Self-styled adventurer, literary wit, philosopher, and statesman of science, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) stood at the center of Enlightenment science and culture. Offering an elegant and accessible portrait of this remarkable man, Mary Terrall uses the story of Maupertuis's life, self-fashioning, and scientific works to explore what it meant to do science and to be a man of science in eighteenth-century Europe.
Beginning his scientific career as a mathematician in Paris, Maupertuis entered the public eye with a much-discussed expedition to Lapland, which confirmed Newton's calculation that the earth was flattened at the poles. He also made significant, and often intentionally controversial, contributions to physics, life science, navigation, astronomy, and metaphysics. Called to Berlin by Frederick the Great, Maupertuis moved to Prussia to preside over the Academy of Sciences there. Equally at home in salons, cafes, scientific academies, and royal courts, Maupertuis used his social connections and his printed works to enhance a carefully constructed reputation as both a man of letters and a man of science. His social and institutional affiliations, in turn, affected how Maupertuis formulated his ideas, how he presented them to his contemporaries, and the reactions they provoked.
Terrall not only illuminates the life and work of a colorful and important Enlightenment figure, but also uses his story to delve into many wider issues, including the development of scientific institutions, the impact of print culture on science, and the interactions of science and government. Smart and highly readable, "Maupertuis" will appeal to anyone interested ineighteenth-century science and culture.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...In the world of affairs the wind was howling, too, and the storm was gathering which culminated in the series of lawsuits brought by Morse and his associates against the infringers on his patents. The letters to his brother are full of the details of these piratical attacks, but throughout all the turmoil he maintained his poise and his faith in the triumph of justice and truth. In the letter just quoted from he says: "These matters do not annoy me as formerly. I have seen so many dark storms which threatened, and particularly in relation to the Telegraph, and I have seen them so often hushed at the 'Peace, be still' of our covenant God, that now the fears and anxieties on any fresh gathering soon subside into perfect calm." And on November 27, he writes: "The most annoying part of the matter to me is that, notwithstanding my matters are all in the hands of agents and I have nothing to do with any of the arrangements, I am held up by name to the odium of the public. Lawsuits are commenced against them at Cincinnati and will be in Indiana and Illinois as well as here, and so, notwithstanding all my efforts to get along peaceably, I find the fate of Whitney before me. I think I may be able to secure my farm, and so have a place to retire to for the PEACE IN THE NEW HOME 283 evening of my days, but even this may be denied me. A few months will decide.... You have before you the fate of an inventor, and, take as much pains as you will to secure to yourself your valuable invention, make up your mind from my experience now, in addition to others, that you will be robbed of it and abused into the bargain. This is the lot of a successful inventor or discoverer, and no precaution, I believe, will save him from it. He will meet with a mixed estimate; the...

Inspired by Maine's extraordinary land-and-seascape, the author recounts a lifetime of intertwined adventures on the water, and professional and volunteer land conservation engagement. Shining through is the joy of Maine ocean and landscape, fascination with good boats, dedication to conservation, and observations about a changing world. Important land trust history, and some national trust, is set forth for the first time. Maps by Jane Crosen. Among the advance comments: "Great history and warmly written! . . . from a player present at the birth of the modem conservation movement."--Tim Glidden, President, Maine Coast Heritage Trust ..". a fantastic job of merging the personal and professional, factual and reflective, historical and contemporary."--Janet Milne, Professor, VT Law School "As one of Maine's pioneers for the land trust movement, Ben Emory's historical perspective in Sailor for the Wild is both enlightening and entertaining . . . An admirable accomplishment and nicely written."--Anthony Irving, Preservation Chair, Lyme (CT) Land Conservation Trust and ocean sailor Ben Emory of Bar Harbor and Brooklin, Maine, has decades of conservation experience. As executive director of Maine Coast Heritage Trust, he helped Acadia National Park launch its nationally heralded conservation easement program. Co-founding the Land Trust Exchange (now Alliance) and serving as its president, he later became Maine representative for The Conservation Fund. He has served on several land trust boards as well as the Land for Maine's Future Board and Acadia National Park Advisory Commission. He has published articles in Northern Woodlands, Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, Cruising World and Yachtin

This memoir follows the sixty-year meteorology career of Robert M. Atlas. As a young child, Robert M. Atlas would often look up at the sky, observe the clouds, and ask his parents questions about the weather. That early interest sparked a career in meteorology that took place during a period of rapid development in the field. Weather Forecaster to Research Scientist follows his decades-long career and his innovative research, which led to improvements in the understanding and prediction of extreme weather. Atlas's journey begins with his start as an apprentice forecaster for the US Weather Bureau during a time when satellite meteorology and operational numerical weather prediction were just in their infancy. Weather Forecaster to Research Scientist also traces his experiences as an operational forecaster in the US Air Force, discusses his pioneering work on ocean surface winds using satellites, and describes his leadership of scientific organizations within NASA and NOAA as well as his experiences teaching at several universities. An engaging account of a distinguished career, this book will appeal to students, educators, weather forecasters, scientists, and weather enthusiasts alike.

Chronicles is a major work, a collection of current, pressing and inspirational stories of Indigenous communities from the Canadian subarctic to the heart of Dine Bii Kaya, Navajo Nation. Chronicles is a book literally risen from the ashes--beginning in 2008 after her home burned to the ground--and collectively is an accounting of Winona's personal path of recovery, finding strength and resilience in the writing itself as well as in her work. Long awaited, Chronicles is a labour of love, a tribute to those who have passed on and those yet to arrive.

For more than fifty years, Dr. Cahill has been helping to heal the world, as a leading specialist in tropical medicine and as a driving force in humanitarian assistance and relief efforts around the globe. In this revised and expanded edition, he chronicles extraordinary achievements of compassion and commitment. Bringing together a rich selection of writings, he crafts a fascinating memoir of a life devoted to others. The book includes front-line reports from places under siege Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Nicaragua, Gaza, and Ireland; there are also visionary essays from the origins of the AIDS epidemic and landmine crises, and no less passionate concerns of his own experiences of pain and suffering as well as of joy and beauty in the worlds in which he has traveled. As the distinguished neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, M.D., notes in his endorsement, "These essays, by turns elegiac, lyrical, funny, tender, nostalgic, and vehemently impassioned, come together in an ongoing tapestry, a portrait of a dedicated physician who has dared to make a difference."

Hans Christian Orsted (1777-1851) is of great importance as a scientist and philosopher far beyond the borders of Denmark and his own time. At the centre of an international network of scholars, he was instrumental in founding the world picture of modern physics. Orsted was the physicist who brought Kant's metaphysics to fruition. In 1820 his discovery of electro-magnetism, a phenomenon that could not possibly exist according to his adversaries, changed the course of research in physics. It inspired Michael Faraday's experiments and discovery of the adverse effect, magneto-electric induction. The two physical phenomena were later described in mathematical equations by J.C. Maxwell. Together these discoveries constitute the prerequisites for the overwhelming development of modern technology. But Orsted was also one of the cultural leaders and organizers of the Danish Golden Age (together with Grundtvig, Kierkegaard, and Hans-Christian Andersen, his protege), and made significant contributions to aesthetics, philosophy, pedagogy, politics, and religion. Orsted remarkably bridged the gap between science, the humanities, and the arts.

This biography of James Edmund Reeves, whose legislative accomplishments cemented American physicians' control of the medical marketplace, illuminates landmarks of American health care: the troubled introduction of clinical epidemiology and development of botanic medicine and homeopathy, the Civil War's stimulation of sanitary science and hospital medicine, the rise of government involvement, the revolution in laboratory medicine, and the explosive growth of phony cures. It recounts the human side of medicine as well, including the management of untreatable diseases and the complex politics of medical practice and professional organizing. His life is reminder that while politics, economics, and science drive the societal trajectory of modern health care, moral decisions often determine its path.

Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom is the first book that focuses in detail on the birth and development of Bohr's atomic theory and gives a comprehensive picture of it. At the same time it offers new insight into Bohr's peculiar way of thinking, what Einstein once called his 'unique instinct and tact'. Contrary to most other accounts of the Bohr atom, the book presents it in a broader perspective which includes the reception among other scientists and the criticism launched against it by scientists of a more conservative inclination. Moreover, it discusses the theory as Bohr originally conceived it, namely, as an ambitious theory covering the structure of atoms as well as molecules. By discussing the theory in its entirety it becomes possible to understand why it developed as it did and thereby to use it as an example of the dynamics of scientific theories.

This book presents a biography of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize for Science (Physics 1979), who was nevertheless excommunicated and branded as a heretic in his own country. His achievements are often overlooked, even besmirched. Realizing that the whole world had to be his stage, he pioneered the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, a vital focus of Third World science which remains as his monument. A staunch Muslim, he was ashamed of the decline of science in the heritage of Islam, and struggled doggedly to restore it to its former glory. Undermined by his excommunication, these valiant efforts were doomed.

Winner of the 2021 Minnesota Book Award for Minnesota Nonfiction The story of the scientist who first mapped Minnesota's geology, set against the backdrop of early scientific inquiry in the state At twenty, Newton Horace Winchell declared, "I know nothing about rocks." At twenty-five, he decided to make them his life's work. As a young geologist tasked with heading the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey, Winchell (1839-1914) charted the prehistory of the region, its era of inland seas, its volcanic activity, and its several ice ages-laying the foundation for the monumental five-volume Geology of Minnesota. Tracing Winchell's remarkable path from impoverished fifteen-year-old schoolteacher to a leading light of an emerging scientific field, Minnesota's Geologist also recreates the heady early days of scientific inquiry in Minnesota, a time when one man's determination and passion for learning could unlock the secrets of the state's distant past and present landscape. Traveling by horse and cart, by sailboat and birchbark canoe, Winchell and his group surveyed rock outcrops, river valleys, basalt formations on Lake Superior, and the vast Red River Valley. He studied petrology at the Sorbonne in Paris, bringing cutting-edge knowledge to bear on the volcanic rocks of the Arrowhead region. As a founder of the American Geological Society and founding editor of American Geologist, the first journal for professional geologists, Winchell was the driving force behind scientific endeavor in early state history, serving as mentor to many young scientists and presiding over a household-the Winchell House, located on the University of Minnesota's present-day mall-that was a nexus of intellectual ferment. His life story, told here for the first time, draws an intimate picture of this influential scientist, set against a backdrop of Minnesota's geological complexity and splendor.

Doctors have been able to cure some forms of congenital blindness and deafness for decades. But this has created another problem: most people end up hating their new senses. To ask someone to adapt to a new sense is to ask them to reshape their entire world. Many simply cannot. Every waking minute, they are bombarded by meaningless sights or sounds. Some sink into a depression so great that they lose their will to live and die. So then what to do with the cases of Liam McCoy and Zora Damji? Liam was born blind and Zora was born deaf. Both received surgeries to restore their senses as teenagers. Today, both lead healthy, independent lives. The question at the heart of Coming to Our Senses is: why? The answer reveals a common misunderstanding of how perception works. We tend to think of perception as a purely mechanical process, as a camera or microphone in the brain, recording the world objectively. But neurobiologist Susan Barry argues that your senses are completely your own. What you hear or see is influenced by your environment, history, age, relationships, preferences, fears, and needs. Your senses are so intimately connected to your experiences that they actually shape your personality. And as you grow, your senses grow with you, much further into adulthood than doctors once thought. The way you sense the world is part of what makes you, you. People like Liam and Zohra provide a clear view of how our sensory abilities intertwine with our personality, and Barry spent a decade with them, watching their process. Barry finds the environmental sources of Liam's exquisite sense of direction, as well his inability to learn to recognize even his own mother's face. And she considers how Zohra's world expands upon learning that sound allows you to observe things you can't see, as well as how the voice of Zohra's Aunt Najma influenced the kinds of voices Zohra can understand best. Ultimately, Liam and Zohra adapted to their new senses because their individual circumstances allowed them to do so, and in ways that reflect those circumstances. But there is no single answer to why some people adapt to their new senses while others do not, or for that matter, why two normally sighted people can see the same thing two different ways -- the answer depends upon the whole history and tenor of a person's life. Coming to Our Senses tells its stories with grace, empathy, and genuine curiosity. It is a testament to the power of resilience, and a moving account of how, regardless of how we're born, we must each find our own way.

Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has crafted a biography that dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishments of a mythic figure whose early-seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion-the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics-indeed of modern science altogether." It is also a stunning portrait of Galileo's daughter, a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me."

Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. During that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, Galileo sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. Filled with human drama and scientific adventure, "Galileo's Daughter" is an unforgettable story.

Praise for" Galileo's Daughter"

" Sobel] shows herself a virtuoso at encapsulating the history and the politics of science. Her descriptions of Galileo's ideas...are pithy, vivid, and intelligible."-"Wall Street Journal"

The autobiography of one of the greatest pilots in history. In 1939 Eric Brown was on a University of Edinburgh exchange course in Germany, and the first he knew of the war was when the Gestapo came to arrest him. They released him, not realising he was a pilot in the RAF volunteer reserve: and the rest is history. Eric Brown joined the Fleet Air Arm and went on to be the greatest test pilot in history, flying more different aircraft types than anyone else. During his lifetime he made a record-breaking 2,407 aircraft carrier landings and survived eleven plane crashes. One of Britain's few German-speaking airmen, he went to Germany in 1945 to test the Nazi jets, interviewing (among others) Hermann Goering and Hanna Reitsch. He flew the suicidally dangerous Me 163 rocket plane, and tested the first British jets. WINGS ON MY SLEEVE is 'Winkle' Brown's incredible story.

Christopher A. Roosa grew up the eldest son of Apollo 14 astronaut and command module pilot Stuart A. Roosa. As a child of the space program, Christopher had a ringside seat at the dinner table of one of twenty-four Americans who had either entered lunar orbit or landed on the moon. The first book written by an offspring of an Apollo astronaut to focus on growing up in that era, Son of Apollo tells the inside story of the life of his father, a man who had a remarkable career despite always believing his air force career was "off-track," from his initial application to the service to his removal from the prime crew of Apollo 13 and his subsequent assignment to Apollo 14. During the Apollo 13 mission and recovery, Stuart played an integral role in developing the procedures to return the crew to Earth safely. The focus-and the pressure-of the entire Apollo program then shifted to the Apollo 14 mission. If the Apollo program was to continue, Stuart and the Apollo 14 crew would need to get safely to the moon, land, and return. In writing about his father's career, Christopher Roosa also shows us a familial side of the Apollo experience, from the daily struggles of growing up in the shadow of a father who was necessarily away in training most of the year to the expectations involved in being an astronaut's son. Roosa's story shows the Apollo era was the result not only of thousands of scientists and engineers working steadfastly toward achieving an assassinated president's national goal but also the families who supported them and lived the missions in their own way. For more information about the book visit roosa.com

Few people have proved more influential in the field of differential and algebraic geometry, and in showing how this links with mathematical physics, than Nigel Hitchin. Oxford University's Savilian Professor of Geometry has made fundamental contributions in areas as diverse as: spin geometry, instanton and monopole equations, twistor theory, symplectic geometry of moduli spaces, integrables systems, Higgs bundles, Einstein metrics, hyperkahler geometry, Frobenius manifolds, Painleve equations, special Lagrangian geometry and mirror symmetry, theory of grebes, and many more.
He was previously Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, as well as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has been the President of the London Mathematical Society.
The chapters in this fascinating volume, written by some of the greats in their fields (including four Fields Medalists), show how Hitchin's ideas have impacted on a wide variety of subjects. The book grew out of the Geometry Conference in Honour of Nigel Hitchin, held in Madrid, with some additional contributions, and should be required reading for anyone seeking insights into the overlap between geometry and physics."

Peter Byrne tells the story of Hugh Everett III (1930-1982), whose "many worlds" theory of multiple universes has had a profound impact on physics and philosophy. Using Everett's unpublished papers (recently discovered in his son's basement) and dozens of interviews with his friends, colleagues, and surviving family members, Byrne paints, for the general reader, a detailed portrait of the genius who invented an astonishing way of describing our complex universe from the inside. Everett's mathematical model (called the "universal wave function") treats all possible events as "equally real," and concludes that countless copies of every person and thing exist in all possible configurations spread over an infinity of universes: many worlds.
Afflicted by depression and addictions, Everett strove to bring rational order to the professional realms in which he played historically significant roles. In addition to his famous interpretation of quantum mechanics, Everett wrote a classic paper in game theory; created computer algorithms that revolutionized military operations research; and performed pioneering work in artificial intelligence for top secret government projects. He wrote the original software for targeting cities in a nuclear hot war; and he was one of the first scientists to recognize the danger of nuclear winter. As a Cold Warrior, he designed logical systems that modeled "rational" human and machine behaviors, and yet he was largely oblivious to the emotional damage his irrational personal behavior inflicted upon his family, lovers, and business partners.
He died young, but left behind a fascinating record of his life, including correspondence with such philosophically inclined physicists as Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener, and John Wheeler. These remarkable letters illuminate the long and often bitter struggle to explain the paradox of measurement at the heart of quantum physics. In recent years, Everett's solution to this mysterious problem-the existence of a universe of universes-has gained considerable traction in scientific circles, not as science fiction, but as an explanation of physical reality.

This book is a complete biography of Camillo Golgi one of the most prominent European researcher between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth century, a period of dramatic scientific development. The life of Golgi was an extraordinary intellectual adventure in three major fields of biology and medicine, namely the neuroscience, the emerging cell biology and the new science of medical microbiology. In 1873 Golgi published the description of a revolutionary histological technique which allowed, for the first time, to visualize a single nerve cell with all its ramification which could be followed and analyzed even at a great distance from the cell bodies, the so called "black reaction" (later named the "Golgi method"). This invention provided the spark to a truly scientific revolution which allowed the morphology and the basic architecture of the cerebral tissue to be evidenced in all its complexity, thus contributing to the foundation of the modern neuroscience. It has been written that, in the same way Galileo Galilei was able to find new stars observing with his telescope any sky region, Golgi was able to find new nervous structures and nerve cells by applying his black reaction to any brain region. Finally, the details of the most complex structure in the known universe, the brain, could be characterized. Golgi also strongly contributed to the development of cell biology with the discovery of one of the major organelles of the cell, the "internal reticular apparatus" (later named the "Golgi apparatus" or the "Golgi complex" or simply "the Golgi") and to medical microbiology with his description of the human malaria parasitic development inside the red blood cells (Golgi cycle). He was also a prominent political figure who deeply influenced the Nineteenth century development of science in Italy.

Modesty, humor, compassion, and wisdom are the traits most evident in this illuminating selection of personal papers from the Albert Einstein Archives. The illustrious physicist wrote as thoughtfully to an Ohio fifth-grader, distressed by her discovery that scientists classify humans as animals, as to a Colorado banker who asked whether Einstein believed in a personal God. Witty rhymes, an exchange with Queen Elizabeth of Belgium about fine music, and expressions of his devotion to Zionism are but some of the highlights found in this warm and enriching book.

This is the first book to present a carefully chosen and annotated selection of the unpublished writings and correspondence of the English logician John Venn (1834-1923). Today remembered mainly as the inventor of the famous diagram that bears his name, Venn was an important figure of nineteenth-century Cambridge, where he worked alongside leading thinkers, such as Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, on the development of the Moral Sciences Tripos. Venn published three influential textbooks on logic, contributed some dozen articles to the then newly-established journal Mind, of which he became co-editor in 1892, and counted F.W. Maitland, William Cunningham and Arthur Balfour among his pupils. After his active career as a logician, which ended around the turn of the 20th century, Venn reinvented himself as a biographer of his University, College and family. Together with his son, he worked on the massive Alumni Cantabrigienses, which is still used today as a standard reference source. The material presented here, including the 100-page Annals: Autobiographical Sketch, provides much new information on Venn's philosophical development and Cambridge in the 1850s-60s. It also brings to light Venn's relation with famous colleagues and friends, such as Leslie Stephen, Francis Galton, and William Stanley Jevons, thereby placing him at the heart of Victorian intellectual life.