Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (iHPS) is commonly understood as the study of science from a combined historical and philosophical perspective. Yet, since its gradual formation as a research field, the question of how to suitably integrate both perspectives remains open. This volume presents cutting edge research from junior iHPS scholars, and in doing so provides a snapshot of current developments within the field, explores the connection between iHPS and other academic disciplines, and demonstrates some of the topics that are attracting the attention of scholars who will help define the future of iHPS.

Remarkable Discoveries! is an enthusiastic and engaging narrative that explores eighteen exciting discoveries, found in all areas of science, that have had a profound impact on modern life. Writing without technical jargon, the author relates the histories of such fascinating discoveries as electricity, DNA, microbes, plate tectonics, and x-rays, emphasizing the personalities involved, the role of serendipity, and the element of surprise and wonder that often accompanies scientific research. The intriguing vignettes related in easy-to-read prose leave the reader eager to know more about the world of science and scientists.

This new text is a detailed study of an important process in modern Indian history. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, India experienced an intellectual renaissance, which owed as much to the influx of new ideas from the West as to traditional religious and cultural insights.

Gosling examines the effects of the introduction of Western science into India, and the relationship between Indian traditions of thought and secular Western scientific doctrine. He charts the early development of science in India, its role in the secularization of Indian society, and the subsequent reassertion, adaptation and rejection of traditional modes of thought. The beliefs of key Indian scientists, including Jagadish Chandra Bose, P.C. Roy and S.N. Bose are explored and the book goes on to reflect upon how individual scientists could still accept particular religious beliefs such as reincarnation, cosmology, miracles and prayer.

Science and the Indian Tradition gives an in-depth assessment of results of the introduction of Western science into India, and will be of interest to scholars of Indian history and those interested in the interaction between Western and Indian traditions of intellectual thought.

A biography of a staple grain we often take for granted, exploring how wheat went from wild grass to a world-shaping crop. At breakfast tables and bakeries, we take for granted a grain that has made human civilization possible, a cereal whose humble origins belie its world-shaping power: wheat. Amber Waves tells the story of a group of grass species that first grew in scattered stands in the foothills of the Middle East until our ancestors discovered their value as a source of food. Over thousands of years, we moved their seeds to all but the polar regions of Earth, slowly cultivating what we now know as wheat, and in the process creating a world of cuisines that uses wheat seeds as a staple food. Wheat spread across the globe, but as ecologist Catherine Zabinski shows us, a biography of wheat is not only the story of how plants ensure their own success: from the earliest bread to the most mouthwatering pasta, it is also a story of human ingenuity in producing enough food for ourselves and our communities. Since the first harvest of the ancient grain, we have perfected our farming systems to grow massive quantities of food, producing one of our species' global mega crops-but at a great cost to ecological systems. And despite our vast capacity to grow food, we face problems with undernourishment both close to home and around the world. Weaving together history, evolution, and ecology, Zabinski's tale explores much more than the wild roots and rise of a now-ubiquitous grain: it illuminates our complex relationship with our crops, both how we have transformed the plant species we use as food, and how our society-our culture-has changed in response to the need to secure food sources. From the origins of agriculture to gluten sensitivities, from our first selection of the largest seeds from wheat's wild progenitors to the sequencing of the wheat genome and genetic engineering, Amber Waves sheds new light on how we grow the food that sustains so much human life.

Weather forecasting is the most visible branch of meteorology and has its modern roots in the nineteenth century when scientists redefined meteorology in the way weather forecasts were made, developing maps of isobars, or lines of equal atmospheric pressure, as the main forecasting tool. This book is the history of how weather forecasting was moulded and modelled by the processes of nation-state building and statistics in the Western world.

Between the years 1890 and 1924, the dominant view of the universe suggested a cosmology largely foreign to contemporary ideas. First, astronomers believed they had confirmed that the sun was roughly in the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. Second, considerable evidence indicated that the size of the galaxy was only about one-third the value now accepted by today's astronomers. Third, it was thought that interstellar space was completely transparent, that there was no absorbing material between the stars. Fourth, astronomers believed that the universe was composed of numerous star systems comparable to the Milky Way galaxy. The method that provided this picture and came to dominate cosmology was 'statistical' in nature, because it was based on the counts of stars and their positions, motions, brightnesses and stellar spectra. Professor Paul describes the rise of this statistical cosmology in light of developments in nineteenth-century astronomy and explains how this cosmology set the stage for many of the most significant developments of twentieth-century astronomy.

In 1962 Dean Acheson famously described Britain as having lost an Empire but not yet found a role. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the realms of nuclear weapons. An increasingly marginal world power, successive post-war British governments felt that an independent nuclear deterrent was essential if the country was to remain at the top table of world diplomacy. Focusing on a key twenty-year period, this study explores Britain's role in efforts to bring about a nuclear test ban treaty between 1954 and 1973. Taking a broadly chronological approach, it examines the nature of defence planning, the scientific goals that nuclear tests were designed to secure, Anglo-American relationships, the efficacy of British diplomacy and its contribution to arms control and disarmament. A key theme of the study is to show how the UK managed to balance the conflicting pressures created by its determination to remain a credible nuclear power whilst wanting to pursue disarmament objectives, and how these pressures shifted over the period in question. Based on a wealth of primary sources this book opens up the largely ignored subject of the impact of arms control on the UK nuclear weapons programme. Its appraisal of the relationship between the requirements and developments of the UK nuclear weapons programme against international and domestic pressures for a test ban treaty will be of interest to anyone studying post-war British defence and foreign policy, history of science, arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation and international relations. It also provides important background information on current events involving nuclear proliferation and disarmament.

This book provides a survey of the development of scientific disciplines and technical projects under National Socialism in Germany. Each contribution addresses a different, new aspect which is important for judging the interaction between science, technology and National Socialism. In particular, the personal conduct of individual scientists and engineers as well as the functionality of certain the ones and projects are examined. All essays share a common theme: continuity and discontinuity. All authors cover a period that reaches back to the Weimar Republic and forward beyond the end of National Socialism to the post-war period. This unanimity of approach provides answers to major questions about the nature of Hitler's regime and about possible lines of continuity in science and technology which may transcend political upheaval. The book is also the most comprehensive to date on this subject, and includes essays on engineering, geography, biology, psychology, physics, mathematics, and science policy. It thus offers something of interest for the specialist, engineer and historian as well as an unprecedented overview of science and technology before, during and after the Third Reich.

A fresh look at electricity and its powerful role in life on Earth When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices-or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical. The story of how we came to understand electricity's essential role in all life is rooted in our observations of its influences on the body-influences governed by the body's central nervous system. Spark explains the science of electricity from this fresh, biological perspective. Through vivid tales of scientists and individuals-from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk-Timothy Jorgensen shows how our views of electricity and the nervous system evolved in tandem, and how progress in one area enabled advancements in the other. He explains how these developments have allowed us to understand-and replicate-the ways electricity enables the body's essential functions of sight, hearing, touch, and movement itself. Throughout, Jorgensen examines our fascination with electricity and how it can help or harm us. He explores a broad range of topics and events, including the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of the electron and neuron, the history of experimentation involving electricity's effects on the body, and recent breakthroughs in the use of electricity to treat disease. Filled with gripping adventures in scientific exploration, Spark offers an indispensable look at electricity, how it works, and how it animates our lives from within and without.

The aim of this book is to explore the body in various historical contexts and to take it as a point of departure for broader historiographical projects. The chapters in the volume present the ways in which the body constitutes a valuable and productive object of historical analysis, especially as a lens through which to trace histories of social, political, and cultural phenomena and processes. More specifically, the authors use the body as a tool for critical re-examination of particular histories of human experience, and of societal and cultural practices, thus contributing to the burgeoning area of body history in terms of both specific case studies as well as historiography in general.

This volume comprises nine articles on Islamic astronomy published since 1989 by Benno van Dalen. Van Dalen was the first historian of Islamic astronomy who made full use of the new possibilities of computers in the early 1990s. He implemented various statistical and numerical methods that can be used to determine the mathematical properties of medieval astronomical tables, and utilized these to obtain entirely new, until then unattainable historical results concerning the interdependence of individual tables and hence of entire astronomical works. His programmes for analysing tables, making sexagesimal calculations and converting calendar dates continue to be widely used. The five articles in the first part of this collection explain the principles of a range of statistical methods for determining unknown parameter values underlying astronomical tables and present extensive step-by-step examples for their use. The four articles in the second part provide extensive studies of materials in unpublished primary sources on Islamic astronomy that heavily depend on these methods. The volume is completed with a detailed index.

In his monumental study, Christopher Braider explores the dialectical contest between history and truth that defines the period of cultural transition called the 'baroque'. For example, Annibale Carracci's portrayal of the Stoic legend of Hercules at the Crossroads departs from earlier, more static representations that depict an emblematic demigod who has already rejected the fallen path of worldly Pleasure for the upward road of heroic Virtue. Braider argues that, in breaking with tradition in order to portray a tragic soliloquist whose dominant trait is agonized indecision, Carracci joins other baroque artists, poets and philosophers in rehearsing the historical dilemma of choice itself. Carracci's picture thus becomes a framing device that illuminates phenomena as diverse as the construction of gender in baroque painting and science, the Pauline ontology of art in Caravaggio and Rembrandt, the metaphysics of baroque soliloquy and the dismantling of Cartesian dualism in Cyrano de Bergerac and Pascal.

Experimental philosophy was an exciting and extraordinarily successful development in the study of nature in the seventeenth century. Yet experimental philosophy was not without its critics and was far from the only natural philosophical method on the scene. In particular, experimental philosophy was contrasted with and set against speculative philosophy and, in some quarters, was accused of tending to irreligion. This volume brings together ten scholars of early modern philosophy, history and science in order to shed new light on the complex relations between experiment, speculation and religion in early modern Europe. The first six chapters of the book focus on the respective roles of experimental and speculative philosophy in individual seventeenth-century philosophers. They include Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton. The next two chapters deal with the relation between experimental philosophy and religion with a special focus on hypotheses and natural religion. The penultimate chapter takes a broader European perspective and examines the paucity of concerns with religion among Italian natural philosophers of the period. Finally, the concluding chapter draws all these individuals and themes together to provide a critical appraisal of recent scholarship on experimental philosophy. This book is the first collection of essays on the subject of early modern experimental philosophy. It will appeal to scholars and students of early modern philosophy, science and religion.

Volume 8 opens with Darwin eagerly scrutinizing each new review, as one by one all the major media of the day carried notices of the book. To those who express their views privately in letters, Darwin responds patiently and thoughtfully, answering their objections and attempting to guide their fuller understanding of the operation of natural selection. His more personal thoughts emerge in letters to his friends Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Lyell, and Thomas Henry Huxley. This volume presents a wealth of detailed information, giving the full range of response to the Origin and revealing how Victorians coped with a theory that many recognized would revolutionize thinking about the organic world and human ancestry.

This volume discusses gardens as designed landscapes of mediation between nature and culture, embodying different levels of human control over wilderness, defining specific rules for this confrontation and staging different forms of human dominance. The contributing authors focus on ways of rethinking the garden and its role in contemporary society, using it as a crossover platform between nature, science and technology. Drawing upon their diverse fields of research, including History of Science and Technology, Environmental Studies, Gardens and Landscape Studies, Urban Studies, and Visual and Artistic Studies, the authors unveil various entanglements woven in the past between nature and culture, and probe the potential of alternative epistemologies to escape the predicament of fatalistic dystopias that often revolve around the Anthropocene debate. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental and landscape history, the history of science and technology, historical geography, and the environmental humanities.

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 is about a single image - the frontispiece to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal-Society of London (1667). Designed by John Evelyn, and etched by Wenceslaus Hollar, it is arguably the best-known representation of seventeenth-century English science. The use of such plates to celebrate and legitimise the 'new' science of the period falls into a tradition that was well-established both in Britain and in Europe more generally, and which has increasingly attract attention from historians. Nevertheless, there are many questions to be asked about it and how it came into being. Was it an original composition by Evelyn, or is it based on earlier exemplars? Can all the scientific instruments, books and other objects that appear in it be identified, and what significance should be attached to their inclusion? Above all, how did the plate come to be designed in the first place, and what is its true relationship with Sprat's book? In order to assess such issues, this study provides a full analysis of Evelyn's image in its Royal Society setting and the wider world of early-modern science. The book first considers the overall iconography of the image and its message concerning Evelyn's conception of the society's role, before moving on to examine the myriad of details included in the plate and their significance. It concludes by considering the print's history after publication, including the extent to which Evelyn used copies to exemplify the combination of technological and artistic accomplishment to which he believed the society should aspire.

What did the writer of Genesis mean by "the first day"? Is it a literal week or a series of time periods? If I believe that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, am I denying the authority of Scripture? In response to the continuing controversy over the interpretation of the creation narrative in Genesis, John Lennox proposes a succinct method of reading and interpreting the first chapters of Genesis without discounting either science or Scripture. With examples from history, a brief but thorough exploration of the major interpretations, and a look into the particular significance of the creation of human beings, Lennox suggests that Christians can heed modern scientific knowledge while staying faithful to the biblical narrative. He moves beyond a simple response to the controversy, insisting that Genesis teaches us far more about the God of Jesus Christ and about God's intention for creation than it does about the age of the earth. With this book, Lennox offers a careful yet accessible introduction to a scientifically-savvy, theologically-astute, and Scripturally faithful interpretation of Genesis.

Systems of units still fail to attract the philosophical attention they deserve, but this could change with the current reform of the International System of Units (SI). Most of the SI base units will henceforth be based on certain laws of nature and a choice of fundamental constants whose values will be frozen. The theoretical, experimental and institutional work required to implement the reform highlights the entanglement of scientific, technological and social features in scientific enterprise, while it also invites a philosophical inquiry that promises to overcome the tensions that have long obstructed science studies.

During the early modern period there was a natural correspondence between how artists might benefit from the knowledge of mathematics and how mathematicians might explore, through advances in the study of visual culture, new areas of enquiry that would uncover the mysteries of the visible world. This volume makes its contribution by offering new interdisciplinary approaches that not only investigate perspective but also examine how mathematics enriched aesthetic theory and the human mind. The contributors explore the portrayal of mathematical activity and mathematicians as well as their ideas and instruments, how artists displayed their mathematical skills and the choices visual artists made between geometry and arithmetic, as well as Euclid's impact on drawing, artistic practice and theory. These chapters cover a broad geographical area that includes Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, France and England. The artists, philosophers and mathematicians whose work is discussed include Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Verrocchio, as well as Michelangelo, Galileo, Piero della Francesca, Girard Desargues, William Hogarth, Albrecht Durer, Luca Pacioli and Raphael.

The seventh volume of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin covers two of the most momentous years in Darwin's life and in the history of science. Begun in 1856, Darwin's big book on species, later published as Natural Selection (Cambridge University Press, 1974) was a little more than half finished when Darwin unexpectedly received a letter and a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace indicating that he too had independently formulated a theory of natural selection. In a letter to his friend, Charles Lyell, Darwin wrote, "So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed." On the Origin of Species was an abstract of the larger manuscript and was published in 1859. All the extant correspondence surrounding Darwin's receipt of Wallace's letter and the eventual publication of the abstract of Darwin's theory a year later is gathered in this volume. The letters detail the stages in the preparation of what was to become one of the world's most famous works, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. They reveal the first impressions of Darwin's book given by his confidants; including Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Asa Gray. Finally, the letters relate Darwin's anxious response to the early reception of this theory by friends, family members, and prominent naturalists. This volume provides the key to understanding Darwin's remarkable efforts for more than two decades to solve one of nature's greatest riddles--the origin of species. This volume also contains a supplement (1821-1857) of letters which have been located or redated since publication of Volumes One to Six of the Correspondence. Many of these letters appear in print for the first time and provide an interesting and important complement to the correspondence published to date.

This volume consists of a selection of scholarly essays from literature, philosophy and history on the conception of reality as understood by Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Einstein. The nature of reality has been a long-debated issue among scientists and philosophers. Tagore (1861-1941) met Einstein (1879-1955) at the latter's house in Kaputh, Germany on 14 July 1930 and had a long conversation on this issue. This conversation has been widely quoted and discussed by scientists, philosophers and scholars from the literary world. The important question that Tagore and Einstein discussed was whether the world is a unity dependent on humanity, or the world is a reality independent of the human factor. Einstein believed that reality is independent of the mind and the human factor. On the other hand, Tagore adopted the opposite view. Nevertheless, both Einstein and Tagore claimed to be realists - their conceptions of reality were obviously fundamentally different. Where does the difference lie? Can it be harmonized at a deeper level? This volume brings together for the first time a gamut of views on this subject from eminent scholars. It presents some key reflections on reality, language, poetry, truth, science, personality, human sciences, virtue ethics, intelligibility and creativity. It will be useful to scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature, history and political studies, as also to those interested in Tagore.

In the form of a sociological pilgrimage, this book approaches some topics essential to understanding the role of science in Latin America, juxtaposing several approaches and exploring three main lines: First, the production and use of knowledge in these countries, viewed from a historical and sociological point of view; second, the reciprocal construction of scientific and public problems, presented through significant cases such as Latin American Chagas Disease; and third, the past and present asymmetries affecting the relationships between centers and peripheries in scientific research. These topics show the paradox of being at the same time "modern" and "peripheral."

Immigration is not only a modern-day debate. Major change in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a surge of political and religious refugees moving across the continent. Estimates suggest that from 1550 to 1585 around 50,000 Dutch and Walloons from the southern Netherlands settled in England, and in the late seventeenth century 50,000 Huguenots from France followed suit. The majority gravitated towards London which, already a magnet for merchants and artisans across the centuries, began a process of major transformation. New skills, capital, technical know-how and social networks came with these migrants and helped to spark London's cosmopolitan flair and diversity. But the early experience of many of these immigrants in London was one of hostility, serving to slow down the adoption and expansion of new crafts and technologies. Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500-1700 examines the origins and the changing face and shape of many trades, crafts and skills in the capital in this transformative period. It focuses on three crafts in particular: silk weaving, beer brewing and the silver trade, crafts which had relied heavily on foreign skills in the 16th century and had become major industries in the capital by the 18th century. Each craft was established by a different group of immigrants, distinguished not only by their social backgrounds, social organisation, identity, motives, migration pattern and experience and links with their home country but also by the nature of their reception, assimilation and economic contribution. Change was a protracted process in the London of the day. Immigrants endured inferior status, discrimination and sometimes exclusion, and this affected both their ability to integrate and their willingness to share trade secrets. And resistance by the English population meant that the adoption of new skills often took a long time - in some cases more than three centuries - to complete. The book places the adoption of new crafts and technologies in London within a broader European context, and relates it to the phenomenal growth of the metropolis and technological developments within these specific trades. It throws new perspectives on the movement of skills from Europe and the transmission of know-how from the immigrant population to English artisans. The book explores how, through enterprise and persistence, the immigrants' contribution helped transform London from a peripheral and backward European city to become the workshop of the world by the nineteenth century. By way of conclusion the book brings the current immigration debate full circle to examine the lessons we can draw from this early-modern experience.

Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily, and should primarily be, an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view, such as logical positivism, suffered from serious defects. In this book, however, Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism, which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This position-'cognitive instrumentalism'-involves three core theses. First, science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second, scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third, scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness. There are examples from science throughout the book, and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics, and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history, Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding, empirical understanding, which we can achieve without having true, or even approximately true, representations of unobservable things. In closing the book, he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn, and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism, constructive empiricism, and semirealism. Overall, this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science.