ... All in all, the book is highly recommended to philosophers of chemistry. As philosophers we have a natural tendency to concentrate on generalities and not to get too involved in the specifics and the details. Above all else, this new book reminds us that such an approach needs to be tempered by a detailed knowledge of the exceptions and features that go against the simplified generalities which we so cherish.' [Read Full Review]Eric ScerriFoundations of Chemistry'Many questions are dealt with in a clearly written way in this stimulating and innovative book. The reader will quickly become interested in the subject and will be taken on tour through this Periodic Table in a very readable way, both for students and teachers ... The number of illustrations is good, and clear. This book is indeed unique and quite thought-provoking ... This book is highly recommended for students, teachers, researchers and not only chemists! Geologists, biochemist and also physicists will find it very interesting to read.' [Read Full Review]Chemistry InternationalThat fossilized chart on every classroom wall - isn't that The Periodic Table? Isn't that what Mendeleev devised about a century ago? No and No. There are many ways of organizing the chemical elements, some of which are thought-provoking, and which reveal philosophical challenges. Where does hydrogen 'belong'? Can an element occupy more than one location on the chart? Which are the Group 3 elements? Is aluminum in the wrong place? Why is silver(I) like thallium(I)? Why is vanadium like molybdenum? Why does gold form an auride ion like a halide ion? Does an atom 'know' if it is a non-metal or metal? Which elements are the 'metalloids'? Which are the triels? So many questions! In this stimulating and innovative book, the Reader will be taken on a voyage from the past to the present to the future of the Periodic Table. This book is unique. This book is readable. This book is thought-provoking. It is a multi-dimensional examination of patterns and trends among the chemical elements. Every reader will discover something about the chemical elements which will provoke thought and a new appreciation as to how the elements relate together.

Offering a valuable resource for medical and other historians, this book explores the processes by which pharmacy in Britain and its colonies separated from medicine and made the transition from trade to profession during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain was founded in 1841, its founders considered pharmacy to be a branch of medicine. However, the 1852 Pharmacy Act made the exclusion of pharmacists from the medical profession inevitable, and in 1864 the General Medical Council decided that pharmacy legislation was best left to pharmacists themselves. Yet across the Empire, pharmacy struggled to establish itself as an autonomous profession, with doctors in many colonies reluctant to surrender control over pharmacy. In this book the author traces the professionalization of pharmacy by exploring issues including collective action by pharmacists, the role of the state, the passage of legislation, the extension of education, and its separation from medicine. The author considers the extent to which the British model of pharmacy shaped pharmacy in the Empire, exploring the situation in the Divisions of Empire where the 1914 British Pharmacopoeia applied: Canada, the West Indies, the Mediterranean colonies, the colonies in West and South Africa, India and the Eastern colonies, Australia, New Zealand, and the Western Pacific Islands. This insightful and wide-ranging book offers a unique history of British pharmaceutical policy and practice within the colonial world, and provides a firm foundation for further studies in this under-researched aspect of the history of medicine.

This book presents quantum theory as a theory based on new relationships among matter, thought, and experimental technology, as against those previously found in physics, relationships that also redefine those between mathematics and physics in quantum theory. The argument of the book is based on its title concept, reality without realism (RWR), and in the corresponding view, the RWR view, of quantum theory. The book considers, from this perspective, the thinking of Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and Dirac, with the aim of bringing together the philosophy and history of quantum theory. With quantum theory, the book argues, the architecture of thought in theoretical physics was radically changed by the irreducible role of experimental technology in the constitution of physical phenomena, accordingly, no longer defined independently by matter alone, as they were in classical physics or relativity. Or so it appeared. For, quantum theory, the book further argues, made us realize that experimental technology, beginning with that of our bodies, irreducibly shapes all physical phenomena, and thus makes us rethink the relationships among matter, thought, and technology in all of physics.

A standard view of elementary particles and forces is that they determine everything else in the rest of physics, the whole of chemistry, biology, geology, physiology and perhaps even human behavior.This reductive view of physics is popular among some physicists. Yet, there are other physicists who argue this is an oversimplified and that the relationship of elementary particle physics to these other domains is one of emergence. Several objections have been raised from physics against proposals for emergence (e.g., that genuinely emergent phenomena would violate the standard model of elementary particle physics, or that genuine emergence would disrupt the lawlike order physics has revealed). Many of these objections rightly call into question typical conceptions of emergence found in the philosophy literature. This book explores whether physics points to a reductive or an emergent structure of the world and proposes a physics-motivated conception of emergence that leaves behind many of the problematic intuitions shaping the philosophical conceptions. Examining several detailed case studies reveal that the structure of physics and the practice of physics research are both more interesting than is captured in this reduction/emergence debate. The results point to stability conditions playing a crucial though underappreciated role in the physics of emergence. This contextual emergence has thought-provoking consequences for physics and beyond, and will be of interest to physics students, researchers, as well as those interested in physics.

This book offers the first in-depth enquiry into the origins of 135 Indigenous Australian objects acquired by the Royal Navy between 1795 and 1855 and held now by the British Museum. In response to increasing calls for the 'decolonisation' of museums and the restitution of ethnographic collections, the book seeks to return knowledge of the moments, methods, and motivations whereby Indigenous Australian objects were first collected and sent to Britain. By structuring its discussion in terms of three key 'stages' of a typical naval voyage to Australia-departure from British shores, arrival on the continent's coasts, and eventual return to port-the book offers a nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the pathways followed by these 135 objects into the British Museum. The book offers important new understandings of Indigenous Australian peoples' reactions to naval visitors, and contains a wealth of original research on the provenance and meaning of some of the world's oldest extant Indigenous Australian object collections.