This is an original and wide-ranging account of the careers of a close-knit group of highly influential ecologists working in Britain from the late 1960s onwards. The book can also be read as a history of some recent developments in ecology. One of the group, Robert May, is a past president of the Royal Society, and the author of what many see as the most important treatise in theoretical ecology of the later twentieth century. That the group flourished was due not only to May's intellectual leadership, but also to the guiding hand of T. R. E. Southwood. Southwood ended his career as Linacre Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford, where he also served a term as Vice-Chancellor. Earlier, as a professor and director of the Silwood Park campus of Imperial College London, he brought the group together. Since it began to coalesce at Silwood it has been named here the Silwood Circle. Southwood promoted the interests of its members with the larger aim of raising the profile of ecological and environmental science in Britain. Given public anxiety over the environment and the loss of ecosystems, his actions were well-timed.Ecology, which had been on the scientific margins in the first half of the twentieth century, came to be viewed as a science central to modern existence. The book illustrates its importance to many areas. Members of the Silwood Circle have acted as government advisors in the areas of conservation and biodiversity, resource management, pest control, food policy, genetically modified crops, sustainable agriculture, international development, defence against biological weapons, and epidemiology and infectious disease control. In recounting the science they carried out, and how they made their careers, the book reflects also on the role of the group, and the nature of scientific success.

In 1963 a schoolboy browsing in his local library stumbled across the world's greatest mathematical problem: Fermat's Last Theorem, a puzzle that every child can understand but which has baffled mathematicians for over 300 years. Aged just ten, Andrew Wiles dreamed that he would crack it. Wiles's lifelong obsession with a seemingly simple challenge set by a long-dead Frenchman is an emotional tale of sacrifice and extraordinary determination. In the end, Wiles was forced to work in secrecy and isolation for seven years, harnessing all the power of modern maths to achieve his childhood dream. Many before him had tried and failed, including a 18-century philanderer who was killed in a duel. An 18-century Frenchwoman made a major breakthrough in solving the riddle, but she had to attend maths lectures at the Ecole Polytechnique disguised as a man since women were forbidden entry to the school. A remarkable story of human endeavour and intellectual brilliance over three centuries, Fermat's Last Theorem will fascinate both specialist and general readers.

This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume's essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.

This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.

This book offers a comprehensive study and account of the co-evolution of technological and scientific literature in the early modern period (1450-1750). It examines the various relationships of these literatures in six areas of knowledge - Architecture, Chemistry, Gunnery, Mechanical Engineering, Mining, and Practical Mathematics - which represent the main types of advanced technological and scientific knowledge of the era. These six fields of technologically advanced knowledge and their interrelations and interactions with learned knowledge are investigated and discussed through a specific lens: by focusing on the technological literature. Among present-day historians of science, it hardly remains controversial that contact and exchange between educated and practical knowledge played a significant role in the development of the natural sciences and technology in early modern Europe. Several paths for such exchange arose from the late Middle Ages onward due to the formation of an economy of knowledge that fostered contacts and exchange between the two worlds. How can this development be adequately described and how, on the basis of such a description, can the significance of this process for the early modern history of knowledge in the West be assessed? These are the overarching questions this book tries to answer. There exists a considerable amount of literature concerning several stations and events in the course of this long development process as well as its various aspects. As meritorious and indispensable as many of these studies are, none of them tried to portray this process as a whole with its most essential branches. What is more, many of them implicitly or explicitly took physics as a model of science, and thus highlighted mechanics and mechanical engineering as the model of all interrelations of practical and learned knowledge. By contrast, this book aims at a more complete portrait of the early modern interrelations and interactions between learned and practical knowledge. It tries to convey a new idea of the variety and disunity of these relations by discussing and comparing altogether six widely different fields of knowledge and practice. The targeted audience of this book is first of all the historians of science and technology. As one of the peer reviewers suggested - the book could very well become a textbook used for teaching the history of science and technology at universities. Furthermore, since the book addresses fundamental aspects of the significance emergence and development of modern science has for the self-image of the West, it can be expected that it will attract the attention and interest of a wider readership than professional historians.

This book presents a cultural history of psychology that analyzes the diverse contexts in which psychological knowledge and practices have developed in Latin America. The book aims to contribute to the growing effort to develop a theoretical knowledge that complements the biographical perspective centered on the great figures, with a polycentric history that emphasizes the different cultural, social, economic and political phenomena that accompanied the emergence of psychology. The different chapters of this volume show the production of historians of psychology in Latin America who are part of the Ibero-American Network of Researchers in History of Psychology (RIPeHP, in the Portuguese acronym for "Rede Iberoamericana de Pesquisadores em Historia da Psicologia"). They present a significant sample of the research carried out in a field that has experienced a strong development in the region in the last decades. The volume is divided into two parts. The first presents comparative chapters that address cross-cutting issues in the different countries of the region. The second part analyzes particular aspects of the development of psychology in seven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru. Throughout these chapters the reader will find how psychology made its way through dictatorial governments, phenomena of violence and internal armed conflict, among others. Dimensions that include rigorous analysis ranging from ancestral practices to current geopolitical knowledge of the Latin American region. History of Psychology in Latin America - A Cultural Approach is an invaluable resource for historians of psychology, anywhere in the world, interested in a polycentric and critical approach. Since its content is part of the "cultural turn in psychology" it is also of interest to readers interested in the social and human sciences in general. Finally, the thoroughly international perspective provided through its chapters make the book a key resource for both undergraduate and graduate teaching and education on the past and current state of psychology.

This book presents a multidisciplinary guide to gauge theory and gravity, with chapters by the world's leading theoretical physicists, mathematicians, historians and philosophers of science. The contributions from theoretical physics explore e.g. the consistency of the unification of gravitation and quantum theory, the underpinnings of experimental tests of gauge theory and its role in shedding light on the relationship between mathematics and physics. In turn, historians and philosophers of science assess the impact of Weyl's view on the philosophy of science. Graduate students, lecturers and researchers in the fields of history of science, theoretical physics and philosophy of science will benefit from this book by learning about the role played by Weyl's Raum-Zeit-Materie in shaping several modern research fields, and by gaining insights into the future prospects of gauge theory in both theoretical and experimental physics. Furthermore, the book facilitates interdisciplinary exchange and conceptual innovation in tackling fundamental questions about our deepest theories of physics. Chapter "Weyl's Raum-Zeit-Materie and the Philosophy of Science" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK An original and revelatory journey through the three-billion-year history of slime - a substance upon which we and our world depend. Slime is an ambiguous thing. It exists somewhere between a solid and liquid. It inspires revulsion even while it compels our fascination. It is a both a vehicle for pathogens and the strongest weapon in our immune system. Most of us know little about it and yet it is the substance on which our world turns. Slime exists at the interfaces of all things: between the different organs and layers in our bodies, and between the earth, water, and air in the environment. It is often produced in the fatal encounter between predator and prey, and it is a vital presence in the reproductive embrace between female and male. In this ground-breaking and fascinating book, Susanne Wedlich leads us on a scientific journey through the 3 billion year history of slime, from the part it played in the evolution of life on this planet to the way it might feature in the post-human future. She also explores the cultural and emotional significance of slime, from its starring role in the horror genre to its subtle influence on Art Nouveau. Slime is what connects Patricia Highsmith's fondness for snails, John Steinbeck's aversion to hagfish, and Emperor Hirohito's passion for jellyfish, as well as the curious mating practices of underwater gastropods and the miraculous functioning of the human gut. Written with authority, wit and eloquence, Slime brings this most nebulous and neglected of substances to life. Rich and strange... a deft cultural history of the idea of slime as well as an up-to-the-minute exegesis of its science - Daily Telegraph

This collection of essays examines the way psychoactive substances are described and discussed within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural texts. Covering several genres, such as novels, poetry, autobiography and non-fiction, individual essays provide insights on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of drug effects of opium, alcohol and many other plant-based substances. Contributors consider both contemporary and recent medical knowledge in order to contextualise and illuminate understandings of how drugs were utilised as stimulants, as relaxants, for pleasure, as pain relievers and for other purposes. Chapters also examine the novelty of experimentations of drugs in conversation with the way literary texts incorporate them, highlighting the importance of literary and cultural texts for addressing ethical questions.

This book presents a brief compilation of results from nearly a century of research on the globular star clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). It explores the techniques and limitations of the observations, the successes and challenges of the models, and the paradigm for the formation of M31 that has gradually emerged. These results will eventually be superseded by new data, better analysis techniques, and more complex models. However, the emphasis of this book is on the techniques, thought processes, and connections with other studies.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction in to the various theories of colour and how they developed over the centuries and millennia. As colour is the perception of light by our brains, the book captures not only the physical phenomena but also psychological and philosophical aspects of colours. It starts with ancient studies of Greek philosophers and their insights into light and mirrors, then reviews the theory of colors in the middle ages in Europe and Middle East. The last big part of the book explains the theories of colours by modern scientists and philosophers, starting with Isaac Newton and ending colour schemes of modern digital pictures.