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Using two tours de force of modern physics as case studies - proofs that ordinary matter is stable, and solutions to the Ising model of a phase transition (how a liquid freezes to a solid, for instance) - Krieger uncovers the philosophical foundations on which the mathematical models of these phenomena are built. In so doing, he gives the reader a better feel not just for how physicists believe the natural world is structured, but also for how they have arrived at those conclusions.
This book is a cultural phenomenology of doing physics. It describes the ways physicists actually do their work--their motives, and their ways of making sense of the world--so that outsiders can understand it. Martin H. Krieger explains that physicists employ a small number of everyday notions to get at the world experimentally and conceptually.
"Krieger takes design - in architecture, landscape, interiors, engineering, and systems and computer science - to be modeled by traditional theological and artistic problems. And here, he claims, design has traditionally been a redesign of nature. For nature is for us - as Durkheim would describe it - a totem."--BOOK JACKET.
A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America’s leading urban planners and scholars. The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this un...
This book discusses some ways of doing mathematical work and the subject matter that is being worked upon and created. It argues that the conventions we adopt, the subject areas we delimit, what we can prove and calculate about the physical world, and the analogies that work for mathematicians--all depend on mathematics, what will work out and what won't. And the mathematics, as it is done, is shaped and supported, or not, by convention, subject matter, calculation, and analogy. The causes studied include the central limit theorem of statistics, the sound of the shape of a drum, the connection between algebra and topology, the stability of matter, the Ising model, and the Langlands Program i...
First produced by the Swedish Association of Metalworking Industries.
Focuses on the field of solid-state physics - also referred to as condensed matter physics - which grew to maturity between 1920 and 1960. The history of some exciting developments is told here in an easy-to-follow text, accessible to general readers, while maintaining standards of high scholarship.
Science at the Frontiers: Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of Science brings new voices to the study of the history and philosophy of science. It supplements current literature on these fields, highlighting sciences that are overlooked, by the current literature and viewing classic problems in the field from new perspectives. Archaeologist and philosopher of science William H. Krieger asked a group of working scientists, philosophers of science, and historians of science to present a series of case studies in a range of disciplines including archaeology, medicine, forestry, biology and genetics to predict the future for their fields. Their chapters give new perspectives on many of the questions that have resisted solution in the classical canon while raising new questions born out of new perspectives and new historical, scientific, and philosophical approaches. Those studying the philosophy and history of science and those who are already practicing?-scientists, philosophers of science, and historians of science will gain a great deal from this book Book jacket.
Critical care practitioners are often the initial providers of care to seriously ill patients with infections. This book provides clinicians practicing in the intensive care unit with a reference to help guide their care of infected patients. It brings together a group of international authors to address important topics related to infectious diseases for the critical care practitioner.
Second place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2003 Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City. The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told man...