China and Albert Einstein is the first extensive study in English or Chinese of China’s reception of the celebrated physicist and his theory of relativity. Tracing the influence of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century and Western missionaries and educators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as they introduced key concepts of Western physical science and paved the way for Einstein’s radical new ideas, Danian Hu shows us that Chinese receptivity was fostered by the trickle of Chinese students sent abroad for study beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and by the openness of the May Fourth Movement (1916–1923).
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.
China and Albert Einstein is an important contribution to Einstein studies and a landmark work in the history of Chinese science.
Benjamin Thompson (later Count Rumford) aimed by his inventions and scientific research to increase the degree of comfort in daily life. His goals were practical and his contributions to our knowledge of the nature of heat proved extremely valuable. Between 1870 and 1875, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston published all of Rumford's papers that the Academy committee was able to find. The Academy edition, however, has long been out of print and practically unavailable. Here Sanborn Brown has rearranged the papers according to subject matter.
Volume I contains Rumford's papers on the nature of heat; the second covers its practical applications. This third volume contains his papers on devices and techniques, including “Use of Steam for Transporting Heat”; “Means of Heating the Hall of the (French) Institute”; “New Boiler for Saving Fuel”; “Steam Heat for Making Soap”; “Fires in Closed Fire-Places”; “Kitchen Fire-Places”; “Salubrity of Warm Rooms”; “Salubrity of Warm Bathing”; “The Strength of Silk”; “Quantities of Absorbed Moisture”; “Advantage of Wheels with Broad Felloes”; and “Proposals for Building a Frigate.”
Like his countryman and contemporary Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Thompson (later Count Rumford) aimed by his inventions and scientific research to increase the degree of comfort in daily life. During fourteen years spent in Munich, he made important reforms in the city's public service and social welfare institutions; he also introduced improvements in the hospitals and workhouses in Ireland, England, and Italy. His goals were practical, and his contributions to our knowledge of the nature of heat were as valuable as Franklin's to our knowledge of electricity. Rumford believed heat to be a form of energy, and worked to demolish the widely held material theory of heat.
Between 1870 and 1875 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston published Rumford's “complete” Works, financing the project with part of the increase of a fund that Rumford himself had given to the Academy in 1796. This edition presented, in order of their first appearance, all the papers that the Academy committee was able to find. The Academy edition has long been out of print and practically unavailable.
In this edition Sanborn Brown has rearranged the papers according to subject matter. Rumford's papers dealing with light and with armament are contained in this fourth volume. They include “Intensity of Light”; “Coloured Shadows”; “Harmony of Colors”; “Chemical Properties of Light”; “Management of Light”; “Source of Light in Combustion”; “Air from Water Exposed to Light”; “Description of a New Lamp”; “Experiments upon Gunpowder”; “Force of Fired Gunpowder”; and “Experiments with Cannon.”
An American of wide-ranging interests and overflowing energy, Benjamin Thompson applied his scientific and technical knowledge to the improvement of public service and welfare institutions in Bavaria (a service for which he was made Count Rumford), Ireland, England, and Italy. In the process, he made important discoveries in physics. In this new edition of Rumford’s Works, Sanborn Brown has arranged his writings according to subject matter: in this fifth volume are Rumford’s papers on public institutions: “Poor in Munich”; “Poor in All Countries”; “Feeding the Poor”; “Coffee”; “Public Institutions in Bavaria”; “Regulations for the Army of Bavaria”; “Public Institutions in Great Britain”; and “The Royal Institution.”
The Collected Works of Count Rumford is much more than a source book or a guide to methods of research in physics. It provides a unique portrait of the scientific, political, and social conditions of the turbulent early years of the Industrial Revolution.
An American of wide-ranging interests and overflowing energy, Benjamin Thompson applied his scientific and technical knowledge to the improvement of public service and welfare institutions in Bavaria (a service for which he was made Count Rumford), Ireland, England, and Italy. In the process, he made important discoveries in physics. In this new edition of Rumford's Works, Sanborn Brown has arranged his writings according to subject matter: this first volume contains his papers on the nature of heat, and includes one paper which has never before been published in English.
The volume begins with Rumford's paper on the production of heat by friction, and continues with descriptions of the experiments by which he showed that heat has no weight, and his essays on the propagation of heat in solids and fluids. Subsequent volumes contain papers on practical applications of heat, devices and techniques (including studies of fireplaces and chimneys), armament, light and color, and on such public establishments and organizations as poorhouses, the army of Bavaria, and the Royal Institution in London.
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes the effect of gravitation on the shape of space and the flow of time. But for more than four decades after its publication, the theory remained largely a curiosity for scientists; however accurate it seemed, Einstein’s mathematical code—represented by six interlocking equations—was one of the most difficult to crack in all of science. That is, until a twenty-nine-year-old Cambridge graduate solved the great riddle in 1963. Roy Kerr’s solution emerged coincidentally with the discovery of black holes that same year and provided fertile testing ground—at long last—for general relativity. Today, scientists routinely cite the Kerr solution, but even among specialists, few know the story of how Kerr cracked Einstein’s code.
Fulvio Melia here offers an eyewitness account of the events leading up to Kerr’s great discovery. Cracking the Einstein Code vividly describes how luminaries such as Karl Schwarzschild, David Hilbert, and Emmy Noether set the stage for the Kerr solution; how Kerr came to make his breakthrough; and how scientists such as Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, and Stephen Hawking used the accomplishment to refine and expand modern astronomy and physics. Today more than 300 million supermassive black holes are suspected of anchoring their host galaxies across the cosmos, and the Kerr solution is what astronomers and astrophysicists use to describe much of their behavior.
By unmasking the history behind the search for a real world solution to Einstein’s field equations, Melia offers a first-hand account of an important but untold story. Sometimes dramatic, often exhilarating, but always attuned to the human element, Cracking the Einstein Code is ultimately a showcase of how important science gets done.
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