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During the Victorian period, the practice of science shifted from a
religious context to a naturalistic one. It is generally assumed
that this shift occurred because naturalistic science was distinct
from and superior to theistic science. As Huxley's Church and
Maxwell's Demon reveals, however, most of the methodological values
underlying scientific practice were virtually identical for the
theists and the naturalists: each agreed on the importance of the
uniformity of natural laws, the use of hypothesis and theory, the
moral value of science, and intellectual freedom. But if scientific
naturalism did not rise to dominance because of its methodological
superiority, then how did it triumph? Matthew Stanley explores the
overlap and shift between theistic and naturalistic science through
a parallel study of two major scientific figures: James Clerk
Maxwell, a devout Christian physicist, and Thomas Henry Huxley, the
iconoclast biologist who coined the word agnostic. Both were deeply
engaged in the methodological, institutional, and political issues
that were crucial to the theistic-naturalistic transformation. What
Stanley's analysis of these figures reveals is that the scientific
naturalists executed a number of strategies over a generation to
gain control of the institutions of scientific education and to
reimagine the history of their discipline. Rather than a sudden
revolution, the similarity between theistic and naturalistic
science allowed for a relatively smooth transition in practice from
the old guard to the new.
"New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected Matthews" is the last of
poet William Matthews' posthumous collections, following "Search
Party: Collected Poems" (Houghton Mifflin) and "The Poetry Blues:
Essays & Interviews" (University of Michigan Press), all edited
by son Sebastian Matthews and close friend and fellow poet Stanley
Plumly. "New Hope for the Dead" features the best of Matthews'
remaining uncollected work, including over 30 poems spanning
Matthews' prolific but tragically cut-short career. But unlike the
first two collections, "New Hope for the Dead" features Matthews'
unheralded talents as a short story writer, food writ
James Clark seemingly has everything that a man could ever want.
His wife, Sarah Jane, is 40 years old but has long legs and a firm
body. His advertising agency is bringing in lots of cash. And he
has two wonderful children and a great home in the mining town of
Charleston, West Virginia. But James is also the sort of man who
brings his sister-in-law into his bed, flirts with other women and
engages in unethical business practices. Even worse, he doesn't see
anything wrong with his behavior. Sarah Jane urges her husband to
go to marriage counseling with Pastor Douglas, but he refuses,
knowing that she will never leave him. The pastor, however, ends up
affecting the couple's relationship in ways they never would have
imagined. As Sarah Jane works on her marriage, her husband focuses
on work, filming a commercial for a coal company. Soon, he's not
just fighting with his wife but also a conservancy group that is
against everything that James and his clients represent. James
can't believe it, but everything begins slipping away. To hold onto
his life, he must do all that he can to redeem himself in "Making
Love with God."
James Clark seemingly has everything that a man could ever want.
His wife, Sarah Jane, is 40 years old but has long legs and a firm
body. His advertising agency is bringing in lots of cash. And he
has two wonderful children and a great home in the mining town of
Charleston, West Virginia. But James is also the sort of man who
brings his sister-in-law into his bed, flirts with other women and
engages in unethical business practices. Even worse, he doesn't see
anything wrong with his behavior. Sarah Jane urges her husband to
go to marriage counseling with Pastor Douglas, but he refuses,
knowing that she will never leave him. The pastor, however, ends up
affecting the couple's relationship in ways they never would have
imagined. As Sarah Jane works on her marriage, her husband focuses
on work, filming a commercial for a coal company. Soon, he's not
just fighting with his wife but also a conservancy group that is
against everything that James and his clients represent. James
can't believe it, but everything begins slipping away. To hold onto
his life, he must do all that he can to redeem himself in Making
Love with God.
The amnesia that surrounds our earliest life is not only a great
human mystery but also a receptacle into which is poured by the
baby's relatives the beginnings of a life story. In later years
these relatives can look at the grown child and see their first
observations confirmed, for was he not always a curious baby, a
cranky baby, a calm baby, what have you? We come into the world
swaddled in the beginnings of a story, and, by the time we begin
remembering and tending it, it already has a shape and a momentum.
When I was born, in 1942, my young parents were following my
father's naval orders around the country--Bremerton, Washington;
Norman, Oklahoma. I spent many of my first months with my father's
parents in Cincinnati. There are photographs of me in, of course, a
sailor suit. The lawn at the back, or western side, of my
grandparent's house had a few huge trees--could they have been
oaks?--and I think I remember standing at the edge of that lawn, on
a kind of flagstone patio, in the late-afternoon light, staring
excitedly and contentedly at the effect the tall trees and their
long shadows made. The world seemed vast and full of comfortable
mystery, and yet I was but a few feet from the safety of the house.
But that would have, of course, been later, when I was four or
maybe even six. I stood there often. And, of course, I've seen
photographs of the lawn and house. And maybe I'm recalling some
older relative's anecdote about a boy at the edge of a lawn that
somehow, inexplicably, has got blended into my own memories, like
vodka slipped into a bowl of punch. My earliest memory seems to be
from the back yard of my mother's mother's house in Ames, Iowa.
There's a sandbox, a tiny swatch of grainy sidewalk, and--there!
it's moving--a ladybug. I have tried again and again to construct a
tiny narrative from these bright props, but they won't connect.
They lie there and gleam with promise but won't connect. \ls\ The
war ended, my sister Susan was born, my father took a job with the
Soil Conservation Service in Ohio, and then the four of us were in
a boxy farmhouse outside Rosewood, Ohio, for a year and then moved
into a house just outside the city limits of Troy, Ohio. The smells
of that house, that life, those years, I absorbed all unthinkingly,
as greedily and easily as breath. Later, thinking back fondly on
them, I at first organized them easily: indoors and outdoors,
female and male. Coffee, dishwashing liquid, baking are foremost
among the kitchen smells, and the braided scent of misty heat and
faint scorch that meant ironing. I remember, too, coming home from
school during the Army-McCarthy hearings to find my mother ironing
glumly, fascinated and appalled by what I now know to call the
self-righteousness and swagger and mendacity of the whole gloomy
circus. Once or twice--I think I remember this correctly--she was
weeping a little. A child's world is small. Think how easily I
wrote the war ended earlier. I don't remember it myself. In 1945 I
remember I suddenly had a sister. I saw in the kitchen those
puzzling afternoons how the cruelty of the official world, the
world that history records and by whose accounts I knew to write
that the war ended, could come into the house and linger, itself a
sort of odor.
During the Victorian period, the practice of science shifted from a
religious context to a naturalistic one. It is generally assumed
that this shift occurred because naturalistic science was distinct
from and superior to theistic science. Yet as Huxley's Church and
Maxwell's Demon reveals, most of the methodological values
underlying scientific practice were virtually identical for the
theists and the naturalists: each agreed on the importance of the
uniformity of natural laws, the use of hypothesis and theory, the
moral value of science, and intellectual freedom. But if scientific
naturalism did not rise to dominance because of its methodological
superiority, then how did it triumph? Matthew Stanley explores the
overlap and shift between theistic and naturalistic science through
a parallel study of two major scientific figures: James Clerk
Maxwell, a devout Christian physicist, and Thomas Henry Huxley, the
iconoclast biologist who coined the word agnostic. Both were deeply
engaged in the methodological, institutional, and political issues
that were crucial to the theistic-naturalistic transformation. What
Stanley's analysis of these figures reveals is that the scientific
naturalists executed a number of strategies over a generation to
gain control of the institutions of scientific education and to
reimagine the history of their discipline. Rather than a sudden
revolution, the similarity between theistic and naturalistic
science allowed for a relatively smooth transition in practice from
the old guard to the new.
'Deeply researched and profoundly absorbing . . . Matthew Stanley
traces one of the greatest epics of scientific history . . . An
amazing story' Michael Frayn, author of Tony Award-winning
Copenhagen In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British
astronomer, opened a letter written by an obscure German professor
named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper
outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until
then Einstein's masterpiece of time and space had been trapped
behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown.
Einstein's name is now synonymous with 'genius', but it was not an
easy road. He spent a decade creating relativity and his ascent to
global celebrity owed much to against-the-odds international
collaboration, including Eddington's globe-spanning expedition of
1919 - two years before they finally met. We usually think of
scientific discovery as a flash of individual inspiration, but here
we see it is the result of hard work, gambles and wrong turns.
Einstein's War is a celebration of what science can offer when
bigotry and nationalism are defeated. Using previously unknown
sources and written like a thriller, it shows relativity being
built brick-by-brick in front of us, as it happened 100 years ago.
'Riveting . . . Stanley lets us share the excitement a hundred
years later in this entertaining and gripping book. It's a must
read if you ever wondered how Einstein became 'Einstein'' Manjit
Kumar, author of Quantum
This volume of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and
Technology, Second Edition, provides a broad and comprehensive view
of air pollution, extending from ground-level, localized air
quality and regional and global air quality and effects, to sensors
and measurement and air pollution control. Despite substantial
improvements in many parts of the world, globally, air pollution
remains the most hazardous environmental threat. The increasing
quality of exposure assessments, access to new and better
statistical methods, and more complete and precise health data have
led to stronger associations between air pollution exposure and
health effects. Air pollution exposure-effect relationships have
now been established for a wide variety of health outcomes, and
well documented through parallel studies in many countries around
the world using a variety of approaches and methodologies.
Assessments of the health effects in the population are now
performed on a routine basis in many countries and by many
agencies, and often these also include calculation of externalities
associated with the negative health effects. Such knowledge is
essential for pushing development towards a more sustainable
society. This volume covers topics including, but not limited to,
basic knowledge to understand foundational concepts and drivers of
regional and global air pollution in relation to air quality and
ways to sense, measure and control pollutants, while placing this
knowledge into the perspectives of health and technological
systems.
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