About the Author Adele Diamond is at the Center for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Shriver Center, UMass Medical School. B. J. Casey is at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Medical College, Cornell University. Yuko Munakata is at the Department of Psychology, University of Denver.

How is it that nobody--except maybe scientists--sees science for what it is? In this entertaining and provocative book, Lewis Wolpert draws on the entire history of science, from Thales of Miletus to Watson and Crick, from the study of eugenics to the discovery of the double helix. The result is a scientist's view of the culture of science, authoritative and informed and at the same time mercifully accessible to those who find cohabiting with this culture a puzzling experience. Science is arguably the defining feature of our age. For anyone who hopes to understand its nature, this lively and thoughtful book provides the perfect starting point.

In these engaging memoirs of a maverick, Theodore H. Maiman describes the life events leading to his invention of the laser in 1960. Maiman succeeded using his expertise in physics and engineering along with an ingenious and elegant design not anticipated by others. His pink ruby laser produced mankind’s first-ever coherent light and has provided transformational technology for commerce, industry, telecom, the Internet, medicine, and all the sciences. Maiman also chronicles the resistance from his employer and the ongoing intrigue by competing researchers in industry and academia seeking to diminish his contribution in inventing the first laser. This work will appeal to a wide readership, from physicists and engineers through science enthusiasts to general readers. The volume includes extensive photos and documentary materials related to Maiman’s life and accomplishments never before published. "No one beat Maiman to the laser. How important is the laser? How important are all lasers? That is how important we have to regard Maiman’s contribution.He and the laser changed all of our lives, everyone’s!"Dr. Nick Holonyak, Jr., Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics, University of Illinois at Champaigne-Urbana, and inventor of the light-emitting diode (LED) and co-inventor of the transistor laser "More than five decades later, we can safely conclude that Theodore Maiman's groundbreaking discovery changed the world. Our modern life just as scientific research would be quite different without the laser."Dr. Ferenc Krausz, Director, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany, and Professor of Physics, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, and pioneer in attosecond lasers and attophysics "Maiman had the stroke of genius needed to take a different approach [from his competitors]. The sheer elegance and simplicity of his design beliesthe intellectual achievement it represents. If his invention seems obvious to some today, it was far from obvious in 1960."Jeff Hecht, authoritative science writer on the historical development of the laser, author of books on lasers and fiber optics

"Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then." -- Amazon.com.

Please Explain Is the latest in Dr Karl's mega-selling science series which includes the best sellers Great Mythconceptions, Bum Breath, Botox and Bubbles and Q and A with Dr K. Australia's favourite scientist answers more curly questions on life, the universe and everything. No one conveys the excitement and wonder of science quit like Dr Karl, and this, his twenty-sixth book, taken us on another thoroughly entertaining exploration of the world around us. If you like your science fun and unpredictable, don't miss this new addition to the Dr Karl library.

"A new collection of seventeen science essays that once again demonstrate the profound knowledge and imagination which have become the hallmarks of Isaac Asimov's works. Here, Dr. Asimov explores such topics as: the farthest distance in the universe; why astrology is sheer nonsense; how eclipses occur and how they were predicted by the ancients; why antievolutionists should consider the chimpanzee; why the North Star keeps shifting, and how it proves that Bacon didn't write Shakespeare's plays; and why fusion, and not fission, is the only solution to the energy crisis. Each fascinating chapter in this new volume brings Dr. Asimov further toward his goal of explaining to everyone the wonders of the universe and of man." --

God's war crimes, Aristotle's sneaky tricks, Galileos creationism, Newton's intelligent design, entropys errors, Einstein's pajamas, John Conway's game of loneliness, Information Theory's blind spot, Stephen Wolfram's New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you're about to see.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

"Hans Blumenberg has, in the quarter-century since his death, become recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the postwar period. The Readability of the World represents Blumenberg's first full-length demonstration of the metaphorological method he had pioneered twenty years earlier in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Whereas Blumenberg had confined himself in Paradigms to sketching this future research field, in Readability he applies his method to a single case study: the idea that the world presents itself to human beings as a book. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality. Beginning with ancient Greek cosmology and ending with the genetic code, Blumenberg traces the changes undergone by this metaphor in order to access the different expectations of reality that it articulates, reflects, and projects"--

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a radical change occurred in the patterns and framework of European thought. In the wake of Copernican theory and discoveries through the telescope, the notion of an ordered cosmos of "fixed stars" gave way to that of a universe infinite in both time and space-with significant and far-reaching consequences for human thought. Alexandre Koyré brilliantly interprets this revolution in terms of the change that occurred in our conception of the universe and our place in it, and illustrates the primacy of this change in the development of the modern world. "An important contribution to the problem of the transition from the world view characteristic of the medieval centuries to that which rapidly gained acceptance after the seventeenth century." (Philosophical Quarterly) "Koyré has provided the material and has illuminated it with uniformly perceptive and occasionally brilliant commentary.... An important contribution to the study of 17th-century thought." (Thomas S. Kuhn, Science) "A model of scholarliness without pedantry, of clarity without oversimplification." (Arthur Koestler, Encounter) "Surely a work that will be welcomed alike by the scientist, philosopher, and historian of ideas." (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research) Alexandre Koyré was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. His books include Discovering Plato and Newtonian Studies.

Lean back and settle in for cutting-edge scientific snippets from the trend-setting Dr Karl Kruszelnicki.In Short Back & Science, Dr Karl combs through some of the greatest scientific conundrums of our age, such as what is killing half the bacteria on Earth every two days and why don't mole rats get cancer? Why would anyone pay $40 million for a cup of tea, and how did a toilet seat help to end the First World War? Are bananas really slippery, radioactive and loaded with potassium? What do clouds weigh? And why are there scientists running around naked in the Antarctic? Brushing aside any hype about coconuts and antioxidants, there is no one better to trim down to the facts than Australia's most trusted scientist, Dr Karl.

Humorous and witty story-telling about absurd aspects of scientific discovery and invention. Kruszelnicki has a flair for the absurd and talent as a media performer. The book draws extensively on his Triple J radio appearances. Referenced and illustrated.

17 essays selected from the magazine "Fantasy and science fiction."

Published by Avon Books, 1983, this First Paperback Edition has 253 pages. Isaac Asimov was considered to be one of the big three authors who brought science fiction into the American households.

Hilary Putnam has been convinced for some time that the present situation in philosophy calls for revitalization and renewal; in this latest book he shows us what shape he would like that renewal to take. Words and Life offers a sweeping account of the sources of several of the central problems of philosophy, past and present, and of why some of those problems are not going to go away As the first four part tides in the volume-"The Return of Aristotle," "The Legacy of Logical Positivism," "The Inheritance of Pragmatism," and "Essays after Wittgenstein"-suggest, many of the essays are concerned with tracing the recent, and the not so recent, history of these problems. The goal is to bring out what is coercive and arbitrary about some of our present ways of posing the problems and what is of continuing interest in certain past approaches to them. Various supposedly timeless philosophical problems appear, on closer inspection, to change with altered historical circumstances, while there turns out to be much of permanent value in Aristotle's, Peirce's, Dewey's, and Reichenbach's work on some of the problems that continue to exercise us. A unifying theme of the volume as a whole is that reductionism, scientism, and old-style disenchanted naturalism tend to be obstacles to philosophical progress. The titles of the final three parts of the volume-Truth and Reference," "Mind and Language," and "The Diversity of the Sciences-indicate that the sweep of the problems considered here comprehends all the fundamental areas of contemporary analytic philosophy Rich in detail, the book is also grand in scope, allowing us to trace the ongoing intellectual evolution of one of the most significant philosophers of the century.

Intended for a first year graduate course in quantum mechanics, this collection of topics can also be considered as a set of self-contained ``monographs for pedestrians'' on the Mouml;ssbauer effect, many-body quantum mechanics, kaon physics, scattering theory, Feynman diagrams, symmetries and relativistic quantum mechanics. An unusual feature of the book is the introduction of many interesting physical problems and mathematical techniques at a much earlier level than in conventional texts. This approach enables the student to see the physical implications and useful applications of quantum theory before he has mastered the formalism in detail. It provides him with new mathematical tools at an earlier stage for use in subsequent problems. It also presents the active research physicist with a ``pedestrian'' treatment of many topics without the necessity of learning the formalism.

During the Soviet years, Russian science was touted as one of the greatest successes of the regime. Russian science was considered to be equal, if not superior, to that of the wealthy western nations. The Perversion of Knowledge, a history of Soviet science that focuses on its control by the KGB and the Communist Party, reveals the dark side of this glittering achievement. Based on the author's firsthand experience as a Soviet scientist, and drawing on extensive Russian language sources not easily available to the Western reader, the book includes shocking new information on biomedical experimentation on humans as well as an examination of the pernicious effects of Trofim Lysenko's pseudo-biology. Also included are many poignant case histories of those who collaborated and those who managed to resist, focusing on the moral choices and consequences. The text is accompanied by the author's own translations of key archival materials, making this work an essential resource for all those with a serious interest in Russian history.

"This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The Presence of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century"--

Based on a highly successful BBC series, A Passion for Science features thirteen informal conversations with eminent scientists--including physicists, molecular biologists, cancer researchers, and astronomers--who speak with remarkable candor and good humor about the personal side of science. Edited to stand alone and including expanded introductions as well as an opening chapter, the interviews focus on why they became scientists, what they find most rewarding about their work, and what it feels like to make a major discovery. In this collection of conversations with Lewis Wolpert, such eminent scientists as Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam, Christopher Zeeman, John Maynard Smith, Stephen Jay Gould, Anthony Epstein, and Richard Gregory provide highly entertaining and non-technical accounts of the activity that dominates their lives. At once humorous, insightful, and inspiring, the stories these scientists tell offer a vivid portrait of scientific work, the day-to-day routine, and the moments that come once in a lifetime.

Gold, gold, gold for Australia's mega-selling scientist's 27th book... 'Nullius in verba', the Royal Society's motto, roughly translated, means 'take nobody's word for it'. Why not do the experiment for yourself and see the reality of nature. Don't trust authority - trust nature.Does cranberry juice cure urinary tract infections? Is the hookah really a safer way to smoke? Will the Large Hadron Collider destroy the Earth and the Universe? Is the purpose of the peacock's tail to attract females? And in the unlikely event of a plane crash, are some seats safer than others?the human hand has 27 bones; Uranus has 27 moons; 27 is a perfect cube, being 3 x 3 x 3; and in this, Dr Karl's 27th book, he takes us on another exploration of the dazzling world of science.