History of science

Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film.

The Science of Walking recounts the story of the growing interest and investment of Western scholars, physicians, and writers in the scientific study of an activity that seems utterly trivial in its everyday performance yet essential to our human nature: walking.

For centuries, historians have speculated about the life of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh.

Psychoanalysis and neurological medicine have promoted contrasting and seemingly irreconcilable notions of the modern self.

A committed Lutheran excommunicated from his own church, a friend to Catholics and Calvinists alike, a layman who called himself a "e;priest of God,"e; a Copernican in a world where Ptolemy still reigned, a man who argued at the same time for the superiority of one truth and the need for many truths to coexist-German astronomer Johannes Kepler was, to say the least, a complicated figure.

Follow Nobel laureate and legendary teacher Enrico Fermi's lost course on geophysics.

Popular science readers embrace epics-the sweeping stories that claim to tell the history of all the universe, from the cosmological to the biological to the social.

Like many of the traditional medicines of South Asia, Ayurvedic practice transformed dramatically in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark.

Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France.

In the 1920s an international team of scientists and miners unearthed the richest evidence of human evolution the world had ever seen: Peking Man.

What is the relationship between intelligence and sex?

Galileo's Idol offers a vivid depiction of Galileo's friend, student, and patron, Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571-1620).

Because it laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent epistemologies, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which scholars have long considered as separate from his rigorous theoretical philosophy-until now.

Modernity in interwar Europe frequently took the form of a preoccupation with mechanizing the natural; fears and fantasies revolved around the notion that the boundaries between people and machines were collapsing.

Given the ubiquity of environmental rhetoric in the modern world, it's easy to think that the meaning of the terms environment and environmentalism are and always have been self-evident.

Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842) was a medical reformer in a great age of reform-an occasional and reluctant vivisectionist, a theistic popularizer of natural science, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a surgeon, an artist, and a teacher.

In modern life, technology is everywhere.

The Republic of Color delves deep into the history of color science in the United States to unearth its origins and examine the scope of its influence on the industrial transformation of turn-of-the-century America.

Panaceia's Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen's healing activities in early modern Europe.

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information.

Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans.

From Blaise Pascal in the 1600s to Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century, inventors struggled to create the first calculating machines.

"e;We frequently see one idea appear in one discipline as if it were new, when it migrated from another discipline, like a mole that had dug under a fence and popped up on the other side.

In this new edition, Arthur Fine looks at Einstein's philosophy of science and develops his own views on realism.

Today few would think of astronomy and astrology as fields related to theology.

The Nobel Prizes enjoy enormous prestige throughout the world.

Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century.

The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven't been able to explain it satisfactorily.

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote.

In 1935 geneticist Nikolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky, radiation physicist Karl G.

Galileo's telescopic discoveries, and especially his observation of sunspots, caused great debate in an age when the heavens were thought to be perfect and unchanging.

Discerning Experts assesses the assessments that many governments rely on to help guide environmental policy and action.

When asked to compare the practice of medicine today to that of a hundred years ago, most people will respond with a story of therapeutic revolution: Back then we had few effective remedies, but now we have more (and more powerful) tools to fight disease, from antibiotics to psychotropics to steroids to anticancer agents.

"e;What a splendid book!

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it.

Located in the heart of England's Lake District, the placid waters of Thirlmere seem to be the embodiment of pastoral beauty.

Thomas S.

Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain.

The term mantle has inspired philosophers, geographers, and theologians and shaped artists' and mapmakers' visual vocabularies for thousands of years.

If the twentieth century saw the rise of "e;Big Science,"e; then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift.

A powerful reimagining of the world in which a young Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution.

Primate Societies is a synthesis of the most current information on primate socioecology and its theoretical and empirical significance, spanning the disciplines of behavioral biology, ecology, anthropology, and psychology.

Few economists can claim the influence-or fame-of F.

What constitutes a need?

Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese.

Making "e;Nature"e; is the first book to chronicle the foundation and development of Nature, one of the world's most influential scientific institutions.

Periodicals played a vital role in the developments in science and medicine that transformed nineteenth-century Britain.

Today's science tells us that our bodies are filled with molecular machinery that orchestrates all sorts of life processes.

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.