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This biography describes the life of Lorentz, from his early childhood, as the son of a market gardener in the provincial town of Arnhem, to his death, as a towering figure in physics and in international scientific cooperation, and as a trailblazer for Einstein's relativity theory.
Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge delves into how the Cold War, as a global phenomenon, shaped local conditions and decisions for science in light of US-Europe relationships. The articles in this volume, edited by Jeroen van Dongen, show how the western network in which science was circulated and produced was strongly conditioned by the state and its international relations. The workings of secrecy, the consequences of US hegemony and decolonization, and the ambitions of post-war recovery attempts were all mediated through the interference of the state and through its relative position in the network. At the same time, hubristic expectations prefigured in the state’s relation to science.
Following the launch of Sputnik, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization became a prominent sponsor of scientific research in its member countries, a role it retained until the end of the Cold War. As NATO marks sixty years since the establishment of its Science Committee, the main organizational force promoting its science programs, Greening the Alliance is the first book to chart NATO’s scientific patronage—and the motivations behind it—from the organization’s early days to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on previously unseen documents from NATO’s own archives, Simone Turchetti reveals how its investments were rooted in the alliance’s defense and surveillance needs...
"Ethics boards have become obligatory passage points in today's medical science, and we forget how novel they really are. The use of humans in experiments is an age-old practice that records show goes back to at least the third century BC and, since the early modern period, as a practice it has become increasingly popular. Yet, in most countries around the world, hardly any formal checks and balances existed to govern the communal oversight of experiments involving human subjects until at least the 1960s. Ethics by Committee traces the rise of ethics boards for human experimentation in the second half of the twentieth century. Using the Netherlands as a case-study, Noortje Jacobs shows how t...
In October 1918, Jan Burgers, 23 years old, started as professor of ‘aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, and their applications’ at the Technical University in Delft. This can be regarded as the birth of fluid mechanics in the Netherlands, not only as an academic discipline but also as the start of the serious study of flow phenomena in engineering environments. During the period of Burgers’ tenure in Delft (till 1955) three Dutch institutes were founded which to this day remain important centres of research in various fields of fluid mechanics: aerospace engineering, hydraulics, and naval engineering. Burgers and others developed mathematical, experimental, and numerical approaches of a broa...
A comprehensive survey of how scientific disciplines have always been informed by politics and ideology on the basis of the Gramscian views in historical materialism, hegemony and civil society.
When science’s “black boxes” are pried open, its workings become accessible. Like time-travellers into history but grounded in today’s cultures, learners interact directly with authentic instruments and replicas. Chapters describe educational experiences sparked through collaborations interrelating museum, school and university.
This book provides new and critical perspectives on the internal development of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (the PCSWA; Pugwash) and its role in international nuclear diplomacy during the 1960s Cold War. Conceived by western scientists dissenting from their own government’s position on nuclear weapons, the conferences brought together elite scientists from across the East-West divide to work towards nuclear disarmament and for peace. The analysis follows two lines. First, the book charts the emergence during the conferences of a distinctive form of technopolitical communication that was crucial to the role of Pugwash in Informal cross-bloc dialogue about disarmamen...
From 1957 onwards, the "Pugwash Conferences" brought together elite scientists from across ideological and political divides to work towards disarmament. Through a series of national case studies - Austria, China, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, the US and USSR – this volume offers a critical reassessment of the development and work of “Pugwash” nationally, internationally, and as a transnational forum for Track II diplomacy. This major new collection reveals the difficulties that Pugwash scientists encountered as they sought to reach across the blocs, create a channel for East-West dialogue and realize the project’s founding aim of influencing state actors. Uniquely, the book affords a sense of the contingent and contested process by which the network-like organization took shape around the conferences. Contributors are Gordon Barrett, Matthew Evangelista, Silke Fengler, Alison Kraft, Fabian Lüscher, Doubravka Olšáková, Geoffrey Roberts, Paul Rubinson, and Carola Sachse.
The first full history of US nuclear secrecy, from its origins in the late 1930s to our post–Cold War present. The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, an...