In the last years, it was observed an increasing interest of computer scientists in the structure of biological molecules and the way how they can be manipulated in vitro in order to define theoretical models of computation based on genetic engineering tools. Along the same lines, a parallel interest is growing regarding the process of evolution of living organisms. Much of the current data for genomes are expressed in the form of maps which are now becoming available and permit the study of the evolution of organisms at the scale of genome for the first time. On the other hand, there is an active trend nowadays throughout the field of computational biology toward abstracted, hierarchical views of biological sequences, which is very much in the spirit of computational linguistics. In the last decades, results and methods in the field of formal language theory that might be applied to the description of biological sequences were pointed out.

This set of 10 volumes, originally published between 1900 and 1994, amalgamates a wide breadth of research on Science and Technology in the Nineteenth Century, including studies on notable figures such as Gregor Johann Mendel, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sir Humphry Davy. This collection of books from some of the leading scholars in the field provides a comprehensive overview of the subject how it has evolved over time, and will be of particular interest to students of history and the sciences.

This book describes the development of what we would now regard as a class of statistical fitting procedures between 1750 and 1900. The book contains detailed algebraic descriptions of the fitting of linear relationships by the method of least squares and the closely related least absolute deviations and minimax absolute deviations procedures. The prerequisite is a basic course in mathematical statistics. The primary audience for this book will be statisticians concerned with the fitting of linear models. However, it will also be of interest to engineers and scientists concerned with the empirical determination of linear relationships.

The articles included in this Volume represent a broad and highly qualified view on the present state of general relativity, quantum gravity, and their cosmological and astrophysical implications. As such, it may serve as a valuable source of knowledge and inspiration for experts in these fields, as well as an advanced source of information for young researchers.
The occasion to gather together so many leading experts in the field was to celebrate the centenary of Einstein's stay in Prague in 1911-1912. It was in fact during his stay in Prague that Einstein started in earnest to develop his ideas about general relativity that fully developed in his paper in 1915.
Approaching soon the centenary of his famous paper, this volume offers a precious overview of the path done by the scientific community in this intriguing and vibrant field in the last century, defining the challenges of the next 100 years.
The content is divided into four broad parts: (i) Gravity and Prague, (ii) Classical General Relativity, (iii) Cosmology and Quantum Gravity, and (iv) Numerical Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics.

This book analyzes scientific problems within the history of physics, engineering, chemistry, astronomy and medicine, correlated with technological applications in the social context. When and how is tension between disciplines explicitly practised? What is the conceptual bridge between science researches and the organization of technological researches in the development of industrial applications? The authors explain various ways in which the sciences allowed advanced modelling on the one hand, and the development of new technological ideas on the other hand. An emphasis on the role played by mechanisms, production methods and instruments bestows a benefit on historical and scientific discourse: theories, institutions, universities, schools for engineers, social implications as well. Scholars from different traditions discuss the emergency style of thinking in methodology and, in theoretical perspective, aim to gather and re-evaluate the current thinking on this subject. It brings together contributions from leading experts in the field, and gives much-needed insight into the subject from a historical point of view. The volume composition makes for absorbing reading for historians, philosophers and scientists.

This book is for physicists, historians and philosophers of physics as well as students seeking an introduction to ongoing debates in relativistic and quantum physics. This title covers the recent debates on the emergence of relativity and quantum theory. It includes chapters with an introductory character, comprehensible to students and science teachers. It strengthens the bonds between the communities of scientists, historians, and philosophers.

This volume focuses on the outstanding contributions made by botany and the mathematical sciences to the genesis and development of early modern garden art and garden culture. The many facets of the mathematical sciences and botany point to the increasingly "scientific" approach that was being adopted in and applied to garden art and garden culture in the early modern period. This development was deeply embedded in the philosophical, religious, political, cultural and social contexts, running parallel to the beginning of processes of scientization so characteristic for modern European history. This volume strikingly shows how these various developments are intertwined in gardens for various purposes.

The Romance of Science pays tribute to the wide-ranging and highly influential work of Trevor Levere, historian of science and author of Poetry Realised in Nature, Transforming Matter, Science and the Canadian Arctic, Affinity and Matter and other significant inquiries in the history of modern science. Expanding on Levere's many themes and interests, The Romance of Science assembles historians of science -- all influenced by Levere's work -- to explore such matters as the place and space of instruments in science, the role and meaning of science museums, poetry in nature, chemical warfare and warfare in nature, science in Canada and the Arctic, Romanticism, aesthetics and morals in natural philosophy, and the "dismal science" of economics. The Romance of Science explores the interactions between science's romantic, material, institutional and economic engagements with Nature.

The year 2011 marked the 80th anniversary of Georges Lemaitre's primeval atom model of the universe, forerunner of the modern day Big Bang theory. Prompted by this momentous anniversary the Royal Astronomical Society decided to publish a volume of essays on the life, work and faith of this great cosmologist, who was also a Roman Catholic priest. The papers presented in this book examine in detail the historical, cosmological, philosophical and theological issues surrounding the development of the Big Bang theory from its beginnings in the pioneering work of Lemaitre through to the modern day. This book offers the best account in English of Lemaitre's life and work. It will be appreciated by professionals and graduate students interested in the history of cosmology.

This biography probes the unusual mind, the dramatic life, and the outstanding scientific work of Danish-born immunologist Niels Jerne (1911-1994). Jerne's Nobel Prize-winning achievements in the field of immunology place him in the pantheon of great twentieth-century biomedical theorists, yet his life is perhaps even more interesting than his science. Science as Autobiography tells Jerne's story, weaving together a narrative of his life experiences, emotional life, and extraordinarily creative scientific work. A legendary figure who preferred an afternoon of conversation in a Paris wine bar to work in the laboratory, Jerne was renowned for his unparalleled powers of concentration and analytical keenness as well as his dissonant personal life. The book explores Jerne the man and scientist, making the fascinating argument that his life experience and view of himself became a metaphorical resource for the construction of his the ories. The book also probes the moral issues that surrounded Jerne's choice to sacrifice his family in favor of scientific goals and the pursuit of excellence.

This investigation of time and space is motivated by gaps in our current understanding: by the lack of definitions, by our failure to appreciate the nature of these entities, by our inability to pin down their properties. The author's approach is based on two key ideas: The first idea is to seek the geo-historical origins of time and space concepts. A thorough investigation of a diversified archaeological corpus, allows him to draft coherent definitions; it furthermore gives clues as to whether time and space were discovered or invented. The second idea is to define the units before trying to define space and time. The results presented here are unexpected: Time and space were not discovered in nature, but they were invented; time is not a phenomenon and space has no materiality; they are only concepts. This runs contrary to the opinion of most scientific and the philosophical authorities, although one would seek in vain for a theoretical validation of the conventional position. This book will provide much food for thought for philosophers and scientists, as well as interested general readers.

William Charles Wells (1757-1817) was one of the foremost, and forgotten, American scientists of the eighteenth century. He should be acknowledged as laying the foundations for modern studies of vestibular function as well as eye movements. This book reprints his Essay on single vision with two eyes (1792) and his own Memoir of his life (1818). Wells essay on natural selection is reprinted as an Appendix. Wells' experiments and observations on natural phenomena will surprise students of science because of their modernity.

The book presents a history of classical mechanics by focusing on issues of equilibrium. The historical point of view adopted here restricts attention to cases where the effectiveness of forces is assessed on the basis of the virtual motion of their points of application. For completeness, hints of the alternative approach are also referred, the Archimedean for ancient mechanics and the Newtonian for modern mechanics. The laws resulting from consideration of virtual motions are named laws of virtual work. The modern formulations of the principle of virtual work are only a particular form of them. The book begins with the first documented formulations of laws of virtual work in the IV century BC in Greece and proceeds to the end of the XIX century AD in Europe. A significant space is devoted to Arabic and Latin mechanics of Middle Ages. With the Renaissance it began to appear slightly different wordings of the laws, which were often proposed as unique principles of statics. The process reached its apex with Bernoulli and Lagrange in the XVIII century. The book ends with some chapters dealing with the discussions that took place in the French school on the role of the Lagrangian version of the law of virtual work and its applications to continuum mechanics.

This book pays tribute to an extraordinary researcher and personality, Manuel Cardona. He had significant influence in the development of science and inside the scientific community. The book consists of contributions by former collaborators and students of Prof. Manuel Cardona. The short contributions deal with personal encounters with Manuel Cardona describing his extraordinary personality. This includes descriptions of scientific discussions, Manuel Cardona's involvement in social justice and his enormous knowledge about human culture, languages and history.

This book is designed as a brief introduction to the study of Eastern science. The author deals only with the main lines of development.

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory.

This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.

The essays in this book look at way in which the fundaments of physics might need to be changed in order to make progress towards a unified theory. They are based on the prize-winning essays submitted to the FQXi essay competition "Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong?", which drew over 270 entries. As Nobel Laureate physicist Philip W. Anderson realized, the key to understanding nature's reality is not anything "magical", but the right attitude, "the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions." The authors of the eighteen prize-winning essays have, where necessary, adapted their essays for the present volume so as to (a) incorporate the community feedback generated in the online discussion of the essays, (b) add new material that has come to light since their completion and (c) to ensure accessibility to a broad audience of readers with a basic grounding in physics. The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

This volume honors the lifetime achievement of distinguished activist and scholar Elise Boulding (1920-2010) on the occasion of her 96th birthday. Known as the "matriarch" of the twentieth century peace research movement, she made significant contributions in the fields of peace education, future studies, feminism, and sociology of the family, as well as serving as a prominent leader in the peace movement and the Society of Friends. She taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1967 to 1978 and at Dartmouth College from 1978 to 1985, and was instrumental in the development of peace studies programs at both those institutions. She was a co-founder of the International Peace Research Association (1964), the Consortium on Peace Research Education and Development (1970), and various peace and women's issue related committees and working groups of the American Sociological Association and International Sociological Association.

This book will provide a compact scholarly introduction to major issues in the cultural history of science and technology in Britain and the British Empire between 1760 and 1914. Key themes will include: exploration and empire, industry and empire, and communication and empire. By demonstrating, in historical context, the real, complex and changing reactions between science and technology during the imperial expansion of 1780-1914, Engineering an Empire will move beyond the sometimes insular discipline of history of technology to offer something altogether new.

This book tells ten urban histories of science from nine cities-Athens, Barcelona, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Dublin (2 articles), Glasgow, Helsinki, Lisbon, and Naples-situated on the geographical margins of Europe and beyond. Ranging from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the contents of this volume debate why and how we should study the scientific culture of cities, often considered "peripheral" in terms of their production of knowledge. How were scientific practices, debates and innovations intertwined with the highly dynamic urban space around 1900? The authors analyze zoological gardens, research stations, observatories, and international exhibitions, along with hospitals, newspapers, backstreets, and private homes while also stressing the importance of concrete urban spaces for the production and appropriation of knowledge. They uncover the diversity of actors and urban publics ranging from engineers, scientists, architects, and physicians to journalists, tuberculosis patients, and fishermen. Looking at these nine cities around 1900 is like glancing at a prism that produces different and even conflicting notions of modernity. In their totality, the ten case studies help to overcome an outdated centre-periphery model. This volume is, thus, able to address far more intriguing historiographical questions. How do science, technology, and medicine shape the debates about modernity and national identity in the urban space? To what degree do cities and the heterogeneous elements they contain have agency? These urban histories show that science and the city are consistently and continuously co-constructing each other.

This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.