Braving the sexism of the scientific world, she joined the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry and became a prominent member of the international physics community. Of Jewish origin, Meitner fled Nazi Germany for Stockholm in 1938 and later moved to Cambridge, England. Her career was shattered when she fled Germany, and her scientific reputation was damaged when Hahn took full credit—and the 1944 Nobel Prize—for the work they had done together on nuclear fission. Ruth Sime's absorbing book is the definitive biography of Lise Meitner, the story of a brilliant woman whose extraordinary life illustrates not only the dramatic scientific progress but also the injustice and destruction that have marked the twentieth century.

    Many still vividly remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the tragedy. In The Challenger Launch Decision, Diane Vaughan recreates the steps leading up to that fateful decision, contradicting conventional interpretations to prove that what occurred at NASA was not skulduggery or misconduct but a disastrous mistake.Journalists and investigators have historically cited production problems and managerial wrong-doing as the reasons behind the disaster. The Presidential Commission uncovered a flawed decision-making process at the space agency as well, citing a well-documented history of problems with the O-ring and a dramatic last-minute protest by engineers over the Solid Rocket Boosters as evidence of managerial neglect.Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them.No safety rules were broken. No single individual was at fault. Instead, the cause of the disaster is a story not of evil but of the banality of organizational life. This powerful work explains why the Challenger tragedy must be reexamined and offers an unexpected warning about the hidden hazards of living in this technological age.

    She left a vast legacy to future scientists through her research, her teaching, and her contributions to the welfare of humankind. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, yet upon her death in 1934, Albert Einstein was moved to say, Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted. She was a physicist, a wife and mother, and a groundbreaking professional woman. This biography is an inspirational and exciting story of scientific discovery and personal commitment.Oxford Portraits in Science is an on-going series of scientific biographies for young adults. Written by top scholars and writers, each biography examines the personality of its subject as well as the thought process leading to his or her discoveries. These illustrated biographies combine accessible technical information with compelling personal stories to portray the scientists whose work has shaped our understanding of the natural world.

    Yet, paradoxically, the philosophy of science movement is now in disarray. The collapse of logical empiricism and the rise of historicism and social constructivism have effectively left all of the sciences without an epistemology. The claims of realism have become increasingly difficult to justify, and, for many, the only alternatives are probabilism, pragmatism, and relativism.But the case is not hopeless. According to William A.Wallace, a return to a realist concept of nature is plausible and, indeed, much needed. Human beings have a natural ability to understand the world in which they live. Many have suggested this understanding requires advanced logic and mathematics. Wallace believes that nature can more readily be understood with the aid of simple modeling techniques.Through an ingenious use of iconic and epistemic models, Wallace guides the reader through the fundamentals of natural philosophy, explaining how the universe is populated with entities endowed with different natures-- inorganic, plant, animal, and human. Much of this knowledge is intuitive, already in people's minds from experience, education, and exposure to the media. Wallace builds on this foundation, making judicious use of cognitive science to provide a model of the human mind that illuminates not only the philosophy of nature but also the logic, psychology, and epistemology that are prerequisite to it.With this background, Wallace sketches a history of the philosophy of science and how it has functioned traditionally as a type of probable reasoning. His concern is to go beyond probability and lay bare the epistemic dimension of science to show how it can arrive at truth and certitude in the various areas it investigates. He completes his study with eight case studies of certified scientific growth, the controversies to which they gave rise, and the methods by which they ultimately were resolved.The Modeling of Nature provides an excellent introduction to the fundamentals of natural philosophy, psychology, logic, and epistemology.William A. Wallace has taught philosophy of science at the University of Maryland since 1988. For twenty-five years prior to that, he taught both the philosophy and history of science at The Catholic University of America. He served with distinction as a naval officer during World War II, following which he entered the Dominican Order, being ordained a priest in 1953. He has published sixteen books and more than three hundred scholarly articles. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines.The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a closed-world discourse of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of containment led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a Star Wars space-based ballistic missile defense.Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a cyborg discourse. By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world.Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed.Inside Technology series

    Public interest in this lively field has been stimulated by environmental concerns and through links with the histories of art, collecting and gardening. Twenty-four essays, written at an accessible level, cover the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The book includes suggestions for further reading, and highlights the relevance of history for current debates on museum practice, ecological diversity, and the environment.

    The Quest for Longitude is described by Dava Sobel, author of Longitude, as "the definitive work on the history of finding longitude at sea." This wonderfully illustrated volume, which includes the work of twenty experts including Alistair Cooke, relates this remarkable story within the context of several disciplines, including astronomy, cartography, mathematics, navigation, science, and time.

    This elegant book is essential reading for anyone interested in plants and science." -- Londa Schiebinger, NatureIn Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, Ann B. Shteir explores the contributions of women to the field of botany before and after the dawn of the Victorian Age. She shows how ideas during the eighteenth century about botany as a leisure activity for self-improvement and a "feminine" pursuit gave women unprecedented opportunities to publish their findings and views. By the 1830s, however, botany came to be regarded as a professional activity for specialists and experts -- and women's contributions to the field of botany as authors and teachers were viewed as problematic. Shteir focuses on John Lindley, whose determination to form distinctions between polite botany -- what he called "amusement for the ladies" -- and botanical science -- "an occupation for the serious thoughts of man" -- illustrates how the contributions of women were minimized in the social history of science. Despite such efforts, women continued to participate avidly in botanical activities at home and abroad, especially by writing for other women, children, and general readers.At a time of great interest in the role of women in science, this absorbing, interdisciplinary book provides a new perspective on gender issues in the history of science. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science rediscovers the resourceful women who used their pens for their own social, economic, and intellectual purposes."Her lively assortment of womenspeaks to the diversity of a scientific world in some ways more pervasive of everyday society than our own, and... a complex ecology of women in science."--Abigail Lustig, William and Mary Quarterly"Shteir's book bears reading and rereading, not merely because it is filled with a wide array of detail, but because it attempts to suggest a texture of women's lives in the nineteenth century that is far too poorly known."--Alan Rauch, Nineteenth Century Studies

    Wolterstorff shows that this concern was instigated by the collapse of a once-unified moral and religious tradition in Europe into warring factions. After presenting Hume's powerful attack on Locke's recommended practice, Wolterstorff argues for Locke's originality and emphasizes his contribution to the modernity of post-sixteenth-century philosophy.

    Bruce Kuklick's new book begins with the story of the initial adventure of these determined investigators--a twelve-year dig near the Biblical Babylon, at Nippur, conducted at intervals from 1888 through 1900 and bankrolled by the Babylonian Exploration Fund. To unearth tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets, the leaders of this venture faced harsh living conditions in the desert and an academic war of each against all that was quickly begun at the site itself. As their knowledge increased, they risked their personal religious beliefs in the search for historical truth. Kuklick discusses their tribulations to illuminate two other contemporary developments: first, the maturation of the American university, particularly in contrast to its German counterpart; and second, the influence of religious-secular conflict on the ways in which Western scholarship appropriated or appreciated other cultures.The Nippur expedition spawned unseemly (and entertaining) fights among the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, and Chicago for leadership in the study of the ancient Near East--not to mention disagreements with their own developing museums and an international scandal called the Hilprecht controversy. More significant than these quarrels was the concern for the meaning of history displayed in this period of Near Eastern scholarship. The field was linked to Biblical criticism and Judeo-Christian interests, and many of the orientalists originally possessed strong religious commitments--which some put aside as they struggled for objectivity. As recent critics have shown, orientalism was an example of the West's ability to appropriate the other for its own purposes. However, Kuklick's study demonstrates that the censure of orientalism hinges on modes of argumentation that scholars of the ancient Near East helped to legitimate, and at no small cost to themselves.

    But could a new science of wholeness heal what the old science of the machine had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, holistic science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to reenchant even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework.Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a reduction of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the internal work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage real phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.

    Using 100s of fascinating examples, James Burke shows how old established ideas in science and technology often lead to serendipitous and amazing modern discoveries and innovations.

    Using, for the first time, the full range of manuscript as well as printed sources, it documents an entirely new view of Hobbes' intellectual development, and reexamines the shift from a humanist to a scientific culture in European moral and political thought. By examining Hobbes' philosophy against the background of his humanist education, Professor Skinner rescues this most difficult and challenging of political philosophers from the intellectual isolation in which he is so often discussed.

    The contributors conceptualise the process of discovery, which involved active cultural solutions to problems of representation, rather than mere collection and passive depiction. These solutions both reflected and created visions of empire. Studies of the voyages of Banks and Cook investigate their mobilisation of resources. Other essays examine the economic and theological roots of Linnaeus's natural history, and the importance of the sexual system of classification in ideas of human nature and social order. Visions of Empire also tackles the cultural roots of botanical representations and the interpretations of encounters with other peoples. Its interdisciplinary approach maps out a more sophisticated understanding of representations of nature and society.

    This authoritative, illustrated history of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew traces a remarkable evolution over more than two centuries, from the time of Queen Caroline to the present. This is the first history of Kew to make extensive use of the gardens' archives for its research. Some of England's most distinguished garden designers, including Charles Bridgeman, Capability Brown, and W. A. Nesfield, worked at the gardens, as did such eminent architects as William Kent, Sir William Chambers, James Wyatt, and Decimus Burton. These last added garden features, glasshouses, a pagoda, and a Gothic palace. It is not only in the field of garden design and architecture that Kew has found renown; Ray Desmond outlines its significant contributions to scientific developments at home and abroad, underscoring Kew's primary objective as "the better management of the Earth's environment by increasing knowledge and understanding of the plant kingdom."

    Also included is an analysis of Bacon's sources, influence, and role in the emergence of the discipline of perspectiva.

    The dazzling central essay by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar questions rhetoric's globally interpretive status; Gaonkar begins with the ubiquity of rhetoric: "It is a habit of our time to invoke rhetoric, time and again, to make sense of a wide variety of discursive practices that beset and perplex us, and of discursive artifacts that annoy and entertain us, and of discursive formations that inscribe and subjugate us. Rhetoric is a way of reading the endless discursive debris that surrounds us."Starting from the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, and Lawrence Prelli on the rhetoric of science, Gaonkar broadens his critique to fundamental issues for any rhetorical theory and develops four questions that cut to the heart of the possibility of a (post)modern rhetoric: How can rhetoric, an art traditionally directed toward practice, transform itself into hermeneutic theory, a mode of reading? Does contemporary rhetorical theory have legitimate theoretical status? Can an intentional, strategic theory of rhetoric survive the poststructuralist, postmodernist critique? Is the case study, the centerpiece of rhetorical and ethnographic scholarship, epistemologically robust enough to bear the weight of a discipline?Representing a variety of disciplines, contributors to this volume include: M. Leff, D. McCloskey, J. A. Campbell, A. Gross, S. Fuller, C. Miller, C. Willard, J. Jasinski, W. Keith, D. Kaufer, A. King, and T. Farrell. In a pellucid final essay, "A Close Reading of the Third Kind," Gaonkar responds to his critics.

    Indeed, that revolution would have been inconceivable without the cumulative antecedent efforts of three great civilizations: Greek, Islamic, and Latin. With the scientific riches it derived by translation from Greco-Islamic sources in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian Latin civilization of Western Europe began the last leg of the intellectual journey that culminated in a scientific revolution that transformed the world. The factors that produced this unique achievement are found in the way Christianity developed in the West, and in the invention of the university in 1200. A reference for historians of science or those interested in medieval history, this volume illustrates the developments and discoveries that culminated in the Scientific Revolution.

    17 (1996).In the second rev. edition the author has eliminated misprints, revised the chapter on Richard Dedekind, and updated the bibliographical index.