Alice Hamilton

Barbara Sicherman

Alice Hamilton was first considered "subversive" during World War I, yet she lived to protest our involvement in Vietnam. She was America's foremost industrial toxicologist, a pioneer in medicine and in social reform, long-time resident of Hull House, pacifist and civil libertarian. She was Edith Hamilton's sister, and the first woman on the faculty of Harvard, though she retired--an assistant professor in the school of public health--ten years before women medical students were admitted. This legendary figure now comes to life in an integrated work of biography and letters

Hardcover 1984 / Paperback

Amber

Andrew Ross

The fossilized resin of ancient trees, amber preserves organic material--most commonly insects and other invertebrates--and with it the shape and surface detail that are usually obliterated or hopelessly distorted during the mineralization we associate with fossils. This fascinating substance offers a unique intersection of the fields of paleontology, botany, entomology, and mineralogy.

Paperback 1999

An Essay on Calcareous Manures

Edmund Ruffin

Edited by J. Carlyle Sitterson

This book's publication in 1832 initiated an era of agricultural reform in the ante-bellum South. By 1850 Ruffin had effected a transformation of the economy of the upper South from poverty to agricultural prosperity. This small book, with its uncompromisingly descriptive title, is a landmark in the history of soil chemistry in the United States.

Hardcover 1961

The Antidepressant Era

David Healy

When we stop at the pharmacy to pick up our Prozac®, are we simply buying a drug, or are we buying into a disease as well? The first complete account of the phenomenon of antidepressants, this authoritative, highly readable book relates how depression, a disease only recently deemed too rare to merit study, has become one of the most common disorders of our day--and a booming business to boot.

Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 1999

Before Big Science

Mary Jo Nye

Mary Jo Nye traces the social and intellectual history of the physical sciences from the early 1800s to the beginning of the Second World War, examining the sweeping transformation of scientific institutions and professions during the period and the groundbreaking experiments that fueled that change, from the earliest investigations of molecular chemistry and field dynamics to the revolutionary breakthroughs of quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and nuclear science.

Paperback 1999

Benjamin Franklin's Science

I. Bernard Cohen

I. Bernard Cohen, the eminent historian of science and the principal elucidator of Franklin's scientific work, examines Franklin's scientific activities in fields ranging from heat to astronomy. He provides masterly accounts of the theoretical background of Franklin's science (especially his study of Newton), the experiments he performed, and their influence throughout Europe and the United States.

Hardcover 1990 / Paperback 1996

Biologists under Hitler

Ute Deichmann

Thomas Dunlap, Translator

Biologists under Hitler is the first book to examine the impact of Nazism on the lives and research of a generation of German biologists. Drawing on previously unutilized archival material, Ute Deichmann, herself a biologist, explores not only the lives of the biologists forced to emigrate but also the careers, science, and crimes of those who stayed in Germany.

Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1999

Bones and Ochre

Marianne Sommer

When ochre-stained bones were unearthed by William Buckland in a Welsh cave in 1823, they raised many unsettling questions regarding their origin, and inspired the casting and recasting of the character who became known as the Red Lady. Her biography reflects the personal, professional, and national ambitions of those who studied her, and echoes the era in which each bit of research was conducted. In telling her story, Sommer reveals how paleoanthropology has emerged as an international, interdisciplinary, and thoroughly modern science.

Hardcover 2008

Botanical Progress, Horticultural Innovations, and Cultural Changes

Edited by Michel Conan

Edited by W. John Kress

This book highlights the religious, artistic, political, and economic consequences of horticultural pursuits, exploring the roles of peasants, botanists, horticulturists, nurserymen and gentlemen collectors in these developments, and concluding with a reflection on the future of horticulture in the present context of widespread environmental devastation and ecological uncertainty.

Paperback 2007

Brainstorming

Solomon Snyder

In this book Solomon Snyder describes the political maneuverings and scientific sleuthing that led him and Candace Pert, then a graduate student in his lab, to a critical breakthrough in the effort to understand addiction. Their discovery--the so-called opiate receptor--is a structure on the surface of certain nerve cells that attracts opiates. From this very human chronicle of scientific battles in the ongoing war against pain and addiction, we gain an appreciation of the extraordinary intellectual processes of an eminent scientist. But Dr. Snyder's story of scientific brainstorming also affords us rare glimpses into the fruitful, sometimes frustrating, relationships among scientists which enrich and complicate creative work.

Hardcover 1989

A Brief History of the Harvard University Cyclotrons

Richard Wilson

This book describes the work of the second Harvard cyclotron during its 50 years of operation and includes references to about 500 publications and 40 student theses from the work. In its first 20 years, the cyclotron's primary use was for nuclear physics, particularly for understanding the interaction between two nucleons. During the next 30 years, the emphasis switched to treating patients with proton radiotherapy.

Paperback 2004

British Naturalists in Qing China

Fa-ti Fan

This book is the first comprehensive study on this topic. In a series of vivid chapters, Fa-ti Fan examines the research of British naturalists in China in relation to the history of natural history, of empire, and of Sino-Western relations. The author gives a panoramic view of how the British naturalists and the Chinese explored, studied, and represented China's natural world in the social and cultural environment of Qing China. Using the example of British naturalists in China, the author argues for reinterpreting the history of natural history, and provides an innovative framework for understanding the formation of scientific practice and knowledge in cultural encounters.

Hardcover 2004

The Case of the Female Orgasm

Elisabeth A. Lloyd

Why women evolved to have orgasms--when most of their primate relatives don't--is a persistent mystery among evolutionary biologists. In pursuing this mystery, Lloyd arrives at another: How could anything as inadequate as the evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm have passed muster as science? A judicious and revealing look at all twenty evolutionary accounts of the trait of human female orgasm, Lloyd's book is at the same time a case study of how certain biases steer science astray.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006

China and Albert Einstein

Danian Hu

This is the first extensive study in English or Chinese of China's reception of the celebrated physicist and his theory of relativity. In a series of biographical studies of Chinese physicists, Hu describes the Chinese assimilation of relativity and explains how Chinese physicists offered arguments and theories of their own. Hu's account concludes with the troubling story of the fate of foreign ideas such as Einstein's in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when the theory of relativity was denigrated along with Einstein's ideas on democracy and world peace.

Hardcover 2005

City Hospitals

Harry F. Dowling

Hardcover 1982

The Common Sense of Science

J. Bronowski

Foreword by Herman Bondi

Hardcover 1953 / Paperback

A Computer Perspective

Charles Eames

Ray Eames

Edited by Glen Fleck

Robert Staples, Producer

Introduction by I. Bernard Cohen

A sequence of 20th century ideas, events, and artifacts from the history of the information machine.

Hardcover 1973 / Paperback 1990

The Conquest of the Microchip

Hans Queisser

Queisser tells the exciting story behind the birth of a new industry and a new knowledge that has resulted not only in a restructuring of science, technology, and industry but also in major rearrangements of political and economic power.

Hardcover 1988 / Paperback 1990

The Control Revolution

James Beniger

Beniger traces the origin of the Information Society to major economic and business crises of the past century. In the U.S., applications of steam power in the early 1800s brought a dramatic rise in the speed, volume, and complexity of industrial processes, making them difficult to control. Inevitably the Industrial Revolution, with its ballooning use of energy to drive material processes, required a corresponding growth in the exploitation of information.

Hardcover 1986 / Paperback 1989

The Copernican Revolution

Thomas S. Kuhn

For scientist and layman alike this book provides vivid evidence that the Copernican Revolution has by no means lost its significance today. Few episodes in the development of scientific theory show so clearly how the solution to a highly technical problem can alter our basic thought processes and attitudes. Understanding the processes which underlay the Revolution gives us a perspective, in this scientific age, from which to evaluate our own beliefs more intelligently. With a constant keen awareness of the inseparable mixture of its technical, philosophical, and humanistic elements, Mr. Kuhn displays the full scope of the Copernican Revolution as simultaneously an episode in the internal development of astronomy, a critical turning point in the evolution of scientific thought, and a crisis in Western man's concept of his relation to the universe and to God.

Paperback 1992

Crafting Science

Joan Fujimura

During the late 1970s and 1980s, "cancer" underwent a transformation: what had long been a set of heterogeneous diseases marked by uncontrolled cell growth became a disease of our genes. How this happened and what it means is the story Joan Fujimura tells in a rare inside look at the way science works and knowledge is created.

Hardcover

The Creationists

Ronald L. Numbers

In light of the embattled status of evolutionary theory, particularly as "intelligent design" makes headway against Darwinism in the schools and in the courts, this now classic account of the roots of creationism assumes new relevance. Expanded and updated to account for the appeal of intelligent design and the global spread of creationism, The Creationists offers a thorough, clear, and balanced overview of the arguments and figures at the heart of the debate.

Paperback 2006

A Cultural History of Modern Science in China

Benjamin A. Elman

In A Cultural History of Modern Science in China, Elman has retold the story of the Jesuit impact on late imperial China, circa 1600-1800, and the Protestant era in early modern China from the 1840s to 1900 in a concise and accessible form ideal for the classroom.

Hardcover 2006

Culturing Life

Hannah Landecker

How did cells make the journey from their origin in living bodies to something that can be grown and manipulated on artificial media in the laboratory? This is the question at the heart of Hannah Landecker's book. She shows how cell culture changed the way we think about such central questions of the human condition as individuality, hybridity, and even immortality and asks what it means that we can remove cells from the spatial constraints of the body and "harness them to human intention."

Hardcover 2007

A Cursing Brain?

Howard I. Kushner

A Cursing Brain? traces the problematic classification of Tourette syndrome through three distinct but overlapping stories: the claims of medical knowledge, patients' experiences, and cultural expectations and assumptions.

Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000

Dangerous Garden

David Stuart

Gardener and botanist David Stuart tells the fascinating story of botanical medicine, and chronicles how the herbal materia medica of healing and killing plants has sparked wars, helped establish intercontinental trade routes, and seeded fortunes.

Hardcover 2004

Darwin and Design

Michael Ruse

In clear, non-technical language, Ruse offers a full and fair assessment of the status of the argument from design in light of both the advances of modern evolutionary biology and the thinking of today's philosophers--with special attention given to the supporters and critics of "intelligent design." The first comprehensive history and exposition of Western thought about design in the natural world, this important work suggests directions for our thinking as we move into the twenty-first century.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004

Defenders of the Text

Anthony Grafton

This book traces the relationship between humanism and science from the mid-fifteenth century to the beginning of the modern period and demonstrates that humanism was neither a simple nor an impractical enterprise, but worked hand-in-hand with science in developing modern learning.

Hardcover 1991 / Paperback

Defining Biology

Jane Maienschein, Editor

The 1890s was an exciting time in American biology, a time of great intellectual debate and turmoil. Much of this activity centered on the now-famous Evening Lectures delivered at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod, where leading biologists gathered to research the leading issues of the day. Jane Maienschein has selected key lectures, written an introductory essay, and provided brief explanations of the significance and impact of each lecture.

Hardcover 1986

Distilling Knowledge

Bruce T. Moran

This book suggests that scientific revolution may wear a different appearance in different cultural contexts. The metaphor of the Scientific Revolution, Moran argues, can be expanded to make sense of alchemy and other so-called pseudo-sciences--by including a new framework in which "process can count as an object, in which making leads to learning, and in which the messiness of conflict leads to discernment." Seen on its own terms, alchemy can stand within the bounds of demonstrative science.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006

Edward Teller

Peter Goodchild

In the story of the man dubbed "the father of the H-bomb," told here in greater depth and detail than ever before, Goodchild unravels the complex web of harsh early experiences, character flaws, and personal and professional frustrations that lay behind the paradox of "the real Dr. Strangelove."

Hardcover 2004

Einstein 1905

John S. Rigden

For Einstein, 1905 was a remarkable year. It was also a miraculous year for the history and future of science. In six short months, he published five papers that would transform our understanding of nature. This unparalleled period is the subject of Rigden's book, which deftly explains what distinguishes 1905 from all other years in the annals of science, and elevates Einstein above all other scientists of the twentieth century.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006

Einstein and Oppenheimer

Silvan S. Schweber

Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, two iconic scientists of the twentieth century, belonged to different generations, with the boundary marked by the advent of quantum mechanics. By exploring how these men differed—in their worldview, in their work, and in their day—this book provides powerful insights into the lives of two critical figures and into the scientific culture of their times.

Hardcover 2008

Electrical Shock Waves in Power Systems

Reinhold Rudenberg

Hardcover 1968

Engineering--An Endless Frontier

Sunny Y. Auyang

Auyang ranges widely in demonstrating that engineering today is not only a collaborator with science but its equal. In concise accounts of the emergence of industrial laboratories and chemical and electrical engineering, and in whirlwind histories of the machine tools and automobile industries and the rise of nuclear energy and information technology, her book presents a broad picture of modern engineering.

Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006

The Equations

Sander Bais

In this beautifully designed book, the equations that govern our world unfold in all their formal grace--and their deeper meaning as core symbols of our civilization. The renowned Dutch physicist Sander Bais has produced a book that delves into the details of seventeen equations that form the very basis of what we know of the universe today.

Hardcover 2005

Evolution

Edited by Michael Ruse

Edited by Joseph Travis

Foreword by Edward O. Wilson

Spanning evolutionary science from its inception to its latest findings, from discoveries and data to philosophy and history, this book is the most complete, authoritative, and inviting one-volume introduction to evolutionary biology available.

Hardcover 2009

The Evolving World

David P. Mindell

Today, evolutionary biology is much more than an explanatory concept. It is indispensable to the world we live in. This book provides the first truly accessible and balanced account of how evolution has become a tool with applications that are thoroughly integrated, and deeply useful, in our everyday lives and our societies, often in ways that we do not realize. The Evolving World convinces us as never before that evolutionary biology has become absolutely necessary for human existence.

Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2007

Eyewitness to Science

John Carey

Science's most momentous discoveries come alive in 100 brilliant firsthand accounts.

Paperback 1997

Facing Up

Steven Weinberg

Each of these essays struggles in one way or another with the necessity of facing up to the discovery that the laws of nature are impersonal, with no hint of a special status for human beings. Defending the spirit of science against its cultural adversaries, these essays express a viewpoint that is reductionist, realist, and devoutly secular. Together, they afford the general reader the unique pleasure of experiencing the superb sense, understanding, and knowledge of one of the most interesting and forceful scientific minds of our era.

Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003

Fathoming the Ocean

Helen M. Rozwadowski

Foreword by Sylvia Earle

By the middle of the nineteenth century, as scientists explored the frontiers of polar regions and the atmosphere, the ocean remained silent and inaccessible. The history of how this changed--of how the depths became a scientific passion and a cultural obsession, an engineering challenge and a political attraction--is the story that unfolds in Fathoming the Ocean.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008

Flying Buttresses, Entropy, and O-Rings

James L. Adams

From Teflon to Velcro, from bandwidths to base pairs, the artifacts of engineering and technology reflect the broad scope--and frustrating limitations--of our imagination. Best-selling author James Adams takes readers on an enlightening tour of this exciting world, demystifying such endeavors as design, research, and manufacturing.

Hardcover 1992 / Paperback 1993

From Clockwork to Crapshoot

Roger G. Newton

In From Clockwork to Crapshoot, Roger Newton, whose previous works have been widely praised for erudition and accessibility, presents a history of physics from the early beginning to our day--with the associated mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry. His work identifies what may well be the defining characteristic of physics in the twenty-first century.

Hardcover 2007

Fruits and Plains

Philip J. Pauly

Plant engineering has a long history, and Pauly urges us to think of horticulturists as pioneer "biotechnologists," hacking their plants to create a landscape that reflects their ambitions and ideals. In telling the histories of Concord grapes and Japanese cherry trees, the problem of the prairie and the war on the Medfly, Pauly hopes to provide a new understanding of not only how horticulture shaped the vegetation around us, but how it influenced our experiences of the native, the naturalized, and the alien.

Hardcover 2008

Galileo's Glassworks

Eileen Reeves

Galileo and the Dutch telescope have long enjoyed a durable connection in the popular mind, transforming a rather modest middle-aged scholar into the icon of the Copernican Revolution. And yet the speed with which the telescope changed the course of Galileo's life and early modern astronomy obscures his actual delayed encounter with the instrument. This book considers the lapse between the telescope's 1608 creation in The Hague and Galileo's acquaintance with such news ten months later. Along the way, Reeves offers a revised chronology of Galileo's life in this critical period.

Hardcover 2008

Galileo's Pendulum

Roger G. Newton

The principle of the pendulum's swing marks a simple yet fundamental system in nature, one that ties the rhythm of time to the very existence of matter in the universe. Newton sets the stage for Galileo's discovery with a look at biorhythms in living organisms and at early calendars and clocks--contrivances of nature and culture that, however adequate in their time, did not meet the precise requirements of seventeenth-century science and navigation.

Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005

Gehennical Fire

William Newman

Reputed to have performed miraculous feats in New England--restoring the hair and teeth to an aged lady, bringing a withered peach tree to fruit--Eirenaeus Philalethes was also rumored to be an adept possessor of the alchemical philosophers' stone. That the man was merely a mythical creation didn't diminish his reputation a whit--his writings were spectacularly successful, read by Leibniz, esteemed by Newton and Boyle, voraciously consumed by countless readers. Gehennical Fire is the story of the man behind the myth, George Starkey.

Hardcover 1994

Genesis and Geology

Charles Gillispie

Nicolaas Rupke

First published in 1951, Genesis and Geology describes the background of social and theological ideas and the progress of scientific researches which, between them, produced the religious difficulties that afflicted the development of science in early industrial England.

Paperback 1996

The Ghost of the Executed Engineer

Loren Graham

Stalin ordered his execution, but here Peter Palchinsky has the last word. Palchinsky tells of Soviet technology and industry, the mistakes he condemned in his lifetime, the corruption and collapse he predicted, the ultimate price paid for silencing those who were not afraid to speak out. The story of this visionary engineer's life and work, as Graham tells it, is also the story of the Soviet Union's industrial promise and failure.

Paperback 1996 / Hardcover

Giant Telescopes

W. Patrick McCray

By focusing on the history of the Gemini Observatory--twin 8-meter telescopes located on mountain peaks in Hawaii and Chile--Giant Telescopes tells the story behind the planning and construction of modern scientific tools, offering a detailed view of the technological and political transformation of astronomy in the postwar era.

Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006

God's Universe

Owen Gingerich

Are the creative forces of our vast cosmos purposeful, and in fact divine? Professor Emeritus of Harvard's Department of Astronomy and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Owen Gingerich, argues that an individual can be both a creative scientist and a believer in divine design--that indeed the very motivation for scientific research can derive from a desire to trace God's handiwork. Gingerich carves out "a theistic space" from which it is possible to contemplate a universe where God plays an interactive role, unnoticed yet not excluded by science.

Hardcover 2006

The Gospel of Germs

Nancy Tomes

All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. Yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness.

Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 1999

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology

Jim Endersby

Hardcover 2007

The Harvard College Observatory

Bessie Zaban Jones

Lyle Gifford Boyd

Donald H. Menzel

The authors vividly portray the genesis, growth, and achievements of a major scientific institution and its relations with other observatories. Through the use of photographs and correspondence they also portray the men and women who played essential roles in the development of astronomy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hardcover 1971

Hippocrates, VIII, Places in Man. Glands. Fleshes. Prorrhetic 1-2. Physician. Use of Liquids. Ulcers. Haemorrhoids and Fistulas

Hippocrates

Paul Potter, Translator

This is the eighth volume in the Loeb Classical Library®'s edition of these invaluable texts which are essential sources of information about the practice of medicine in antiquity and about Greek theories concerning the human body. Paul Potter presents the Greek text and facing English translation for ten treatises that offer an illuminating overview of Hippocratic medicine.

Hardcover 1995

A History of Chemistry

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent

Isabelle Stengers

The authors of this history of chemistry--respected, prolific scholars in history and philosophy of science--have distilled their knowledge into an accessible work, free of jargon. They have written a book deeply enthusiastic about the conceptual, experimental, and technological complexities and challenges with which chemists have grappled over many centuries.

Hardcover 1996

A History of Japanese Astronomy

Shigeru Nakayama

This first comprehensive history in a Western language of the development of Japanese astronomy has interest beyond its immediate subject area, for astronomy has often been the focus of the transmission of a wide range of scientific ideas from one culture to another. Mr. Nakayama explains the historical background, with particular emphasis on the accessibility of foreign ideas at different times. The author thoroughly examines the superimposition of Western cosmology on the radically different Chinese modes of thought prevalent in Japan.

Hardcover 1969

A History of Molecular Biology

Michel Morange

Matthew Cobb, Translator

This book offers a concise account for a general readership of the history of molecular biology. Michel Morange, himself a molecular biologist, takes us from the turn-of-the-century convergence of molecular biology's two progenitors, genetics and biochemistry, to the perfection of gene splicing and cloning techniques in the 1980s.

Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000

The History of Pain

Roselyne Rey

Louise Elliott Wallace, Translator

J. A. Cadden, Translator

S.W. Cadden, Translator

In The History of Pain, Roselyne Rey draws on multidisciplinary sources to explore this universally shared experience. From classical antiquity to the twentieth century, she contrasts the different cultural perceptions of pain in each period, as well as the medical theories advanced to explain its mechanisms, and the various therapeutic remedies formulated to relieve those suffering from it.

Paperback 1998 / Hardcover

Hydrogen

John S. Rigden

In this biography of hydrogen, John Rigden shows how this singular atom, the most abundant in the universe, has helped unify our understanding of the material world from the smallest scale, the elementary particles, to the largest, the universe itself. It is a tale of startling discoveries and dazzling practical benefits spanning more than one hundred years--from the first attempt to identify the basic building block of atoms in the mid-nineteenth century to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate only a few years ago.

Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2003

Ice Ages

John Imbrie

Katherine Palmer Imbrie

This book tells the exciting story of the ice ages--what they were like, why they occurred, and when the next one is due. The solution to the ice age mystery originated when the National Science Foundation organized the CLIMAP project to study changes in the earth's climate over the past 700,000 years. One of the goals was to produce a map of the earth during the last ice age. Scientists examined cores of sediment from the Indian Ocean bed and deciphered a continuous history for the past 500,000 years. Their work ultimately confirmed the theory that the earth's irregular orbital motions account for the bizarre climatic changes which bring on ice ages.

Paperback

Imperial Ecology

Peder Anker

From 1895 to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Anker asks why ecology expanded so rapidly and how a handful of influential scientists and politicians established a tripartite ecology of nature, knowledge, and society.

Hardcover 2002

In Pursuit of the Gene

James Schwartz

Schwartz presents the history of genetics through the eyes of a dozen or so central players, beginning with Charles Darwin and ending with Nobel laureate Hermann J. Muller. This book offers readers the background they need to understand the latest findings in genetics and those still to come in the search for the genetic basis of complex diseases and traits.

Hardcover 2008

Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

I. Bernard Cohen

Hardcover 1972

Ivory Diptych Sundials, 1570-1750

Steven Lloyd

Penelope Gouk

A. J. Turner

Hardcover 1992

Kant and the Exact Sciences

Michael Friedman

Kant sought throughout his life to provide a philosophy adequate to the sciences of his time--especially Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics. In this new book, Michael Friedman argues that Kant's continuing efforts to find a metaphysics that could provide a foundation for the sciences is of the utmost importance in understanding the development of his philosophical thought.

Hardcover 1992 / Paperback 1998

Keywords in Evolutionary Biology

Evelyn Fox Keller, Editor

Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Editor

Paperback 1998 / Hardcover

Laws of Men and Laws of Nature

Tal Golan

Are scientific expert witnesses partisans, or spokesmen for objective science? This ambiguity has troubled the relations between scientists and the legal system for more than 200 years. With deep learning and wry humor, Tal Golan tells stories of courtroom drama and confusion and media jeering on both sides of the Atlantic, until the start of the twenty-first century, as the courts still search for ways that will allow them to distinguish between good and bad science.

Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2007

Linnaeus

Lisbet Koerner

Drawing on letters, poems, notebooks, and secret diaries, Lisbet Koerner tells the moving story of one of the most famous naturalists who ever lived, the Swedish-born botanist and systematizer, Carl Linnaeus. The first scholarly biography of this great Enlightenment scientist in almost one hundred years, Linnaeus also recounts for the first time Linnaeus' grand and bizarre economic projects: to "teach" tea, saffron, and rice to grow on the Arctic tundra and to domesticate buffaloes, guinea pigs, and elks as Swedish farm animals. Koerner's narrative goes against the grain of Linnaean scholarship old and new by analyzing not how modern Linnaeus was, but how he understood science in his time.

Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001

Made to Break

Giles Slade

Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2007

Making Sex

Thomas Laqueur

Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Thomas Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice; and Making Sex tells the astonishing story of sex in the vest from the ancients to the moderns. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Laqueur's story--the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm--but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe.

Hardcover 1990 / Paperback 1992

The Man Who Invented the Chromosome

Oren Solomon Harman

Harman follows Darlington's path from bleak prospects to world fame, showing how, within the most miniscule of worlds, he sought answers to the biggest questions--how species originate, how variation occurs, how Nature makes her way from deep past to unknown future. But Darlington did not stop there: Chromosomes held within their tiny confines untold, dark truths about man and his culture. This passionate conviction led the once famed Darlington down a path of rebuke, isolation, and finally obscurity.

Hardcover 2004

Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov on the Corpuscular Theory

Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov

Hardcover 1970

The Mind Has No Sex?

Londa Schiebinger

Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1991

Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons

Peter J. Bowler

Bowler doesn't minimize the hostility of many of the faithful toward evolution, but he reveals the less well-known existence of a long tradition within the churches that sought to reconcile Christian beliefs with evolution by finding reflections of the divine in scientific explanations for the origin of life. By tracing the historical forerunners of these rival Christian responses, Bowler provides a valuable alternative to accounts that stress only the escalating confrontation.

Hardcover 2007

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders

James Delbourgo

In this compelling book, James Delbourgo traces the path of electricity through early American culture, exploring the relationship between human, natural, and divine powers in the eighteenth century. By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, showmen, preachers, and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of terror and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment.

Hardcover 2006

Mystery of Mysteries

Michael Ruse

Mystery of Mysteries is an enlightening inquiry into the nature of science, using evolutionary theory as a case study. Beginning with Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and ending with the work of the English game theorist Geoffrey Parker--a microevolutionist who studied mating strategies of dung flies--and the American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, whose computer-generated models reconstruct mass extinctions and other macro events in life's history, Ruse explicates the role of metaphor and metavalues in evolutionary thought and draws significant conclusions about the cultural impregnation of science.

Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001

The National Labs

Peter J. Westwick

The national laboratories have occupied a central place in the landscape of American science for more than fifty years. Deeply researched and lucidly written, The National Labs is the first book to trace the confluence of diverse interests that created and sustained this extensive enterprise. Westwick takes us from the origins of the labs in the Manhattan Project to their role in building the hydrogen bomb, nuclear power reactors, and high-energy accelerators, to their subsequent entry into such fields as computers, meteorology, space science, molecular biology, environmental science, and alternative energy sources.

Hardcover 2003

Nature Lost?

Frederic Gregory

Gregory shows that the loss of nature from theological discourse is only one reflection of the larger cultural change that marks the transition of European society from a nineteenth century to a twentieth-century mentality. Employing different understandings of the concept of truth as investigative tools, the author depicts varying theological responses to the growth of natural science in the nineteenth century.

Hardcover 1992

Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist

Russell McCormmach

Hardcover 1982 / Paperback 1991

The North American Grasshoppers, Volume II, Acrididae

Daniel Otte

Having received such lavish praise for the first volume of his definitive taxonomic handbook, Daniel Otte now turns his attention to the bandwing grasshoppers. Like its predecessor, this volume will be useful to scientists in agriculture, environmental assessment, biogeography, grassland ecology, and insect taxonomy. It will also appeal to amateur naturalists.

Hardcover 1985

Nuclear Fear

Spencer R. Weart

Hardcover 1988 / Paperback

Of Flies, Mice, and Men

François Jacob

Giselle Weiss, Translator

Nobel Prize-winning geneticist François Jacob walks us through the surprising ways of science in this century, particularly the science of biology. Animated with anecdotes from Greek mythology, literature, episodes from the history of science, and personal experience, Of Flies, Mice, and Men tells the story of how the marvelous discoveries of molecular and developmental biology are transforming our understanding of who we are and where we came from.

Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001

On Their Own Terms

Benjamin A. Elman

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.

Hardcover 2005

On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin

This, the most interesting and helpful edition of Darwin's major work, is now available in an inexpensive paperback edition. It is written with a clarity, forcefulness, and conciseness not found in any subsequent revision. For modem reading and for reference, it is the standard edition of Darwin's greatest work

Paperback

One Long Argument

Ernst Mayr

Who could elucidate the subtitles of Darwin's thought and that of his contemporaries and intellectual heirs--A.R. Wallace, T.H. Huxley, August Weisman, Asa Gray--better then Ernst Mayr, a man considered by many to be the greatest evolutionist of the twentieth century? In this gem of historical scholarship, Mayr has achieved a remarkable distillation of Charles Darwin's scientific thought and his enormous legacy to twentieth-century biology.

Hardcover 1991 / Paperback

One of Us

Alice Domurat Dreger

One of Us views conjoined twinning and other "abnormalities" from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics. This deeply thought-provoking and compassionate work exposes the extent of the social frame upon which we construct the "normal."

Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005

Partners in Science

James Watt

Joseph Black

The close friendship that grew up between Dr. Joseph Black, the discoverer of specific and latent heats, and James Watt, the scientific instrument maker who was destined to become perhaps the greatest engineer of all time, is in itself a dramatic relationship, not before fully appreciated, Here for the first time is the full text of all their surviving correspondence, known only fragmentarily before in J. P. Muirhead's Life and Mechanical Inventions of James Watt, and there rather freely amended by the editor. In addition, Watt's notebook on his experiments on heat, known before only through quotation, is presented complete. This is a primary source of first-rate importance to the historian of science.

Hardcover 1969

The Pasteurization of France

Bruno Latour

Alan Sheridan, Translator

John Law, Translator

Hardcover 1988 / Paperback

The Physicists

Daniel Kevles

This magnificent account of the coming of age of physics in America has been heralded as the best introduction to the history of science in the United States. Unsurpassed in its breadth and literary style, Kevles's account portrays the brilliant scientists who became a powerful force in bringing the world into a revolutionary new era.

Paperback

Pierre Simon Laplace, 1749-1827

Roger Hahn

Often referred to as the Newton of France, Pierre Simon Laplace has been called the greatest scientist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this compact biography, Hahn illuminates the man in his historical setting. Elegantly written, Pierre Simon Laplace reflects a lifetime of thinking and research by a distinguished historian of science on the fortunes of a singularly important figure in the annals of Enlightenment science.

Hardcover 2005

Plants and Empire

Londa Schiebinger

In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Plants and Empire explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.

Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2007

The Platypus and the Mermaid

Harriet Ritvo

This thoroughly absorbing book on taxonomy captures the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing. As she depicts a complex of competing groups--naturalists and zoologists, farmers and showmen, butchers and artists--deploying rival schemes to impose order on nature, Harriet Ritvo offers a new perspective on the constantly shifting, ever suggestive interactions of scientific lore, cultural ideas, and popular imagination.

Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998

Practical Matter

Margaret C. Jacob

Larry Stewart

Jacob and Stewart examine the profound transformation that began in 1687. From the year when Newton published his Principia to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually became central to Western thought and economic development. The book aims at a general audience and examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006

Racial Hygiene

Robert Proctor

Scholars exploring the history of science under the Nazis have generally concentrated on the Nazi destruction of science or the corruption of intellectual and liberal values. Racial Hygiene focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Robert Proctor demonstrates that the common picture of a passive scientific community coerced into cooperation with the Nazis fails to grasp the reality of what actually happened--namely, that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.

Paperback

The Radio Noise Spectrum

Edited by Donald H. Menzel

This book deals with the important problem of radio noise, its sources, whether manmade or natural, over the known range of frequencies. Certain of these contributions will interest the communicator, enabling him to estimate the potential interference from various types of sources. Other contributions deal mainly with scientific problems, such as the origins and significance of certain characteristic noise radiations.

Hardcover 1960

Resources under Regimes

Paul R. Josephson

Democratic or authoritarian, every society needs clean air and water; every state must manage its wildlife and natural resources. In this provocative, comparative study, Josephson asks to what extent the form of a government and its economy--centrally planned or market, colonial or post-colonial--determines how politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, engineers, and industrialists address environmental and social problems presented by the transformation of nature into a humanized landscape.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006

Restoring the Balance

Ellen S. More

Drawing on rich archival sources and her own extensive interviews with women physicians, Ellen More shows how the Victorian ideal of balance informed and influenced the practice of healing for women doctors in America over the past 150 years. Restoring the Balance demonstrates that women doctors--collectively and individually--sought to balance the distinctive interests and culture of women against the claims of disinterestedness, scientific objectivity, and specialization of modern medical professionalism.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001

Revolution in Science

I. Bernard Cohen

Cohen's exploration seeks to uncover nothing less than the nature of all scientific revolutions, the stages by which they occur, their time scale, specific criteria for determining whether or not there has been a revolution, and the creative factors in producing a revolutionary new idea. His book is a probing analysis of the history of an idea and one of the most impressive surveys of the history of science ever undertaken.

Hardcover 1985 / Paperback 1987

Science and Anti-Science

Gerald Holton

Paperback 1998 / Hardcover

Science and Technology in Post-Mao China

Denis Fred Simon, Editor

Merle Goldman, Editor

Paperback 1988

Science and the Soviet Social Order

Loren Graham, Editor

Hardcover

Science in Traditional China

Joseph Needham

Hardcover 1981 / Paperback

Scientists in Power

Spencer R. Weart

Spencer Weart tells the astonishing story of how a few individuals at laboratory benches unleashed a power that has transformed our world. Weart's riveting account of the origins of nuclear energy follows developments from Marie Curie's experiments with radium to the late 1940s when her son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, launched France's atomic energy program, opening the age of nuclear arms proliferation.

Hardcover 1979

Simplicity and Complexity in Games of the Intellect

Lawrence Slobodkin

Lawrence Slobodkin takes us on a spirited quest for the multiple meanings of simplicity in all facets of life. Slobodkin proposes that the best intellectual work is done as if it were a game on a simplified playing field. He supplies serious arguments for considering the role of simplification and playfulness in all of our activities. The immediate effect of his unfailingly captivating essay is to throw open a new window on the world and to refresh our perspectives on matters of the heart and mind.

Hardcover 1992 / Paperback 1993

Source Book in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1900-1975

Owen Gingerich

Kenneth Lang

Hardcover 1979

A Source Book in Chemistry, 1400-1900

Edited by Henry M. Leicester

Edited by Herbert S. Klickstein

Hardcover

A Source Book in Chemistry, 1900-1950

Henry M. Leicester, Editor

The Source Book serves as an introduction to present-day chemistry and can also be used as supplementary reading in general chemistry courses, since, in many instances, the papers explain the circumstances under which a particular discovery was made--information that is customarily lacking in textbooks. Although the selections are classified into the usual branches of the science, it will be apparent to the reader how the discoveries in any one branch were taken up and incorporated into others.

Hardcover 1968

Sparks of Life

James E. Strick

How, asks James E. Strick, could spontaneous generation--the idea that living things can suddenly arise from nonliving materials--come to take root for a time (even a brief one) in so thoroughly unsuitable a field as British natural theology? No less an authority than Aristotle claimed that cases of spontaneous generation were to be observed in nature, and the idea held sway for centuries. Beginning around the time of the Scientific Revolution, however, the doctrine was increasingly challenged; attempts to prove or disprove it led to important breakthroughs in experimental design and laboratory techniques, most notably sterilization methods, that became the cornerstones of modern microbiology and sped the ascendancy of the germ theory of disease.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002

Statistics on the Table

Stephen M. Stigler

This lively collection of essays examines statistical ideas with an ironic eye for their essence and what their history can tell us for current disputes. The topics range from seventeenth-century medicine and the circulation of blood, to the cause of the Great Depression and the effect of the California gold discoveries of 1848 upon price levels, to the determinations of the shape of the Earth and the speed of light, to the meter of Virgil's poetry and the prediction of the Second Coming of Christ.

Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2002

The Sun in the Church

J. L. Heilbron

Between 1650 and 1750, four Catholic churches were the best solar observatories in the world. Built to fix an unquestionable date for Easter, they also housed instruments that threw light on the disputed geometry of the solar system, and so, within sight of the altar, subverted Church doctrine about the order of the universe. A tale of politically canny astronomers and cardinals with a taste for mathematics, The Sun in the Church tells how these observatories came to be, how they worked, and what they accomplished, providing a magnificent corrective to long-standing oversimplified accounts of the hostility between science and religion.

Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001

Supercontinent

Ted Nield

This book explores the the Supercontinent cycle, a geological cycle so vast that our species will probably be extinct long before the current one ends. And yet this cycle, the grandest pattern in Nature, may well be the fundamental reason any complex life at all exists. Nield introduces readers to some of the most exciting science of our time, describing how geologists first guessed at these vanishing landmasses and came to appreciate the significance of the fusing and fragmenting of supercontinents.

Hardcover 2007

Sustaining the Earth

John Young

Environmental issues, once the benign hobby of the few, have become everybody's urgent concern. Young maintains that only a powerful synthesis of political, economic, and moral ideologies--a unification he terms postenvironmentalism--will move world societies into a relation to the environment that maintains the best democratic values. Young offers an alternative perspective that is essential reading for all who care about our world.

Hardcover 1990 / Paperback 1992

Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought

Gerald Holton

Paperback 1988

This Is Biology

Ernst Mayr

An eyewitness to this century's relentless biological advance and the originator of some of its most important concepts, Ernst Mayr is uniquely qualified to offer a vision of science that places biology firmly at the center, and a vision of biology that restores the primacy of holistic, evolutionary thinking. Both as an overview of the life sciences and as the culmination of a remarkable life in science, This Is Biology will richly reward professionals and general readers alike.

Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Stephen Jay Gould

Hardcover 1987 / Paperback

The Trouble with Science

Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar asks whether science really is unique to Western culture, even to humankind. He suggests that our "trouble with science" may lie in the fact that evolution has left our minds better able to cope with day-to-day social interaction than with the complexities of the external world.

Paperback 1996

The Unnatural Nature of Science

Lewis Wolpert

In this entertaining and provocative book, Wolpert draws on the entire history of science, from Thales of Miletus to Watson and Crick, from the study of eugenics to the discovery of the double helix. The result is a scientist's view of the culture of science, authoritative and informed and at the same time mercifully accessible to those who find cohabiting with this culture a puzzling experience.

Paperback 1998 / Hardcover

Value-Free Science?

Robert Proctor

Value-Free Science? emphasizes the importance of understanding the political origins and impact of scientific ideas. Proctor lucidly demonstrates how value-neutrality is a reaction to larger political developments, including the use of science by government and industry, the specialization of professional disciplines, and the efforts to stifle intellectual freedoms or to politicize the world of the academy. This provocative book will interest anyone seeking ways to reconcile the ideals of scientific freedom and social responsibility.

Hardcover 1991

Very Special Relativity

Sander Bais

Bais's previous book, The Equations, was widely read and roundly praised for its clear and commonsense explanation of the math in physics. Very Special Relativity brings the same accessible approach to Einstein's theory. Using a series of easy-to-follow diagrams and employing only elementary high school geometry, Bais conducts readers through the quirks and quandaries of such fundamental concepts as simultaneity, causality, and time dilation.

Hardcover 2007

Victory and Vexation in Science

Gerald Holton

This book shows why, at any given time--even in the mature phase of science--there exists no single "paradigm," but rather a spectrum of competing perspectives. Whether considering conflicts between Heisenberg and Einstein, Bohr and Einstein, or P. W. Bridgman and B. F. Skinner; tracing I. I. Rabi's shift of attention from superb science to education and scientific statesmanship--in each case, Holton demonstrates a masterly understanding of modern science and how it influences our world.

Hardcover 2005

Walter B. Cannon, Science and Society

Elin L. Wolfe

A. Clifford Barger

Saul Benison

This second volume completes the story begun in Walter B. Cannon: The Life and Times of a Young Scientist, tracing the middle and late years of one of America's most distinguished medical scientists. This volume also recounts Cannon's work with society on a broader scale, including defending the practice of animal experimentation, the rescue of European medical émigrés fleeing the Nazis and Fascists, and providing medical aid to the Spanish Loyalists and to China. Moreover, as a senior statesman of science, Cannon helped guide policies and programs that shaped the future of medical research, practice, and education.

Hardcover 2000