Bücher der Reihe Archimedes

This book, drawing on fresh scholarship, investigates electrification in new places and across different time periods. While much of our understanding of electrification as a historical process is based on the seminal work done by Thomas P. Hughes in Networks of Power (1983), the scholars in this volume expand and revise Hughes¿ systems approach to suggest that electrification is a heterogeneous and contingent process. Moreover, the contributors suggest that the conquest of the world by electricity remains incomplete despite more than a century elapsing. Above all, though, this book provides context for thinking about what lies ahead as humans continue their conquest of the earth through electricity. As we become increasingly dependent on electricity to power our lights, heat and cool our homes, turn the wheels of industry, and keep our information systems humming, so we are ever more vulnerable when the grid runs into trouble.Chapter "Surveying the Landscape: The Oil Industry and Alternative Energy in the 1970s" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Eclipses have long been seen as important celestial phenomena, whether as omens affecting the future of kingdoms, or as useful astronomical events to help in deriving essential parameters for theories of the motion of the moon and sun.

Presents a fresh and comprehensive picture of David Hilbert's intense, original, and influential involvement with physics, that spanned his career and that constituted a main focus of interest in his scientific horizon. This book is of interest to historians of physics and of mathematics, and to historically-minded physicists and mathematicians.

Viewed as a flashpoint of the Scientific Revolution, early modern astronomy witnessed a virtual explosion of ideas about the nature and structure of the world.

All technologies differ from one another. Jay David Bolter argues in Turing's Man that certain technologies in certain ages have had the power not only to transform society but also to shape the way in which people understand their relationship with the physical world.

Examines particular cases of 'reception' in ways that emphasize pressing historiographical and methodological issues. This book discusses the transfer of scientific ideas, the mechanisms of their introduction, and the processes of their appropriation at the periphery.

Historical accounts of successful laboratories often consist primarily of reminiscences by their directors and the eminent people who studied or worked in these laboratories. The second, The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874-1974, was published in 1974 to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Cavendish.

This book reconnects health and thought, as the two were treated together in the seventeenth century, and by reuniting them, it adds a significant dimension to our historical understanding. Indeed, there is hardly a single early modern figure who took a serious interest in one but not the other, with their attitudes toward body-mind interaction often revealed in acts of self-diagnosis and experimentation. The essays collected here specifically reveal the way experiment and especially self-experiment, combined with careful attention to the states of mind which accompany states of body, provide a new means of assessing attitudes to body-mind interactions just as they show the abiding interest and relevance of source material typically ignored by historians of science and historians of philosophy. In the surviving records of such experimenting on one¿s own body, we can observe leading figures like Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, deliberately setting out to repeat pleasurable, or intellectually productive moods and states of mind, by applying the same medicine on successive occasions. In this way we can witness theories of the working of the human mind being developed by key members of an urban culture (London; interregnum Oxford) who based those theories in part on their own regular, long-term use of self-administered, mind-altering substances. It is hardly an overstatement to claim that there was a significant drug culture in the early modern period linked to self-experimentation, new medicines, and the new science. This is one of the many things this volume has to teach us.

Deals with the Scientific Revolution, and the resistance encountered by new concepts. The book also looks at these new scientific concepts that rose out of several "centres" of European learning, the mechanisms of their introduction, and the processes of their appropriation at the periphery.

Historical accounts of successful laboratories often consist primarily of reminiscences by their directors and the eminent people who studied or worked in these laboratories. The second, The Cavendish Laboratory, 1874-1974, was published in 1974 to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Cavendish.

The contributions are based on papers presented at the workshop entitled "Reworking the Bench: Laboratory Notebooks in the History of Science", held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin or written after the workshop.

This volume contains essays that examine the optical works of Giambattista Della Porta, an Italian natural philosopher during the Scientific Revolution.

As Huygens applied his mathematical proficiency to practical issues pertaining to telescopes - including trying to design a perfect telescope by means of mathematical theory - his dioptrics is significant for our understanding of seventeenth-century relations between theory and practice.

Prolific instrument maker Rudolph Koenig built, in 19th century Paris, one of the more influential scientific workshops in the history of acoustics. This book provides a detail portrait of his vibrant atelier, a place of construction, commerce and experiment.

The articles in this first volume of ARCHIMEDES explicitly and intentionally cross boundaries between science and technology, and they also illuminate one another.

This book presents essays by eminent scholars from across the history of medicine, early science and European history, including those expert on the history of the book. Those with an interest in the history of science, the history of medicine and all related fields will find this work a stimulating and rewarding read.

For 100 years, the conceptual pair of Erklaren (explanation) and Verstehen (understanding) has fostered philosophical and methodological debates. This book considers these terms in historical context and systematically reviews the arguments they've inspired.

Why should mathematics, the purest of sciences, have a history? Medieval mathematicians took little interest in the history of their discipline. Yet in the Renaissance the history of mathematics flourished. This book explores how Renaissance scholars recovered and reconstructed the origins of mathematics.

In a detailed reconstruction of the genesis of Feynman diagrams, the author traces their development from the beginning, demonstrating that Feynman and Dyson not only created a powerful computational device but, above all, a new conceptual framework.

For 100 years, the conceptual pair of Erklaren (explanation) and Verstehen (understanding) has fostered philosophical and methodological debates. This book considers these terms in historical context and systematically reviews the arguments they've inspired.

Viewed as a flashpoint of the Scientific Revolution, early modern astronomy witnessed a virtual explosion of ideas about the nature and structure of the world.

Using Vinogradskii's career and scientific research trajectory as a point of entry, this book illustrates the manner in which microbiologists, chemists, botanists and plant physiologists inscribed the concept of a "cycle of life" into their investigations.

The eighteenth century has long been considered critical for the development of modern chemistry, yet many features of the period remain largely unknown or unexplored. Themes include late-phase alchemy, professionalization, chemical education, and the links and relations between chemistry and pharmacy, medicine, agriculture, and geology.

John Roche's brief essay (1987), in which he sketched the broad outlines of the history of this concept, was particularly helpful, and led us to conclude that the subject was worthy of monographic treatment.

Famed among physicists and astronomers for his anticipation of black holes, John Michell lived a double life-as a clergyman and an experimenting scientist. This, his first full biography, tells his story and includes a complete edition of his known letters.

Through recent volumes of the scientific letters and mathematical papers series of the Academy Edition scholars have obtained a much richer textual basis on which to conduct their studies - material which allows readers to see interconnections between his philosophical and mathematical ideas which have not previously been manifested.

This book examines the Lysenko controversy. It covers the interwar eugenics movement, the Scopes Trial, the popularity of Lamarckism as a theory of heredity prior to the synthesis of genetics and Natural Selection, and the Cold War.

This book represents a first considered attempt to study the factors that conditioned industrial chemistry for war in 1914-18. Taking a comparative perspective, it reflects on the experience of France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Britain, Italy and Russia, and points to significant similarities and differences.

The volume of his work, reaching from medicine to physiology to physics and epis- mology, his impact on the development of the sciences far beyond German borders, and the contribution he made to the organization and popularization of research, all established Helmholtz's prominence both in the academic world and in public cultural life.