History of science Books

Patterns resonate and reveal themselves in this unique photographic essay featuring objects from the six museums associated with the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture (HMSC). The museums' encyclopaedic collections hold great significance in...

Arranged in chronological order from the early Greek mathematicians, Euclid and Archimedes through to present-day Nobel Prize winners, 100 Science Discoveries That Changed the World charts the great breakthroughs in scientific understanding. Each entry...

For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these...

Universities have searched for truth over nearly a millennium. Maxwell Bennett recounts the history of this search during three of its most momentous periods in the 13th, 18th and 20th centuries, which helped fashion the idea of a university. He...

Witnessing a total solar eclipse is a wondrous and unforgettable event! Eclipse Chasers is a guide to past and future Australian total solar eclipses, exploring historical and cultural knowledge, as well as featuring five upcoming eclipses that will be...

Australia's coral reefs stretch far and wide, covering 50 000 square kilometres from the Indian Ocean in the West to the Pacific Ocean in the East. They have been viewed as a bedrock of coastal livelihoods, as uncharted and perilous nautical...

An in-depth and unified exploration of genius in the arts and sciences through the life and works of five seminal intellectual and cultural figures: Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Ludwig von Beethoven, and Albert Einstein.Who among...

An enthralling and accessible account of humanity’s quest to make sense of our physical world, told through interwoven tales of inspiration, tragedy, and triumph.How do the remarkable recent discoveries of the Higgs boson, dark matter, and dark energy...

From atoms and fluorescent pigments to sulfa drug synthesis and buckyballs, this lush and authoritative chronology presents 250 milestones in the world of chemistry. As the "central science" that bridges biology and physics, chemistry...

A new biography of Carl Linnaeus, offering a vivid portrait of Linnaeus's life and work.Carl Linnaeus (17071778), known as the father of modern biological taxonomy, formalised and popularised the system of binomial nomenclature used to classify plants...

Jung's lectures on the history of psychology-in English for the first timeBetween 1933 and 1941, C. G. Jung delivered a series of public lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Intended for a general audience, these...

How the Einsteinian revolution can be understood as the result of a long-term evolution of science.The revolution that emerged from Albert Einstein's work in the early twentieth century transformed our understanding of space, time, motion, gravity,...

More than ever before, radiation is a part of our modern daily lives. We own radiation-emitting phones, regularly get diagnostic x-rays, such as mammograms, and submit to full-body security scans at airports. We worry and debate about the proliferation...

A Selection of the Scientific American, History, and BOMC2 Book Clubs "An in-depth look at the anatomy and history of feet reveals their often overlooked importance in human evolution, medicine and art." -Science News "Stylish, informative, entertaining,...

A breathtakingly illustrated look at botanical spirals and the scientists who puzzled over them.Charles Darwin was driven to distraction by plant spirals, growing so exasperated that he once begged a friend to explain the mystery 'if you wish to...

Why evolution is like a network, not a family tree-and why it matters for understanding the health of all living thingsIn The Network of Life, David Mindell explains why the conventional narrative of evolution needs to evolve. Ever since Darwin,...

The strange and surprising history of the so-called epidemic of bad posture in modern America - from eugenics and posture pageants to today's promoters of 'paleo posture.'In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that...

How Romans coped with the anxieties and risks of childbirthAcross the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing...

A captivating exploration of the changing definitions of life in biologyBiological Motion studies the foundational relationship between motion and life. To answer the question, "What is Life?," prize-winning historian of science Janina Wellmann engages...

IsLemuria a real place or the fever dream ofcrackpots, mystics, conspiracy theorists, and Bigfoot hunters?Below the waters where the Pacific and Indian Oceans lies alost continent. One of hopes and dreams that housed a race of beings thatarrived from...

How climate change ushered in the collapse of one of history's mighty empiresIn 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China,...

Why is the scientific community so unified?In the last 350-odd years, the international 'scientific community' has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate...

Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. Distinguished scholar Amos Funkenstein explores the...

THE JOURNEY OF THE PIONEERS OF IMMUNOLOGY FROM SMALLPOX TO COVID-19In December 2019 a new virus emerged, one that caused a global pandemic. Millions were infected. In the recesses of their fragile bodies a battle raged: between the immune system and the...

The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs, mammoths, and other extinct animals influenced some of the most spectacular creatures of classical mythologyGriffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and Giants - these fabulous creatures of classical mythology...

What is life? This was a question of particular concern for Mary Shelley and her contemporaries. But how did she, and her fellow Romantic writers, incorporate this debate into their work, and how much were they influenced by contemporary science,...

Martin Lister, royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and molluscs.Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna...

The space race was perhaps the greatest technological contest of the 20th century. It was a thrilling era of innovation, discovery and exploration, as astronauts and cosmonauts were launched on space missions of increasing length, complexity and danger...

The emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences, as revealed through images in scientific atlases-a story of how lofty epistemic ideals fuse with workaday practices.Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In...

** Shortlisted, 2023 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award **Two Australian scientists played a vital yet largely unknown role in the Allied victory in the Second World War. Almost eight decades later, Wizards of Oz finally tells their story.In this...

Despite a facade of brilliant technological advances, American science has led humanity to the brink of interrelated disasters. In The Tragedy of American Science, historian of science Clifford D. Conner describes the dual processes by which this history...

Throughout the Roman Empire Cities held public speeches and lectures, had libraries, and teachers and professors in the sciences and the humanities, some subsidized by the state. There even existed something equivalent to universities, and medical and...

Black powder, the world's first chemical explosive, was originally developed in the seventh century, during China's Tang dynasty. It was a crude mixture at first, but over time chemists discovered the optimum proportion of sulfur, charcoal, and nitrates,...

Seeing Science offers an insightful and reader-friendly collection of essays and pictures about photography's role in visualizing science and building human knowledge-from micro to macro levels and everything in between.Photography and science have long...

This is the definitive book on the Hubble Space Telescope, written by noted astronomer Jim Bell.Looking deep into space, by definition, means looking back in time - and the Hubble Space Telescope can look very far back, including at stars, nebulae, and...

How the classic mirror test served as a portal for scientists to explore questions of self-awarenessSince the late eighteenth century, scientists have placed subjects-humans, infants, animals, and robots-in front of mirrors in order to look for signs of...

A century ago, thoughtful people questioned how reality could agree with physical theories that keep changing, from a mechanical model of the ether to electric and magnetic fields, and from homogeneous matter to electrons and atoms. Today, concepts like...

A translation of selected non-English texts included in Volume 16 is available in paperback. Since this supplementary paperback includes only select portions of Volume 16, it is not recommended for purchase without the main volume.Every document in The...

Among nature's most artful creations, shells have long inspired the curiosity and passion of artisans, artists, collectors, and thinkers. Conchophilia delves into the intimate relationship between shells and people, offering an unprecedented account of...

The Sky Is for Everyone is an internationally diverse collection of autobiographical essays by women who broke down barriers and changed the face of modern astronomy. Virginia Trimble and David Weintraub vividly describe how, before 1900, a woman who...

The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to China or the United States. Yet, this arid expanse was once a verdant, pleasant land, fed by rivers and lakes. The Sahara sustained abundant plant and animal life, such as Nile perch,...

As Featured on Wall Street Journal's Holiday Books Round-up Nature The enduring influence of naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt on American art, culture, and politics.Alexander von Humboldt (17691859) was one of the most influential...

The epic story of human evolution, from our primate beginnings more than five million years ago to the agricultural eraOver the course of five million years, our primate ancestors evolved from a modest population of sub-Saharan apes into the globally...

An authoritative interdisciplinary account of the historic discovery of gravitational waves.In 1915, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by the movement of large masses - as part of...

An entertaining mathematical exploration of the heat equation and its role in the triumphant development of the trans-Atlantic telegraph cableHeat, like gravity, shapes nearly every aspect of our world and universe, from how milk dissolves in coffee to...

Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought of an individual's period as useless, and some doctors still believe it's unsafe for a...

Leading scholars take stock of Darwin's ideas about human evolution in the light of modern science In 1871, Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, a companion to Origin of Species in which he attempted to explain human evolution, a topic...

How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two...