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The Dancing Universe
From Creation Myths to the Big Bang
Marcelo Gleiser
Dartmouth College Press, 2005
Marcelo Gleiser refutes the notion that science and spirituality are irreconcilable. In The Dancing Universe, he traces mystical, philosophical, and scientific ideas about the cosmos through the past twenty-five centuries, from the ancient creation myths of numerous cultures to contemporary theories about an ever-expanding universe. He also explores the lives and ideas of history’s greatest scientists, including Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. By exploring how scientists have unlocked the secrets of gravity, matter, time, and space, Gleiser offers fresh perspective on the debate between science and faith.
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Darney's Circuit Theory and Modelling
Updated and extended for EMC/EMI
Ian B. Darney
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024
The equipotential earth is a fundamental requirement of circuit theory, because it dramatically reduces the complexity of the mathematics required to simulate a circuit. Unfortunately, in the real world, no such equipotential earth exists, nor can it ever do so, which means simulating a circuit to evaluate its electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and susceptibility to electromagnetic interference (EMI) is largely dependent on using the Maxwell equations. The Maxwell equations are inherently complex, however, and so have high processing power requirements and, as with all complex systems, there is a propensity to generate and magnify errors.
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Darwin Meets Einstein
On the Meaning of Science
Frans W. Saris
Amsterdam University Press, 2009

Why do humans engage in scientific research? For some, it’s simply a career. Others are drawn to science for its potential financial rewards. And still others do it out of competitiveness—to be the first in their field. But in Darwin Meets Einstein Frans W. Saris argues that in our postmodern times we have lost the meaning of science—that science is not about competition, nor about creating wealth, nor about the joy of discovery. Science is for survival—the survival of humans, the survival of life.

In this accessible collection of essays and columns, Saris brings together in conversation a number of great minds—Charles Darwin, Baruch Spinoza, Niko Tinbergen, Francis Bacon, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Franz Kafka, and Albert Einstein—to answer the question: why science? With selections like “Diary of a Physicist,” “The Scientific Life,” “The Mother of All Knowledge,” and “Science Through the Looking Glass of Literature,” Darwin Meets Einstein will entertain its readers and ultimately encourage them to reconsider the meaning—and the purpose—of science.

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David Gorlæus (1591-1612)
An Enigmatic Figure in the History of Philosophy and Science
Christoph Lüthy
Amsterdam University Press, 2013
When David Gorlæus, a prospective theology student, passed away tragically at twenty-one years old, he left behind two highly innovative manuscripts, which were published posthumously in 1620 and 1651, respectively. As his identity was unknown, seventeenth-century readers understood him both as an anti-Aristotelian thinker and a precursor of Descartes. In contrast, by the twentieth century, historians depicted him as an atomist, natural scientist, and even a chemist. David Gorlæus (1591–1612) seeks to pull together what is known of this enigmatic figure. Combining multiple historical sources, Christoph Lüthy provides a narrative of Gorlæus’s life that casts light on his exceptional body of work and places it firmly at the intersection between philosophy, the nascent natural sciences, and theology.  
“Christoph Lüthy is the first to tell the complete story of David Gorlæus and to reconstruct his image on the basis of all remaining sources. Showing in a convincing way that Gorlæus is one of the key figures in the renewal of atomistic philosophy in the seventeenth century and a major influence on many philosophers that are much better known, he leaves us with the melancholy picture of someone who died too young to become one of the heroes of the scientific revolution.”—Theo Verbeek, Utrecht University
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The Demon in the Machine
How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life
Paul Davies
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Physics World Book of the Year

A Financial Times, Sunday Times, and Telegraph Best Science Book of the Year


What is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. Huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery.

In this penetrating and wide-ranging book, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name; it is a domain where biology, computing, logic, chemistry, quantum physics, and nanotechnology intersect. At the heart of these diverse fields, Davies explains, is the concept of information: a quantity which has the power to unify biology with physics, transform technology and medicine, and force us to fundamentally reconsider what it means to be alive—even illuminating the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.

From life’s murky origins to the microscopic engines that run the cells of our bodies, The Demon in the Machine journeys across an astounding landscape of cutting-edge science. Weaving together cancer and consciousness, two-headed worms and bird navigation, Davies reveals how biological organisms garner and process information to conjure order out of chaos, opening a window onto the secret of life itself.
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Descartes' Metaphysical Physics
Daniel Garber
University of Chicago Press, 1992
In this first book-length treatment of Descartes' important and influential natural philosophy, Daniel Garber is principally concerned with Descartes' accounts of matter and motion—the joint between Descartes' philosophical and scientific interests. These accounts constitute the point at which the metaphysical doctrines on God, the soul, and body, developed in writings like the Meditations, give rise to physical conclusions regarding atoms, vacua, and the laws that matter in motion must obey.

Garber achieves a philosophically rigorous reading of Descartes that is sensitive to the historical and intellectual context in which he wrote. What emerges is a novel view of this familiar figure, at once unexpected and truer to the historical Descartes.

The book begins with a discussion of Descartes' intellectual development and the larger project that frames his natural philosophy, the complete reform of all the sciences. After this introduction Garber thoroughly examines various aspects of Descartes' physics: the notion of body and its identification with extension; Descartes' rejection of the substantial forms of the scholastics; his relation to the atomistic tradition of atoms and the void; the concept of motion and the laws of motion, including Descartes' conservation principle, his laws of the persistence of motion, and his collision law; and the grounding of his laws in God.
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Diffraction of Electromagnetic Waves by Small Apertures
Applications to transmission, absorption, and scattering resonances
Young Ki Cho
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2024
This book deals with low-frequency diffraction characteristics of small aperture structures such as a narrow slit and a small hole and their periodic structures, with emphasis on the transmission maximum phenomena through those structures. A narrow slit structure in a conducting plane has been used as a simple model for a narrow slot planar antenna, for example, whereas a small hole structure has been widely used as an aperture-coupling element in a transmission cavity filter or a directional coupler in the microwave regime.
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The Dilemmas of an Upright Man
Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science, With a New Afterword
J. L. Heilbron
Harvard University Press, 2000

In this moving and eloquent portrait, John Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. With great understanding, he shows how Max Planck suffered morally and intellectually as his lifelong habit of service to his country and to physics was confronted by the realities of World War I and the brutalities of the Third Reich.

In an afterword written for this edition, Heilbron weighs the recurring questions among historians and scientists about the costs to others, and to Planck himself, of the painful choices he faced in attempting to build an “ark” to carry science and scientists through the storms of Nazism.

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Discovering Alvarez
Selected Works of Luis W. Alvarez with Commentary by His Students and Colleagues
Edited by Peter Trower
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Luis W. Alvarez has had a breathtakingly varied and important career of discovery, adventure, and invention. The winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on subatomic particles, Alvarez participated as a scientific observer of the Hiroshima bombing mission, formulated the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinctions, discovered the radioactivity of tritium, took x-rays of the Second Pyramid at Giza, designed the Berkeley proton linear accelerator, first observed fundamental particle resonances, created the variable-focus thin lens, analyzed the Kennedy assassination film, and invented the Ground Control Approach radar system for airplane landings, to name but a few of his experiences and accomplishments.

Discovering Alvarez collects articles by this innovative physicist, documenting his outstanding contributions. The articles, which span his career, are accompanied by a remarkable collection of commentary by the colleagues and students who worked closely with Alvarez on each project or discovery.
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Drawing Theories Apart
The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics
David Kaiser
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Winner of the 2007 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society.
 
Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics since the middle of the twentieth century. Introduced by the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) soon after World War II as a means of simplifying lengthy calculations in quantum electrodynamics, they soon gained adherents in many branches of the discipline. Yet as new physicists adopted the tiny line drawings, they also adapted the diagrams and introduced their own interpretations. Drawing Theories Apart traces how generations of young theorists learned to frame their research in terms of the diagrams—and how both the diagrams and their users were molded in the process.

Drawing on rich archival materials, interviews, and more than five hundred scientific articles from the period, Drawing Theories Apart uses the Feynman diagrams as a means to explore the development of American postwar physics. By focusing on the ways young physicists learned new calculational skills, David Kaiser frames his story around the crafting and stabilizing of the basic tools in the physicist's kit—thus offering the first book to follow the diagrams once they left Feynman's hands and entered the physics vernacular.
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Drift and Mastery
An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
Walter Lippmann, Introduction and notes by William E. Leuchtenburg, Foreword by Ganesh Sitaraman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
In 1914, a brilliant young political journalist published a book arguing that the United States had entered a period of “drift”—a lack of control over rapidly changing forces in society. He highlighted the tensions between expansion and consolidation, traditionalism and progressivism, and emotion and rationality. He wrote to convince readers that they could balance these tensions: they could be organized, efficient, and functional without sacrificing impulse, choice, or liberty. Mastery over drift is attainable, Walter Lippmann argued, through diligent attention to facts and making active choices. Democracy, Lippman wrote, is “a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity.”
            Lippman’s Drift and Mastery became one of the most important and influential documents of the Progressive Movement. It remains a valuable text for understanding the political thought of early twentieth-century America and a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics. Distinguished historian Walter Leuchtenberg’s 1986 introduction and notes are retained in this edition.
            Ganesh Sitaraman, who has provided a foreword for this centennial edition, suggests that Lippmann’s classic still has much to say to twenty-first-century progressives. The underlying solutions for our time, he believes, are similar to those of Lippman’s era. Sitaraman contends that American society can regain mastery over drift by reforming finance and reducing inequality, by rethinking the relationship between corporations and workers, and by embracing changes in social life.
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Driving Force
The Natural Magic of Magnets
James D. Livingston
Harvard University Press, 1996

Driving Force unfolds the long and colorful history of magnets: how they guided (or misguided) Columbus; mesmerized eighteenth-century Paris but failed to fool Benjamin Franklin; lifted AC power over its rival, DC, despite all the animals, one human among them, executed along the way; led Einstein to the theory of relativity; helped defeat Hitler's U-boats; inspired writers from Plato to Dave Barry. In a way that will delight and instruct even the nonmathematical among us, James Livingston shows us how scientists today are creating magnets and superconductors that can levitate high-speed trains, produce images of our internal organs, steer high-energy particles in giant accelerators, and--last but not least--heat our morning coffee.

From the "new" science of materials to everyday technology, Driving Force makes the workings of magnets a matter of practical wonder. The book will inform and entertain technical and nontechnical readers alike and will give them a clearer sense of the force behind so much of the working world.

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