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Entropic Creation is the first English-language book to consider the cultural and religious responses to the second law of thermodynamics, from around 1860 to 1920. According to the second law of thermodynamics, as formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius, the entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase in time, meaning that the system will decay and eventually end in a dead state of equilibrium. Application of the law to the entire universe, first proposed in the 1850s, led to the prediction of a future 'heat death', where all life has ceased and all organization dissolved. In the late 1860s it was pointed out that, as a consequence of the heat death scenario, the univer...
"This work considers the spectrum of face recognition from face blindness to super-recognizers and the influence of face evaluation on race, gender, class and ability judgments"--
Physicist John Tyndall and his contemporaries were at the forefront of developing the cosmology of scientific naturalism during the Victorian period. They rejected all but physical laws as having any impact on the operations of human life and the universe. Contributors focus on the way Tyndall and his correspondents developed their ideas through letters, periodicals and scientific journals and challenge previously held assumptions about who gained authority, and how they attained and defended their position within the scientific community.
"This book explores the history and treatment of diabetes. It focuses on the nineteenth-century understanding of the disease and medicine's attempts to grapple with the disorder for the past two centuries"--
From the 1880s to the 1920s, hunger artists - professional fasters - lived on the fringes of public spectacle and academic experiment. Agustí Nieto-Galan presents the history of this phenomenon as popular urban spectacle and subject of scientific study, showing how hunger artists acted as mediators between the human and the social body. Doctors, journalists, impresarios , artists, and others used them to reinforce their different philosophical views, scientific schools, political ideologies, cultural values, and professional interests. The hunger artists generated heated debates on objectivity and medical pluralism, and fierce struggles over authority, recognition, and prestige. Set on the fringes of the freak show culture of the nineteenth century and the scientific study of physiology laboratories, Nieto-Galan explores the story of the public exhibition of hunger, emaciated bodies, and their enormous impact on the public sphere of their time.
The application of standard measurement is a cornerstone of modern science. In this collection of essays, standardization of procedure, units of measurement and the epistemology of standardization are addressed by specialists from sociology, history and the philosophy of science.
This collection of historical and scientific studies shows the impressive significance of the invention, development, and use of the lightning rod in the past 250 years. The rod was a device long taken to be a symbol of enlightenment and utility, judged by some people the very first practical application of the experimental physical sciences to truly practical ends; opposition to its introduction was similarly taken to be a sign of superstition. These essays move beyond the lightning rods’ storied revolutionary symbolism to explore the range of techniques and experiments that fashioned conductors and their varied meanings. “An intriguing and entertaining history of one of modernity’s most cherished technoscientific objects.” Illustrations.
A fascinating and approachable deep dive into the colonial roots of the global wine industry. Imperial Wine is a bold, rigorous history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Here, historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine industry exists as a result of settler colonialism and that imperialism was central, not incidental, to viticulture in the British colonies. Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonization of South Africa...
How did epidemics, zoos, German exiles, methamphetamine, disgruntled technicians, modern bureaucracy, museums, and whipping cream shape the emergence of modern neuroscience?