The first introductory A–Z resource on the dynamic achievements in science from the late 1600s to 1820, including the great minds behind the developments and science's new cultural role. Though the Enlightenment was a time of amazing scientific change, science is an often-neglected facet of that time. Now, Science in the Enlightenment redresses the balance by covering all the major scientific developments in the period between Newton's discoveries in the late 1600s to the early 1800s of Michael Faraday and Georges Cuvier. Over 200 A-Z entries explore a range of disciplines, including astronomy and medicine, scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy and Benjamin Franklin, and instruments such as the telescope and calorimeter. Emphasis is placed on the role of women, and proper attention is given to the shifts in the worldview brought about by Newtonian physics, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's "chemical revolution," and universal systems of botanical and zoological classification. Moreover, the social impact of science is explored, as well as the ways in which the work of scientists influenced the thinking of philosophers such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot and the writers and artists of the romantic movement.

This book examines how the experiences of hearing voices and seeing visions were understood within the cultural, literary, and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. In the Middle Ages, these experiences were interpreted according to frameworks that could credit visionaries or voice-hearers with spiritual knowledge, and allow them to inhabit social roles that were as much desired as feared. Voice-hearing and visionary experience offered powerful creative possibilities in imaginative literature and were often central to the writing of inner, spiritual lives. Ideas about such experience were taken up and reshaped in response to the cultural shifts of the early modern period. These essays, which consider the period 1100 to 1700, offer diverse new insights into a complex, controversial, and contested category of human experience, exploring literary and spiritual works as illuminated by scientific and medical writings, natural philosophy and theology, and the visual arts. In extending and challenging contemporary bio-medical perspectives through the insights and methodologies of the arts and humanities, the volume offers a timely intervention within the wider project of the medical humanities. Chapters 2 and 5 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book explores the changing perspective of astrology from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era. It introduces a framework for understanding both its former centrality and its later removal from legitimate knowledge and practice. The discussion reconstructs the changing roles of astrology in Western science, theology, and culture from 1250 to 1500. The author considers both the how and the why. He analyzes and integrates a broad range of sources. This analysis shows that the history of astrology-in particular, the story of the protracted criticism and ultimate removal of astrology from the realm of legitimate knowledge and practice-is crucial for fully understanding the transition from premodern Aristotelian-Ptolemaic natural philosophy to modern Newtonian science. This removal, the author argues, was neither obvious nor unproblematic. Astrology was not some sort of magical nebulous hodge-podge of beliefs. Rather, astrology emerged in the 13th century as a richly mathematical system that served to integrate astronomy and natural philosophy, precisely the aim of the "New Science" of the 17th century. As such, it becomes a fundamentally important historical question to determine why this promising astrological synthesis was rejected in favor of a rather different mathematical natural philosophy-and one with a very different causal structure than Aristotle's.

This elegant little book discusses a famous problem that helped to define the field now known as topology: What is the minimum number of colors required to print a map such that no two adjoining countries have the same color, no matter how convoluted their boundaries. Many famous mathematicians have worked on the problem, but the proof eluded fomulation until the 1950s, when it was finally cracked with a brute-force approach using a computer. The book begins by discussing the history of the problem, and then goes into the mathematics, both pleasantly enough that anyone with an elementary knowledge of geometry can follow it, and still with enough rigor that a mathematician can also read it with pleasure. The authors discuss the mathematics as well as the philosophical debate that ensued when the proof was announced: Just what is a mathematical proof, if it takes a computer to provide one -- and is such a thing a proof at all?

For almost three quarters of a century, the United States has spent billions of dollars and countless person-hours in the pursuit of a national missile defense system that would protect the country from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) carrying nuclear warheads. The system currently in place consists of 44 long-range antiballistic missiles stationed in Alaska and California to protect the United States from a possible nuclear weapon carrying ICBM attack from North Korea. After all this effort, this systemis still imperfect, being successful only 10 out of 18 tests. This book will provide an historical description of past efforts in national missile defenses to understand the technical difficulties involved. It will also explain how national security concerns, the evolving international environment, and the complexities of US politics have all affected the story. The book will also describe the current systems in place to protect allies and troops in the field from the threat of shorter range missiles. Finally, the book will describe the current US vision for the future of missile defenses and provide some suggestions for alternative paths.

A comprehensive biographical guide to the scientific achievements, personal lives, and struggles of women scientists from around the globe. International Women in Science: A Bibliographical Dictionary to 1950 presents the enormous contributions of women outside North America in fields ranging from aviation to computer science to zoology. It provides fascinating profiles of nearly 400 women scientists, both renowned figures like Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie and women we should know better, like Rosalind Franklin, who, along with James Watson and Francis Crick, uncovered the structure of DNA. Students and researchers will see how the lives of these remarkable women unfolded, and how they made their place in fields often stubbornly guarded by men, overcoming everything from limited education and professional opportunities, to indifference, ridicule, and cultural prejudice, to outright hostility and discrimination. Included are a number of living scientists, many of whom provide insights into their lives and scientific times. Those contributions, plus additional previously unavailable material, make this a volume of unprecedented scope and richness.

This book examines the 1583 voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert to North America. This was England's first attempt at colonization beyond the British Isles, yet it has not been subject to thorough scholarly analysis for more than 70 years. An exhaustive examination of the voyage reveals the complexity and preparedness of this and similar early modern colonizing expeditions. Prominent Elizabethans assisted Gilbert by researching and investing in his expedition: the Printing Revolution was critical to their plans, as Gilbert's supporters traveled throughout England with promotional literature proving England's claim to North America. Gilbert's experts used maps and charts to publicize and navigate, while his pilots experimented with new navigating tools and practices. Though he failed to establish a settlement, Gilbert created a blueprint for later Stuart colonizers who achieved his vision of a British Empire in the Western Hemisphere. This book clarifies the role of cartography, natural science, and promotional literature in Elizabethan colonization and elucidates the preparation stages of early modern colonizing voyages.

This book provides a unique survey displaying the power of Riccati equations to describe reversible and irreversible processes in physics and, in particular, quantum physics. Quantum mechanics is supposedly linear, invariant under time-reversal, conserving energy and, in contrast to classical theories, essentially based on the use of complex quantities. However, on a macroscopic level, processes apparently obey nonlinear irreversible evolution equations and dissipate energy. The Riccati equation, a nonlinear equation that can be linearized, has the potential to link these two worlds when applied to complex quantities. The nonlinearity can provide information about the phase-amplitude correlations of the complex quantities that cannot be obtained from the linearized form. As revealed in this wide ranging treatment, Riccati equations can also be found in many diverse fields of physics from Bose-Einstein-condensates to cosmology. The book will appeal to graduate students and theoretical physicists interested in a consistent mathematical description of physical laws.

This book highlights the importance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings on psychology and psychological phenomena for the historical development of contemporary psychology. It presents an insightful assessment of the philosopher's work, particularly his later writings, which draws on key interpretations that have informed our understanding of metapsychological and psychological issues. Wittgenstein's Philosophy in Psychology engages with both critics and followers of the philosopher's work to demonstrate its enduring relevance to psychology today. Sullivan presents a novel examination of Wittgenstein's later writings by providing historical detail about the uptake, understanding and use of Wittgenstein's remarks and method in psychology and related areas of social science, examining persistent sources of conceptual confusion and showing how to apply his insights in investigations of collectives, social life, emotions, subjectivity, and development. In doing so, he reveals the value for psychologists in adopting a philosophical method of conceptual investigation to work through and become more reflexive about prominent theories, methods, therapies and practices in their respective, multiple fields and thereby create a resource for future theoretical, empirical and applied psychologists. This work will be of particular relevance to students and academics engaged in the history of psychology and to practitioners interested in understanding the continued importance of Wittgenstein's work within the practices of psychology.

Here is an accurate and readable translation of a seminal article by Henri Poincare that is a classic in the study of dynamical systems popularly called chaos theory. In an effort to understand the stability of orbits in the solar system, Poincare applied a Hamiltonian formulation to the equations of planetary motion and studied these differential equations in the limited case of three bodies to arrive at properties of the equations' solutions, such as orbital resonances and horseshoe orbits. Poincare wrote for professional mathematicians and astronomers interested in celestial mechanics and differential equations. Contemporary historians of math or science and researchers in dynamical systems and planetary motion with an interest in the origin or history of their field will find his work fascinating.

While it is well known that the Delian problems are impossible to solve with a straightedge and compass - for example, it is impossible to construct a segment whose length is cube root of 2 with these instruments - the discovery of the Italian mathematician Margherita Beloch Piazzolla in 1934 that one can in fact construct a segment of length cube root of 2 with a single paper fold was completely ignored (till the end of the 1980s). This comes as no surprise, since with few exceptions paper folding was seldom considered as a mathematical practice, let alone as a mathematical procedure of inference or proof that could prompt novel mathematical discoveries. A few questions immediately arise: Why did paper folding become a non-instrument? What caused the marginalisation of this technique? And how was the mathematical knowledge, which was nevertheless transmitted and prompted by paper folding, later treated and conceptualised? Aiming to answer these questions, this volume provides, for the first time, an extensive historical study on the history of folding in mathematics, spanning from the 16th century to the 20th century, and offers a general study on the ways mathematical knowledge is marginalised, disappears, is ignored or becomes obsolete. In doing so, it makes a valuable contribution to the field of history and philosophy of science, particularly the history and philosophy of mathematics and is highly recommended for anyone interested in these topics.

This book relates how, between 1954 and 1961, the biologist Seymour Benzer mapped the fine structure of the rII region of the genome of the bacterial virus known as phage T4. Benzer's accomplishments are widely recognized as a tipping point in mid-twentieth-century molecular biology when the nature of the gene was recast in molecular terms. More often than any other individual, he is considered to have led geneticists from the classical gene into the molecular age.
Drawing on Benzer's remarkably complete record of his experiments, his correspondence, and published sources, this book reconstructs how the former physicist initiated his work in phage biology and achieved his landmark investigation. The account of Benzer's creativity as a researcher is a fascinating story that also reveals intriguing aspects common to the scientific enterprise.

This book collects a renowned scholar's essays from the past five decades and reflects two main concerns: an approach to logic that stresses argumentation, reasoning, and critical thinking and that is informal, empirical, naturalistic, practical, applied, concrete, and historical; and an interest in Galileo's life and thought-his scientific achievements, Inquisition trial, and methodological lessons in light of his iconic status as "father of modern science." These republished essays include many hard to find articles, out of print works, and chapters which are not available online. The collection provides an excellent resource of the author's lifelong dedication to the subject. Thus, the book contains critical analyses of some key Galilean arguments about the laws of falling bodies and the Copernican hypothesis of the earth's motion. There is also a group of chapters in which Galileo's argumentation is compared and contrasted with that of other figures such as Socrates, Karl Marx, Giordano Bruno, and his musicologist father Vincenzo Galilei. The chapters on Galileo's trial illustrate an approach to the science-vs-religion issue which Finocchiaro labels "para-clerical" and conceptualizes in terms of a judicious consideration of arguments for and against Galileo and the Church. Other essays examine argumentation about Galileo's life and thought by the major Galilean scholars of recent decades. The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, history of science, history of religion, philosophy of religion, argumentation, rhetoric, and communication studies.

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge's science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge's contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation (3 chapters) Section II. Philosophy (12 chapters) Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics (4 chapters) Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind (2 chapters) Section V. Sociology and Social Theory (4 chapters) Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy (3 chapters) Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology (3 chapters) Section VIII. Mathematics (3 chapters) Section IX. Education (2 chapters) Section X. Varia (3 chapters) Section XI. Bibliography

This volume views the study of disease as essential to understanding the key historical developments underpinning the foundation of contemporary Indian Ocean World (IOW) societies. The interplay between disease and climatic conditions, natural and manmade crises and disasters, human migration and trade in the IOW reveals a wide range of perceptions about disease etiologies and epidemiologies, and debates over the origin, dispersion and impact of disease form a central focus in these essays. Incorporating a wide scope of academic and scientific angles including history, social and medical anthropology, archaeology, epidemiology and paleopathology, this collection focuses on diseases that spread across time, space and cultures. It scrutinizes disease as an object, and engages with the subjectivities of afflicted inhabitants of, and travellers to, the IOW.