In The Beginnings of Western Science, David C. Lindberg provides a rich chronicle of the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to the late-medieval scholastics.Lindberg surveys all the most important themes in the history of ancient and medieval science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. He synthesizes a wealth of information in superbly organized, clearly written chapters designed to serve students, scholars, and nonspecialists alike. In addition, Lindberg offers an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe. And throughout the book he pays close attention to the cultural and institutional contexts within which scientific knowledge was created and disseminated and to the ways in which the content and practice of science were influenced by interaction with philosophy and religion. Carefully selected maps, drawings, and photographs complement the text.Lindberg's story rests on a large body of important scholarship produced by historians of science, philosophy, and religion over the past few decades. However, Lindberg does not hesitate to offer new interpretations and to hazard fresh judgments aimed at resolving long-standing historical disputes. Addressed to the general educated reader as well as to students, his book will also appeal to any scholar whose interests touch on the history of the scientific enterprise.

    He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarch's Revolution," "The Artist Prophet and Jester" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras.The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day.Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.

    Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

    Though the answers may seem simple, their profound implications make the prisoner's dilemma one of the great unifying concepts of science. Watching players bluff in a poker game inspired John von Neumann--father of the modern computer and one of the sharpest minds of the century--to construct game theory, a mathematical study of conflict and deception. Game theory was readily embraced at the RAND Corporation, the archetypical think tank charged with formulating military strategy for the atomic age, and in 1950 two RAND scientists made a momentous discovery.Called the prisoner's dilemma, it is a disturbing and mind-bending game where two or more people may betray the common good for individual gain. Introduced shortly after the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb, the prisoner's dilemma quickly became a popular allegory of the nuclear arms race. Intellectuals such as von Neumann and Bertrand Russell joined military and political leaders in rallying to the preventive war movement, which advocated a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Though the Truman administration rejected preventive war the United States entered into an arms race with the Soviets and game theory developed into a controversial tool of public policy--alternately accused of justifying arms races and touted as the only hope of preventing them.A masterful work of science writing, Prisoner's Dilemma weaves together a biography of the brilliant and tragic von Neumann, a history of pivotal phases of the cold war, and an investigation of game theory's far-reaching influence on public policy today. Most important, Prisoner's Dilemma is the incisive story of a revolutionary idea that has been hailed as a landmark of twentieth-century thought.

    In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human cultures interacted at every stage of their history. The author suggests that from the Neolithic beginnings of grain agriculture to the present major social changes in all parts of the world were triggered by new or newly important foreign stimuli, and he presents a persuasive narrative of world history to support this claim. In a retrospective essay titled "The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years," McNeill shows how his book was shaped by the time and place in which it was written (1954-63). He discusses how historiography subsequently developed and suggests how his portrait of the world's past in The Rise of the West should be revised to reflect these changes. "This is not only the most learned and the most intelligent, it is also the most stimulating and fascinating book that has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of mankind. . . . To read it is a great experience. It leaves echoes to reverberate, and seeds to germinate in the mind."—H. R. Trevor-Roper, New York Times Book Review

    With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. Holt offers a painless and playful introduction to many of our most beautiful but least understood ideas, from Einsteinian relativity to string theory, and also invites us to consider why the greatest logician of the twentieth century believed the U.S. Constitution contained a terrible contradiction--and whether the universe truly has a future.

    But while this medieval medicine now seems archaic, it also made a critical contribution to modern science.Medieval Bodies guides us on a head-to-heel journey through this era’s revolutionary advancements and disturbing convictions. We learn about the surgeons who dissected a living man’s stomach, then sewed him up again; about the geographers who delineated racial groups by skin color; and about the practice of fasting to gain spiritual renown. Encompassing medicine and mysticism, politics and art—and complete with vivid, full-color illustrations—Medieval Bodies shows us how it felt to live and die a thousand years ago.

    He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.

    Ask them the meaning of 'relativity' and few of them will be able to tell you what it is.The basic principles of relativity have not changed since Russell first published his lucid guide for the general reader. The ABC of Relativity is Bertrand Russell's most brilliant work of scientific popularisation. With marvellous lucidity he steers the reader who has no knowledge of maths or physics through the subtleties of Einstein's thinking. In easy, assimilable steps, he explains the theories of special and general relativity and describes their practical application to, amongst much else, discoveries about gravitation and the invention of the hydrogen bomb.

    Beautifully illustrated, it remains one of those rare works of scholarship which the general reader simply cannot afford to ignore.

    In "Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938", critically acclaimed historian Philipp Blom argues that, amid this uncertainty, Europeans and Americans directed their energies inwards toward aesthetic and intellectual self-discovery. Europe produced strange new brands of art, science, and spirituality—such as Surrealism and Art Deco—while flocking to exciting but dangerous new ideologies including communism and fascism. In America, the Harlem Renaissance marked the flourishing of black culture, and flappers sparked new thinking about the place of women in society. Yet undercurrents of racial and class conflict were pronounced, fueled by immigration quotas and the poverty of the Dust Bowl."Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938" is a sweeping evocation of the tumultuous interwar period, and the sublime cultural movements and terrifying ideologies it spawned.

    Maintaining a personal touch, he introduces all of the outstanding mathematicians of history, from the key Babylonians, Greeks, and Egyptians, via Newton and Descartes, to Fermat, Babbage, and Godel, and demystifies math's key concepts without recourse to complicated formulae. Written to provide a captivating historic narrative for the non-mathematician, this book is packed with fascinating nuggets and quirky asides, and contains plenty of illustrations and diagrams to illuminate and aid understanding of a subject many dread, but which has made the world what it is today.

    In this book, Peter Dear offers an accessible introduction to the origins of modern science for both students and general readers.Beginning with what was worth knowing in 1500, Dear takes the reader through natural philosophy, humanism, mathematics, and experimentalism until he can describe what was worth knowing by the eighteenth century. Along the way, he discusses the key ideas, individuals, and social changes that constituted the Scientific Revolution.For all of its economy and broad appeal, Revolutionizing the Sciences never sacrifices sophistication of treatment. Dear questions triumphal ideas of scientific progress, unravels the connections between scientific knowledge and power over nature, and distinguishes between the scientific renaissance that characterized the sixteenth century and the more fundamental revolution that occurred in the seventeenth.This is an ideal textbook on the Scientific Revolution for courses on the history of science or the history of early modern Europe. The text is chronologically arranged and fully covers both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, standing alone as an up-to-date, complete general introduction to the origins of modern science in Europe.Revolutionizing the Sciences is the best available choice for teaching or learning about the developments that came to be called the Scientific Revolution.

    Includes end notes and master index.

    Its success "might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic." In The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless men,' the outbursts of sexual freedom and deliberate blasphemy, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs. It is a portrait not of the bourgeois revolution that actually took place, but of the impulse towards a far more fundamental overturning of society."Incorporates some of Dr. Hill's most profound statements yet about the 17th-century revolution as a whole." -- The Economist