On January 5, 1845, the Prussian cultural minister received a request by a group of six young men to form a new Physical Society in Berlin. In fields from thermodynamics, mechanics, and electromagnetism to animal electricity, ophthalmology, and psychophysics, members of this small but growing group—which soon included Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke, Werner Siemens, and Hermann von Helmholtz—established leading positions in what only thirty years later had become a new landscape of natural science. How was this possible? How could a bunch of twenty-somethings succeed in seizing the future?
 
In Aesthetics, Industry, and Science M. Norton Wise answers these questions not simply from a technical perspective of theories and practices but with a broader cultural view of what was happening in Berlin at the time. He emphasizes in particular how rapid industrial development, military modernization, and the neoclassical aesthetics of contemporary art informed the ways in which these young men thought. Wise argues that aesthetic sensibility and material aspiration in this period were intimately linked, and he uses these two themes for a final reappraisal of Helmholtz’s early work. Anyone interested in modern German cultural history, or the history of nineteenth-century German science, will be drawn to this landmark book.

Selected by 50 notable astronomers from the major sub-fields of the discipline, the articles assembled in this special AAS Centennial collection are accompanied by commentary that provides the scientific-historical context essential to comprehending each article's original impact. Many commentators were contemporaries of the original authors and provide first-person accounts of papers published in the journals—and the earliest reactions they evoked. Arranged in chronological order of publication, these classic papers include works by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, George E. Hale, Fred Hoyle, Edwin Hubble, A.A. Michelson, Henry Norris Russell, Arthur Achuster, Harlow Shapley, and others. Together the articles and commentaries provide a historical window into twentieth-century astronomy and how the results were achieved.

This is a new translation, with introduction, commentary, and an explanatory glossary.

"Sachs's translation and commentary rescue Aristotle's text from the rigid, pedantic, and misleading versions that have until now obscured his thought. Thanks to Sachs's superb guidance, the Physics comes alive as a profound dialectical inquiry whose insights into the enduring questions about nature, cause, change, time, and the 'infinite' are still pertinent today. Using such guided studies in class has been exhilarating both for myself and my students."  ––Leon R. Kass, The Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago 

Aristotle’s Physics is the only complete and coherent  book we have from the ancient world in which a thinker of the first rank seeks to say something about nature as a whole. For centuries, Aristotle’s inquiry into the causes and conditions of motion and rest dominated science and philosophy. To understand the intellectual assumptions of a powerful world view—and the roots of the Scientific Revolution—reading Aristotle is critical. Yet existing translations of Aristotle’s Physics have made it difficult to understand either Aristotle’s originality or the lasting value of his work.

In this volume in the Masterworks of Discovery series, Joe Sachs provides a new plain-spoken English translation of all of Aristotle’s classic treatise and accompanies it with a long interpretive introduction, a running explication of the text, and a helpful glossary. He succeeds brilliantly in fulfilling the aim of this innovative series: to give the general reader the tools to read and understand a masterwork of scientific discovery. 

In this absorbing account of life with the great atomic scientist Enrico Fermi, Laura Fermi tells the story of their emigration to the United States in the 1930s—part of the widespread movement of scientists from Europe to the New World that was so important to the development of the first atomic bomb. Combining intellectual biography and social history, Laura Fermi traces her husband's career from his childhood, when he taught himself physics, through his rise in the Italian university system concurrent with the rise of fascism, to his receipt of the Nobel Prize, which offered a perfect opportunity to flee the country without arousing official suspicion, and his odyssey to the United States.

 

"I am confident [this book] will become the aurora watcher's bible for many years to come." (Sky & Telescope)

"This is participatory science at its best!" (Midwest Book Review)

"A delightful book, highly recommended." (CHOICE )

"A complete course for the layman with an interest in the northern lights." (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner)

"[Davis] has written the book in a smooth, how-it-works style, and his presentation is remarkably clear. . . . [He] expended much effort on this book, forming from his lifetime of knowledge a coherent and comprehensible picture of the aurora for the non-specialist." (ARCTIC)

"For a comprehensive guide to the northern lights, read Neil Davis's The Aurora." (Small Press Magazine)