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In October 1993 the US Congress terminated the Superconducting Super Collider at the time the largest basic-science project ever attempted, with a total cost estimated to exceed $10 billion. Its termination was a watershed event a pivot point not only in the history of physics but also for science in general. "Tunnel Visions" follows the evolution of the endeavor from its origins in the Reagan Administration s military buildup of the early 1980s to its post-Cold War demise a decade later. The failure of the SSC raises the question of whether Big Science has become too big and expensive; can scientists and their government backers effectively manage such enormous undertakings? The case of the Super Collider offers important lessons about the conditions required to build and sustain a large scientific laboratory, and the rise and fall of the SSC also serves as a cautionary tale about the long-term viability of a research community that comes to depend as much as did US high-energy physics upon a single experimental facility of such an unprecedented scale. Riordan, Hoddeson, and Kolb have written the definitive history of the SSC. "
It's hard to imagine any device more crucial to modern life than the microchip and the transistor from which it sprang. Every waking hour of every day people benefit from its use in cellular phones, computers, radios, TVs, and ATMs. This eloquent retelling of the story behind the invention of the transistor recounts how pride and jealousy coupled with scientific aspirations ignited the greatest technological explosion in history. Photos & drawings.
This work tells the human story of the process of invention that led to the invention of the transistor.
This is the absorbing account of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary discoveries — our first encounter with an essential mystery of the universe. Told by an active participant in this discovery, it is the saga of the search for quarks, the elementary particles lurking within the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei, which constitute the fundamental basis of matter. Michael Riordan, physicist and author, was present at the key moments in this story. He brings to life the personalities, triumphs and failures of this true-life scientific detective story, vividly portraying the soaring ambitions and clashing egos of modern physicists at work, vying for the coveted Nobel Prize....
This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.
The New Solar Home Book has been for hundreds of thousands of readers the work that ushered in a new consciousness about how our culture uses and lives with energy. Provides the moral, philosophical, economic, and environmental rationale for solar energy.
Editors Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan have brought together a distinguished group of elementary particle physicists and historians of science to explore the recent history of particle physics. Based on a conference held at Stanford University, this is the third volume of a series recounting the history of particle physics and offers the most up-to-date account of the rise of the Standard Model, which explains the microstructure of the world in terms of quarks and leptons and their interactions. Major contributors include Steven Weinberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Michael Redhead, Silvan Schweber, Leon Lederman and John Heilbron. The wide-ranging articles explore the detailed scientific experiments, the institutional settings in which they took place, and the ways in which the many details of the puzzle fit together to account for the Standard Model.
Explores recent research into dark matter and its impact on the composition of the universe and the motions of galaxies, and describes efforts to determine what dark matter might be
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