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A thorough grounding in contemporary physics while placing the subject into its social and historical context. Based largely on the highly respected Project Physics Course developed by two of the authors, it also integrates the results of recent pedagogical research. The text thus teaches the basic phenomena in the physical world and the concepts developed to explain them; shows that science is a rational human endeavour with a long and continuing tradition, involving many different cultures and people; develops facility in critical thinking, reasoned argumentation, evaluation of evidence, mathematical modelling, and ethical values. The treatment emphasises not only what we know but also how we know it, why we believe it, and what effects this knowledge has.
This volume reprints Paul Forman's classic papers on the history of physics in post-World War I Germany and the invention of quantum mechanics.
Now in paperback: Heisenberg's life reconsidered for the twenty-first century by the world's leading English-language authority.
With over 150 alphabetically arranged entries about key scientists, concepts, discoveries, technological innovations, and learned institutions, the Oxford Guide to Physics and Astronomy traces the history of physics and astronomy from the Renaissance to the present. For students, teachers, historians, scientists, and readers of popular science books such as Galileo's Daughter, this guide deciphers the methods and philosophies of physics and astronomy as well as the historical periods from which they emerged. Meant to serve the lay reader and the professional alike, this book can be turned to for the answer to how scientists learned to measure the speed of light, or consulted for neat, carefu...
Containing 609 encyclopedic articles written by more than 200 prominent scholars, The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science presents an unparalleled history of the field invaluable to anyone with an interest in the technology, ideas, discoveries, and learned institutions that have shaped our world over the past five centuries. Focusing on the period from the Renaissance to the early twenty-first century, the articles cover all disciplines (Biology, Alchemy, Behaviorism), historical periods (the Scientific Revolution, World War II, the Cold War), concepts (Hypothesis, Space and Time, Ether), and methodologies and philosophies (Observation and Experiment, Darwinism). Coverage is in...
"The entries follow an elaborate organizational plan, which amounts to a new classification of knowledge, its institutional settings, and its applications. This plan is reprinted in the opening pages of the Guide." "Thoroughly cross-referenced, and accented with attractive black and white artwork, no other source is as systematic and authoritative or as informative and inviting in its coverage of physics, astronomy and planetary science."--BOOK JACKET.
In 2010, Hofstra University celebrated its 75th anniversary, inviting scholars to the campus to discuss the world as it was in the year Hofstra was founded. The conference “1935: The Reality and the Promise” provided a wide-ranging exploration of the 1930s with presentations, discussions, and events highlighting the arts, entertainment, society, politics, literature, and science in that momentous decade. This volume encompasses a selection of the most interesting and enlightening papers from this conference, providing both depth and breadth of coverage. By any measure, the 1930s was a pivotal decade in modern history – a time when the reality of current events and the foreshadowing of events to come tempered all promise. The tension between reality and promise is a recurrent theme in the chapters brought together here, as well as in the personalities and faces that came to define this decade.
As the twentieth century ended, computers, the Internet, and nanotechnology were central to modern American life. Yet the physical advances underlying these applications are poorly understood and underappreciated by U.S. citizens. In this overview, Cassidy views physics through America's engagement with the political events of a tumultuous century.
The unexplored secret of the American Century, the last 100 years of US history, is the rise of American science, specifically physics. At the heart of that story is J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. He was a man of contradictions: a scientist who discovered black holes and then turned his back on cutting edge research; a gentle liberal humanist responsible for the creation of the first real weapon of mass destruction; a genius who founded 'scientific militarism' and then let it destroy him. His life story embodies the great conflicts of American society, its genius, its weaknesses, and even its essential morality. How did an aesthete man uninterested in the acquisition of power become the leader of American science, the most powerful research community in the world? And how did he, with all his intellectual and social advantages, lose his power and become regarded by many as an unfulfilled if not failed scientist.
This is a fascinating account of the impact of Einstein's work and outlook upon contemporary culture and upon the scientific enterprise itself. Following a brief, nontechnical explanation of the significance of Einstein's achievements, Prof. Cassidy takes the reader on an intriguing journey through the uses and abuses of Einstein's relativity theory in such widely diverse settings as political ideology, philosophy of science, literature, art, religion, and the individual in an age of dictatorship, genocide, and weapons of mass destruction. Cassidy explores how Einstein's work spread throughout the physical sciences, leading to a new conception of the theoretical physicist as both physicist a...