The authors bring to life Darwin's reckless student days in Cambridge, his epic five-year voyage on the Beagle, and his grueling struggle to develop his theory of evolution.Adrian Desmond and James Moore's gripping narrative reveals the great personal cost to Darwin of pursuing inflammatory truths—telling the whole story of how he came to his epoch-making conclusions.

    Their quest would eventually engulf all of physics and astronomy, leading not only to the discovery of quasars, black holes, and shadow matter but also to fame, controversy, and Nobel Prizes. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos tells the story of the men and women who have taken eternity on their shoulders and stormed nature in search of answers to the deepest questions we know to ask."Written with such wit and verve that it is hard not to zip through in one sitting." —Washington Post

    When it first appeared in 1982, Christian Science Monitor called it an extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man, and Timothy Ferris, in The New York Times Book Review, said it was the biography of Einstein he himself would have liked best, adding that it is a work against which future scientific biographies will be measured. As a respected physicist himself, Pais was the first biographer to give Einstein's thinking its full due, yet despite the occasional high level of science needed to discuss Einstein's ideas, it was the winner of the 1983 American Book Award for Science. Now Pais turns to Niels Bohr, to illuminate the life and thought of another giant of 20th-century physics. Bohr was the first to understand how atoms were put together. He played a major role in shaping the theory of the atomic nucleus, he decoded the atomic spectrum of hydrogen, an achievement which marks him as the founder of the quantum dynamics of atoms, and his concept of complementarity (which provides the philosophical underpinning for quantum theory) qualifies him as one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. Pais covers all of these achievements with sophistication and clarity, but he also reveals the many other facets of the man. Perhaps most important, he shows that Bohr was not only a great scientist, but also a great nurturer of young scientific talent, acting as father figure extraordinaire for several generations of physicists. Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics, which he founded in Copenhagen and for which he tirelessly raised funds, was the world's leading center for physics all through the 1920s and 1930s, the birthplace of Heisenberg's papers on the uncertainty relations, Dirac's first paper on quantum electrodynamics, and other pivotal works. And Pais reveals as well the personal side of Bohr, the avid reader and crossword puzzle solver (Bohr loved Icelandic sagas, Goethe and Schiller, Dickens and Mark Twain--while studying in England early in his career, he improved his English by reading The Pickwick Papers with a dictionary to one side); his aid to Jews and other refugees in the 1930s and during the war; the tragic loss of his son Christian (who died in a sailing accident right before Bohr's eyes); and his attempts during and after the war to promote openness between East and West, meeting with both Roosevelt and Churchill (the former was quite courteous, the latter lectured Bohr like a schoolboy). Niels Bohr's Times, is a marvelous biography that captures the essence of one of the best-loved figures of this century

    In a full-scale presentation of the world of scholarship, from the Renaissance to the modern period, Grafton sets before us in three-dimensional detail such seminal figures as Poliziano, Scaliger, Kepler, and Wolf. He calls attention to continuities, moments of crisis, and changes in direction.The central issue in Defenders of the Text is the relation between humanism and science from the mid-fifteenth century to the beginning of the modern period. Treatments of Renaissance humanism in English have emphasized the humanists' commitment to rhetoric, ethics, and politics and have accused the humanists of concentrating on literary matters in preference to investigating the real world via new developments in science, philosophy, and other technical disciplines. This revisionist book demonstrates that humanism was neither a simple nor an impractical enterprise, but worked hand-in-hand with science in developing modern learning.Grafton makes clear that humanism remained an integral and vital part of European culture until the eighteenth century, maintaining a technical component of its own--classical philology--which developed in as rich, varied, and unexpected a way as any other field of European thought. Attention to the text led the humanists to develop a whole range of cools and methods that lent power to science and learning for centuries to come. Grafton shows the continued capacity of classical texts to provoke innovative work in both philology and philosophy, and traces a number of close and important connections between humanism and natural science. His book will be important to intellectual historians, students of the classics and the classical tradition, and historians of early modern science.

    Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association "Edgerton's interdisciplinary study is a bold attempt to show how the perception of the world, as slowly refined by the Renaissance artists, provided the impetus behind the scientific revolution. . . . An ambitious and largely persuasive book." --Nature"Edgerton's book is learned and richly illustrated with paintings and drawings from the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, and contemporaneous Chinese dynasties. . . . [His] argument is intricate and flawless." --American Historical Review

    It relates the history of chemicals, from the earliest generation of the light elements in the Big Bang, to their transformation into heavier atoms and their subsequent molecular evolution intomyriad forms, including life on Earth. Spanning both organic and inorganic chemical combinations, the survey thus covers billions of years and involves evidence coming from the analysis of long-extinct as well as ongoing processes. The techniques used in this fascinating study are also described.They include the analysis of many sources: isotopes from ancient nuclear reactions and still-active radionuclides; molecules from space--frozen in meteorites or continuously generated in vast interstellar clouds; and the detritus of volcanic and geochemical activity. This is also the story of theorigin of life, which can be biochemically detected through the modern descendants of early microbial life-forms and from laboratory experiments in prebiotic chemistry. The author also describes the history of ideas in the study of chemistry and the development of modern theories on chemicalevolution. This is a highly readable account of central issues and ideas in modern science that will be read with absorbing interest by a wide range of students, researchers, and general readers.

    Formulated in 1891 by Wilhelm Waldeyer, it stated that the cell theory applies to the nervous system. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Spain's greatest scientist, was its main architect; his main tool was a capricious nerve cell stain discovered by Camillo Golgi. This book reviews the original papers on which the neuron doctrine was based, showing that the evidence came from a much wider base of contributions than is generally realized, including such diverse and brilliant personalities as Albrecht Kolliker, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm His, August Forel, Fritdjof Nansen and Gustav Retzius. Furthermore, many questions about terminology of the parts of the neuron and about the organization of neurons into reflex pathways and networks were raised and debated, questions that remain relevant to this day. Electron microscopical studies in the 1950s appeared to confirm the classical doctrine, but subsequent studies have revealed complexities that were not anticipated. This book reviews these new studies against the background of the classical work, and suggests some new directions for revising our concept of the neuron as a basis for the functional organization of the nervous system.

    To some scholastics, alchemy seemed to arrogate the power of divinity itself in its claim that man could replicate the products of nature by means of art; others viewed alchemy as a pure technology, unworthy of inclusion in a curriculum devoted to the study of "scientiae," The "Summa perfectionis" of Pseudo-Geber, written around the end of the 13th century as a defense of the art, became 'the Bible of the medieval alchemists, 'and was still being used as late as the 17th century. The present work contains a critical edition, annotated translation, and commentary of the "Summa,"

    Wajcman argues that the identification between men and machines is not immutable but is the result of ideological and cultural processes. She surveys sociological and feminist literature on technology, highlighting the male bias in the way technology is defined as well as developed.Over the last two decades feminists have identified men's monopoly on technology as an important source of their power, women's lack of technological skills as an important element in their dependence on men. During this period, women's efforts to control their fertility have extended from abortion and contraception to mobilizing around the new reproductive technologies. At the same time there has been a proliferation of new technologies in the home and in the workplace. The political struggles emerging around reproductive technology, as well as the technologies affecting domestic work, paid labor, and the built environment, are the focus of this book.

    But Mill was only the most notable British Victorian to suffer from shattered nerves, for depression appears again and again in nineteenth-century history and literature, among men and women of all classes. It was a problem that doctors struggled to understand and treat--largely unsuccessfully. Their debates over the nature of depression, Janet Oppenheim writes, offer us a unique window on the Victorian mind. In Shattered Nerves, Oppenheim looks at how British doctors and patients tried to make sense of depression in an era of limited psychological knowledge and intense social prejudices. Ranging from the dawn of the Victorian era to the First World War, she draws on letters, memoirs, medical reports, literature, and many other sources to paint a detailed portrait of the slowly evolving knowledge of mental illness. She reveals how a host of nerve specialists searched for the physical causes of mental depression--even the term nervous breakdown came from the belief that mental health depended on maintaining supplies of nerve force, much like recharging a battery. Especially interesting are her rich descriptions of the impact of Victorian prejudices on the ways in which doctors and patients viewed depression. Overwork and worries about money and other manly responsibilities were seen as acceptable causes of nervous collapse among men--in contrast to the range of sexual causes, including masturbation, which Victorian doctors frequently found at the root of male mental illness. Women, it was assumed, were naturally prone to hysteria and depression--and if they made the mistake of competing with men or pursuing higher education, then mental derangement was sure to follow. On the other hand, Oppenheim also reveals a number of surprises about Victorian medical thinking: For instance, even though Freud's revolution went largely ignored in Britain before the First World War, many physicians considered sexual abstinence to be unhealthy. She also points out that anorexia nervosa was identified as early as 1873 and was extensively discussed before the turn of the century. The nineteenth century was a critical period in the evolution of modern thought about the mind and the body, an era when medical knowledge grew rapidly but human psychology remained enigmatic. In exploring how Victorians addressed this problem, Shattered Nerves provides valuable insight into the way they saw their world.