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Description
This history of science in the Dark Ages documents the achievements of lesser-known European scholars, including the monk Saint Bede, who effectively paved the way for the discoveries of such luminaries as Galileo and Newton. Histories of modern science often begin with the heroic battle between Galileo and the Catholic Church, which ignited the Scientific Revolution and led to the world-changing discoveries of Isaac Newton. Virtually nothing is...
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In 1793, William Smith, the orphan son of a village blacksmith, made a startling discovery that was to turn the science of geology on its head. While surveying the route for a canal near Bath, he noticed that the fossils found in one layer of the rocks he was excavating were very different from those found in another. And out of that realization came an epiphany: that by following these fossils one could trace layers of rocks as they dipped, rose...
Author
Description
"A clarifying, fascinating, urgently needed book on radiation--what it is, what should and shouldn't concern us about it, and what place radiation and radiation-related technologies have in our world. The universe and our galaxy and planet Earth were born in a nuclear explosion. We live on a radioactive planet, and without radiation there would be no life here. While radiation can be dangerous, it is also deeply misunderstood and often mistakenly...
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The little-known true story of the unexpected and remarkable contributions to astronomy made by a group of women working in the Harvard College Observatory from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s.--
"In the late nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or "human computers," to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group consisted of the...
Author
Pub. Date
[2009]
Description
The fascinating story of the most powerful source of energy the earth can yield. Uranium is a common element in the earth's crust, and the only naturally occurring mineral with the power to end all life on the planet. After World War II, it reshaped the global order. Marie Curie gave us hope that uranium would be a miracle panacea, but the Manhattan Project gave us reason to believe that civilization would end with apocalypse. Slave labor camps in...
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Evolution was not discovered single-handedly, Rebecca Stott argues, contrary to what has become standard lore, but is an idea that emerged over many centuries, advanced by daring individuals across the globe who had the imagination to speculate on nature's extraordinary ways, and who had the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy.
Author
Pub. Date
2016
Description
464 PAGES. $ 29.95. 2015957180. JANE MAYER SHOWS IN THIS POWERFUL, METICULOUSLY REPORTED HISTORY, A NETWORK OF EXCEEDINGLY WEALTHY PEOPLE WITH EXTREME LIBERTARIAN VIEWS BANKROLLED A SYSTEMATIC, STEP-BY-STEP PLAN TO FUNDAMENTALLY ALTER THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM. DN
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries, from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato's Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world-they did not understand what there...
Author
Pub. Date
2013.
Description
This book describes how five famous scientists actually made major errors in the interpretation of their data and how the further investigations of these mistakes led to scientific breakthroughs in such disciplines as biology, medicine, and cosmology. Drawing on the lives of these five great scientists: Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein, the author shows how even the greatest scientists made...
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