Slightly off-mint

Off-mint.

John Henry discusses how the 16th-century astronomer Copernicus not only disproved the ‘common-sense’ view that the Earth was stationary but also showed what mathematics can reveal about the material world, setting in motion the development of a completely new physics.

This survey of the ancient Greek scientific tradition introduces pioneering figures, including Archimedes, Aristotle and the Hippocratic doctors, and explains the theories with which they developed a rational attitude to the natural world.

In this sequel to Elephants on Acid Alex Boese delves once more into the world of mad scientists and weird experimentation, whether a 1950s project to nuke the moon or self-experimenters getting stung by 78 species of Hymenoptera for the sake of science.

‘Astrology and quantum physics rattling around in one Renaissance skull – who’d have thought?’ The skull belongs to Jerome Cardano (1501–76), physician, astrologer, gambler, inventor of probability theory and the creator of what is now known as the imaginary number. In this remarkable combination of biography, history of science and explanation of quantum theory, Brooks ‘talks’ with Cardano and reveals the 16th-century scientist as the unacknowledged discoverer of the mathematical foundations of quantum physics.

Each volume in this series uses a three-part approach to explain complex ideas. First the ‘helicopter overview’ introduces the concept, then the ‘shortcut’ gives more detail on core elements and the pithy ‘hack’ offers a memorable summary. In this guide to key scientific concepts theories in evolution, genetics and human origins are discussed, as are topics including thermodynamics and Newton’s laws, and hypotheses relating to space and astrophysics.

Napoleon envied his achievements and Darwin called him the ‘greatest scientific traveller who ever lived’, but the writings of Humboldt (1769–1859) are now largely forgotten. This award-winning biography follows the visionary scientist’s travels around the world and highlights the extent to which his ideas shaped our thinking about ecology, climate change and the natural world.

How and when did the world come into existence, where did people come from, and how will the world end? William Poole explores the interaction of the Bible and science as sources in the intellectual debates of late 17th-century England, and describes the emergence of the experimental natural philosophy that questioned the Genesis story.

Celebrating the remarkable Jewish accomplishment in mathematics and physics, Ioan James profiles 20 mathematicians and 15 physicists born after 1800. He tells the life stories of each man or woman, setting them in historical context, from the German mathematician Carl Jacobi (1804–1851), born in the ‘years of opportunity’ following the legal emancipation of Jews in Europe, to the Polish mathematical logician Alfred Tarski (1901–1983). Off-mint.

A science writer with a gift for making the complicated comprehensible, Anil Ananthaswamy tells the story of quantum mechanics from the perspective of the seemingly simple, but utterly confounding double-slit experiment. He traces the various attempts to explain the enigma, from Thomas Young in 1793 to Richard Feynman, who described ‘the experiment with two holes’ as containing ‘all the mystery of quantum mechanics‘.

In 1954 Professor John Heslop Harrison published his discovery of several plants on the island of Rum that were found nowhere else in Britain – they had, he claimed, survived the Ice Age. John Raven, a gifted amateur botanist, went to investigate and revealed Harrison’s claim as untrue, but academic botanists closed ranks and Raven’s report was never published. Karl Sabbagh tells the story of the two men and this strange episode of botanical fraud.

Jim Endersby explores ‘the curious and unexpected variety of significances that people have ascribed to orchids’ in western cultures, from Theophrastus’ herbals in ancient Greece to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, deadly species in science-fiction and ongoing research into Spider Orchids on the South Downs. The book looks at our relationship with orchids in terms of science, sex and death, and examines the theme of empire, describing how European imperial expansion and wealth stimulated the search for ever rarer orchids.

Arguing that British science would not have developed very differently without Newton, the authors demonstrate his indebtedness to the achievements of his contemporaries, in particular Hooke, from whom he ‘borrowed’ many ideas, and Halley, who encouraged and paid for the publication of the Principia.

John Henry assesses Francis Bacon’s ineluctable influence on the methodology, content and organization of science both in his own time and now, revealing how Bacon’s fascination with bureaucracy, magic and religion inspired his best-known works, including The New Organon.

Histories of Western science often begin their narrative with Galileo’s battle to gain acceptance for Copernicus’ heliocentric model. But physicist John Freely sets out ‘to right this historical injustice’ by showing how a succession of European scholars as far back as the Dark Ages paved the way for the exciting discoveries of later centuries. Discussing the influential work of such figures as the Venerable Bede and Albertus Magnus, he identifies those ‘giants’ on whose shoulders Newton said he was standing.

John Gribbin tells the story of how, in the 17th century, amid civil war, plague and fire, a group of ‘natural philosophers’ – Gilbert, Bacon, Harvey, Wren, Newton and Hooke – began a scientific revolution.

Thomas Levenson tells the all-but-forgotten story of Isaac Newton, Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier and the search for the planet Vulcan, and how Albert Einstein proved that it did not exist and went on to discover relativity.

On learning that her father, Howard Thrasher, once photographed Aldous Huxley’s hands, Symons set out to discover how the two men’s paths had crossed. Here she reveals what she learned from conversations with her father and from a cache of letters: how Huxley’s eclectic circle undertook pioneering experiments into the healing potential of psychedelic drugs, because of their belief in the importance of visionary, mystical experience and their hope that this research would benefit humankind.

When black holes collide, vast amounts of energy are emitted in the form of gravitational waves. Einstein predicted the existence of such waves in 1916, but not until a century later was it possible to create instruments of sufficient sensitivity to detect them from Earth. Reporting her own conversations with her fellow-astrophysicists, Levin’s lyrical, humorous account of this decades-long quest captures their ambitions and obsessions, struggles and disappointments as they endeavour to measure subtle shifts in the shape of spacetime. American-cut pages and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Patricia Fara follows the evangelists of the new science of electricity, including Benjamin Franklin and Luigi Galvani, and the ideas their demonstrations sparked in the popular culture of the 18th century.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is best known as Germany’s foremost poet and playwright, but he was also an accomplished all-round scientist, studying anatomy, geology, botany, zoology and colour theory. The extracts from his scientific writings reproduced in this book illustrate his belief that we should study our world as people at home in it rather than remotely, and are essential reading for anyone who feels we have lost our spiritual connection to nature.

The period between the European Renaissance and Enlightenment brought monumental scientific discoveries about gravity, the structure of the solar system and the circulation of the blood, but these coexisted with an almost universal belief in horoscopes and magic. In this book a Tudor historian explores how the great thinkers of the age responded to the entanglement of superstition and science, and shows how their work contributed to debate about the relationship between belief and knowledge.

The physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was one of the ‘great men’ to emerge from the Scottish Enlightenment. Although prompted by Clerk Maxwell’s achievement, this study goes beyond his life to examine the family he emerged from and its wider connections. Covering the period following the religious and political turmoil of the 17th century, John Arthur explores how Scottish families such as the Clerk Maxwells and their associates produced the brilliant Scots of the Enlightenment and the 19th century.

These 15 studies in the early development of geology include papers on Nicholas Desmarest, natural law in 18th-century geology and Buffon’s Époques de la Nature (1778).

This series introduces the texts that have helped shape Western civilization, every volume providing a detailed examination of the central ideas and arguments of a seminal text and discussion of its lasting significance.

After a history of butterfly collecting in Britain and a chapter on the methods of the early lepidopterists, this volume presents profiles of 101 collectors, from Thomas Moffet (1553–1604) to John Heath (1922–1987), each illustrated with a contemporary portrait. The ‘Aurelians’ are followed by a survey of some of the historically interesting species they collected, and a discussion of conservation and collecting. Finally, the book lists all British and Irish butterflies, with past and present common names.

Showing how new scientific discoveries were presented to Victorian children through 'fairy tales of science', Keene's study introduces 19th-century debates about education, scientific progress and the role of fantasy.

This first detailed study of the British Association for the Advancement of Science examines the history and geography of science and the science of geography in 19th- and early 20th-century Britain and the Empire.

Ioan James profiles 38 remarkable biologists from the last 400 years. While the emphasis is on their life stories rather than details of their achievements, read in sequence the biographies convey something of the way in which biology has developed.

With more than 1,200 entries on both prominent and lesser-known figures, this major reference work offers a biographically detailed overview of the development of British science in the 19th century. No jacket.