Best of
Science

1952

The Stars: A New Way to See Them


H.A. Rey - 1952
    This is a clear, vivid text with charts and maps showing the positions of the constellations the year round.

The Principle of Relativity (Books on Physics)


Albert Einstein - 1952
    Lorentz.

Eric Sloane's Weather Book


Eric Sloane - 1952
    This beautifully illustrated and practical treasure trove of climate lore will enlighten outdoorsmen, farmers, sailors, and anyone else who has ever wondered what a large halo around the moon means, why birds "sit it out" before a storm, and whether or not to take an umbrella when leaving the house.

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science


Martin Gardner - 1952
    Not just a collection of anecdotes but a fair, reasoned appraisal of eccentric theory, it is unique in recognizing the scientific, philosophic, and sociological-psychological implications of the wave of pseudoscientific theories which periodically besets the world.To this second revised edition of a work formerly titled In the Name of Science, Martin Gardner has added new, up-to-date material to an already impressive account of hundreds of systematized vagaries. Here you will find discussions of hollow-earth fanatics like Symmes; Velikovsky and wandering planets; Hörbiger, Bellamy, and the theory of multiple moons; Charles Fort and the Fortean Society; dowsing and the other strange methods for finding water, ores, and oil. Also covered are such topics as naturopathy, iridiagnosis, zone therapy, food fads; Wilhelm Reich and orgone sex energy; L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics; A. Korzybski and General Semantics. A new examination of Bridey Murphy is included in this edition, along with a new section on bibliographic reference material.

Engineering Mechanics: Statics


J.L. Meriam - 1952
    Now in its new Sixth Edition, the book continues to help readers develop their problem-solving skills with an extensive variety of highly interesting problems related to engineering design. In the new edition, more than 50% of the homework problems are new. There are also many new sample problems. To help readers build necessary visualization and problem-solving skills, the book strongly emphasizes drawing free-body diagrams--the most important skill needed to solve mechanics problems.

Engineering Mechanics: Dynamics (Volume 2)


J.L. Meriam - 1952
    It illustrates both the cohesiveness of the relatively few fundamental ideas in this area and the great variety of problems these ideas solve. All of the problems address principles and procedures inherent in the design and anlysis of engineering structures and mechanical systems, with many of the problems referring explicitly to design considerations.

The Counter-Revolution of Science


Friedrich A. Hayek - 1952
    These thinkers purported to have discovered the supposed laws of society and concluded that an elite of social scientists should assume direct control of social life.

Peterson Field Guides: Mammals


William Henry Burt - 1952
    Provide up-to-date range information.

Invertebrate Fossils


Raymond C. Moore - 1952
    

All about Dinosaurs


Roy Chapman Andrews - 1952
    Also describes important fossil finds in Mongolia and Montana.

Design for a Brain


William Ross Ashby - 1952
    The work has as basis the fact that the nervous system behaves adap tively and the hypothesis that it is essentiaIly mechanistic; it proceeds on the assumption that these two data are not irrecon cilable. It attempts to deduce from the observed facts what sort of a mechanism it must be that behaves so differently from any machinc made so far. Other proposed solutions have usuaIly left open the question whether so me different theory might not fit the facts equaIly weIl: I have attempted to deduce what is necessary, what properties the nervous system must have if it is to behave at once mechanisticaIly and adaptively. For the deduction to be rigorous, an adequately developed logic of mechanism is essential. Until recently, discussions of mechan ism were carried on almost entirely in terms of so me particular embodiment-the mechanical, the electronic, the neuronie, and so on. Those days are past. There now exists a weIl-developed logic of pure mechanism, rigorous as geometry, and likely to play the same fundamental part, in our understanding of the complex systems of biology, that geometry does in astronomy. Only by the dcvelopment of this basic logic has thc work in this book been made possible."

Lights on the River


Nikolai Dubov - 1952
    That is until he discovers the beauty of the simple lifestyle that Effim and his daughter Nurya, lead, and learns that keeping a river in check is more work than he thought.

Natural Light Photography (#4, Basic Photography Series)


Ansel Adams - 1952
    Originally there were 5 volumes: by the time of this 4th Edition (strictly, 4th reprint) there were 6 volumes in the series. However a note suggests this is a revised edition with important changes to terminology used throughout the book.

Knowledge of Life


Georges Canguilhem - 1952
    In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology.How do transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other.Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects.

The World We Live In


LIFE - 1952
    BEAUTIFUL colorful pictures throughout, includes the miracle of the sea, face of the land, canopy of air, creatures of the sea, the age of mammals, the coral reef, the arctic barrens, the rain forest, the woods of home, the starry universe, the face of the land, the pageant of life, lovely, pages and pages of fold out pictures.

Euclid, Archimedes, Nicomachus (Great Books of the Western World, #10)


Euclid - 1952
    C. 300 BC) The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements Archimedes (C. 287-212 BC) On the Sphere and Cylinder Measurement of a Circle On Conoids and Spheroids On Spirals On the Equilibrium of Planes The Sand-Reckoner Quadrature of the Parabola On Floating Bodies Book of Lemmas The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems NicomachusThe Introduction to Arithmetic of Nicomachus

Across the Space Frontier


Cornelius RyanJoseph Kaplan - 1952
    

Ages in Chaos: A reconstruction of ancient history from the Exodus to King Akhnaton


Immanuel Velikovsky - 1952
    Velikovsky had put forward his ideas briefly in Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History in 1945, but Ages in Chaos was his first full-length work on the subject.A second volume was due for publication shortly after this but was postponed. Instead it was followed eight years later by Oedipus and Akhnaton. In the last two years of his life Velikovsky published a further two works on ancient history: Peoples of the Sea and Rameses II and His Time. At the time of his death he considered that completing his reconstruction of ancient history would require a further two volumes: The Assyrian Conquest and The Dark Age of Greece; these were never published in English, but the manuscripts have long been available online at the Velikovsky archive. [1]Velikovsky claimed in Ages in Chaos that the histories of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Israel are five centuries out of step. His starting point was that the Exodus took place not, as orthodoxy has it, at some point during the Egyptian New Kingdom, but at the fall of the Middle Kingdom. Velikovsky made heavy use in this and later works on ancient history of the concept of "ghost doubles": historical figures who were known by different names in two different sources (e.g. Egyptian and Greek) and were conventionally considered to be entirely different people living in different centuries, but who he proposed to be actually erroneously dated accounts of the same individuals and events.Velikovsky's work has been harshly criticised, including by fellow chronological revisionists such as Peter James. In 1984 fringe science expert Henry H. Bauer wrote Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy, which Time described as "the definitive treatise debunking Immanuel Velikovsky".

Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science


Eric Temple Bell - 1952
    The twenty chapters cover such topics as: algebra, number theory, logic, probability, infinite sets and the foundations of mathematics, rings, matrices, transformations, groups, geometry, and topology. Mathematics was republished in 1987 with corrections and an added foreword by Martin Gardner.

Ptolemy | Copernicus | Kepler (Great Books of the Western World, #16)


Ptolemy - 1952
    

The First Book of Bees


Albert B. Tibbets - 1952
    This beautiful picture book introduces children to bees and beekeeping.

Follow the Sunset


Herman Schneider - 1952
    Sunset in bright colors, darkness in shadowy gray, are shown for one land after another. Fathers come home; mothers sing lullabies as they tuck the children in. Everywhere there is sunset and nighttime, sunrise and daytime. Easy science information and a warm, friendly atmosphere of home and safety.

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Animal Life -- The Animal Kingdom, Volumes 1-16


Friderick Drimmer - 1952
    An illustrated encyclopedia for the young naturalist giving descriptions and commentary on most living animals.