Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
At The Fringes Of Science
Download At The Fringes Of Science full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online At The Fringes Of Science ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis At The Fringes Of Science by : Michael W Friedlander
Download or read book At The Fringes Of Science written by Michael W Friedlander and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific discoveries are constantly in the news. Almost daily we hear about new and important breakthroughs. But sometimes it turns out that what was trumpeted as scientific truth is later discredited, or controversy may long swirl about some dramatic claim. What is a nonscientist to believe? Many books debunk pseudoscience, and some others present only the scientific consensus on any given issue. In At the Fringes of Science Michael Friedlander offers a careful look at the shadowlands of science. What makes Friedlander's book especially useful is that he reviews conventional scientific method and shows how scientists examine the hard cases to determine what is science and what is pseudoscience. Emphasizing that there is no clear line of demarcation between science and nonscience, Friedlander leads the reader through case after entertaining case, covering the favorites of "tabloid science" such as astrology and UFOs, scientific controversies such as cold fusion, and those maverick ideas that were at first rejected by science only to be embraced later. There are many good stories here, but there is also much learning and wisdom. Students of science and interested lay readers will come away from this book with an increased understanding of what science is, how it works, and how the nonscientist should deal with science at its fringes.
Book Synopsis Physics on the Fringe by : Margaret Wertheim
Download or read book Physics on the Fringe written by Margaret Wertheim and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past fifteen years, acclaimed science writer Margaret Wertheim has been collecting the works of "outsider physicists," many without formal training and all convinced that they have found true alternative theories of the universe. Jim Carter, the Einstein of outsiders, has developed his own complete theory of matter and energy and gravity that he demonstrates with experiments in his backyard,-with garbage cans and a disco fog machine he makes smoke rings to test his ideas about atoms. Captivated by the imaginative power of his theories and his resolutely DIY attitude, Wertheim has been following Carter's progress for the past decade. Centuries ago, natural philosophers puzzled out the laws of nature using the tools of observation and experimentation. Today, theoretical physics has become mathematically inscrutable, accessible only to an elite few. In rejecting this abstraction, outsider theorists insist that nature speaks a language we can all understand. Through a profoundly human profile of Jim Carter, Wertheim's exploration of the bizarre world of fringe physics challenges our conception of what science is, how it works, and who it is for.
Book Synopsis On the Fringe by : Michael D. Gordin
Download or read book On the Fringe written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pseudoscience is not a real thing. The term is a negative category, always ascribed to somebody else's beliefs, not to characterize a doctrine one holds dear oneself. People who espouse fringe ideas never think of themselves as "pseudoscientists"; they think they are following the correct scientific doctrine, even if it is not mainstream. In that sense, there is no such thing as pseudoscience, just disagreements about what the right science is. This is a familiar phenomenon. No believer ever thinks she is a "heretic," for example, or an artist that he produces "bad art." Those are attacks presented by opponents. Yet pseudoscience is also real. The term of abuse is used quite frequently, sometimes even about ideas that are at the core of the scientific mainstream, and those labels have consequences. If the reputation of "pseudoscience" solidifies, then it is very hard for a doctrine to shed the bad reputation. The outcome is plenty of scorn and no legitimacy (or funding) to investigate one's theories. In this, "pseudoscience" is a lot like "heresy": if the label sticks, persecution follows"--
Download or read book Future Science written by Max Brockman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-10-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The next wave of science writing is here. Editor Max Brockman has talent-spotted 19 young scientists, working on leading-edge research across a wide range of fields. Nearly half of them are women, and all of them are great communicators: their passion and excitement makes this collection a wonderfully invigorating read. We hear from an astrobiologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the solar system (and the universe); from the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory about why we keep making the same mistakes; from a Cambridge lab about DNA synthesis; from the Tanzanian savannah about what lies behind attractiveness; we hear about how to breed plants to withstand disease, about ways to extract significance from the Interne's enormous datasets, about oceanography, neuroscience, microbiology, and evolutionary psychology.
Book Synopsis Science & Emotions after 1945 by : Frank Biess
Download or read book Science & Emotions after 1945 written by Frank Biess and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the first half of the twentieth century, emotions were a legitimate object of scientific study across a variety of disciplines. After 1945, however, in the wake of Nazi irrationalism, emotions became increasingly marginalized and postwar rationalism took central stage. Emotion remained on the scene of scientific and popular study but largely at the fringes as a behavioral reflex, or as a concern of the private sphere. So why, by the 1960s, had the study of emotions returned to the forefront of academic investigation? In Science and Emotions after 1945, Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross chronicle the curious resurgence of emotion studies and show that it was fueled by two very different sources: social movements of the 1960s and brain science. A central claim of the book is that the relatively recent neuroscientific study of emotion did not initiate – but instead consolidated – the emotional turn by clearing the ground for multidisciplinary work on the emotions. Science and Emotions after 1945 tells the story of this shift by looking closely at scientific disciplines in which the study of emotions has featured prominently, including medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, and the social sciences, viewed in each case from a humanities perspective.
Book Synopsis Science and Nonbelief by : Taner Edis
Download or read book Science and Nonbelief written by Taner Edis and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2009-12-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging overview, physicist and acclaimed science writer Edis examines the relationship between today's sciences and religious nonbelief. He provides a very readable, nontechnical introduction to the leading scientific ideas that impinge upon religious belief.
Book Synopsis Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by : Martin Gardner
Download or read book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science written by Martin Gardner and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fair, witty appraisal of cranks, quacks, and quackeries of science and pseudoscience: hollow earth, Velikovsky, orgone energy, Dianetics, flying saucers, Bridey Murphy, food and medical fads, and much more.
Download or read book The Golem written by Harry M. Collins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the golem? In Jewish mythology the Golem is an effigy or image brought to life. While not evil, it is a strong, clumsy and incomplete servant. Through a series of case studies, ranging from relativity and cold fusion to memory in worms and the sex lives of lizards, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch debunk the traditional view that science is the straightforward result of competent theorization, observation and experimentation. Scientific certainty is the interpretation of ambiguous results. The very well received first edition generated much debate, reflected in a substantial new Afterword in this new edition, which seeks to place the book in what have become known as 'the science wars'.
Book Synopsis Ask a Science Teacher by : Larry Scheckel
Download or read book Ask a Science Teacher written by Larry Scheckel and published by The Experiment. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fun and fascinating science is everywhere, and it’s a cinch to learn—just ask a science teacher! We’ve all grown so used to living in a world filled with wonders that we sometimes forget to wonder about them: What creates the wind? Do fish sleep? Why do we blink? These are common phenomena, but it’s a rare person who really knows the answers—do you? All too often, the explanations remain shrouded in mystery—or behind a haze of technical language. For those of us who should have raised our hands in science class but didn’t, Larry Scheckel comes to the rescue. An award-winning science teacher and longtime columnist for his local newspaper, Scheckel is a master explainer with a trove of knowledge. Just ask the students and devoted readers who have spent years trying to stump him! In Ask a Science Teacher, Scheckel collects 250 of his favorite Q&As. Like the best teachers, he writes so that kids can understand, but he doesn’t water things down— he’ll satisfy even the most inquisitive minds. Topics include: •The Human Body •Earth Science •Astronomy •Chemistry Physics •Technology •Zoology •Music and conundrums that don’t fit into any category With refreshingly uncomplicated explanations, Ask a Science Teacher is sure to resolve the everyday mysteries you’ve always wondered about. You’ll learn how planes really fly, why the Earth is round, how microwaves heat food, and much more—before you know it, all your friends will be asking you!
Book Synopsis The Mad Science Book by : Reto U. Schneider
Download or read book The Mad Science Book written by Reto U. Schneider and published by Quercus Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You don't have to be an eccentric obsessive to be a scientist, but it helps... In The Mad Science Book, Reto Schneider tells the extraordinary tales of 100 of the more unusual experiments conducted across seven centuries of science. From the attempts of the 14th-century Dominican monk Theodoric von Freiberg to discover the cause of the rainbow, to the efforts of the 20th-century psychologist Harry Harlow to be the perfect mother to a family of reluctant rhesus monkeys, these are stories that are often bizarre, sometimes mind-boggling - occasionally stomach-churning - but always diverting, informative and enlightening.Among the myriad delights on display in this cabinet of scientific curiosities are the renowned doctor from Padua who sat in a pair of scales for 30 years, recording the minutest changes in his weight; the sheep, the duck and the rooster who became the world's first air passengers; the disgusting Dr Stubbins Ffirth, who swallowed other people's vomit in an attempt to prove that yellow fever cannot be transmitted from one person to another; the hapless soldier Alexis St Martin, left with a hole in his stomach after an accident with a musket; and the ever-optimistic Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who injected himself with essence of guinea pigs' testicles as an anti-ageing remedy. There is trivia here in abundance, but also quirky, but genuinely influential, science, notably Merrill Flood's and Melvin Dresher's experiments with choices of outcomes, which have been widely influential as game theory.A fizzing cocktail of fascinating science and rich entertainment, The Mad Science Book tells the extraordinary stories of some truly, madly, geeky people. It should be top of every self-respecting science buff's Christmas 2008 wishlist.
Author :Ellen Condliffe Lagemann Publisher :University of Chicago Press ISBN 13 :9780226467733 Total Pages :324 pages Book Rating :4.4/5 (677 download)
Book Synopsis An Elusive Science by : Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
Download or read book An Elusive Science written by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its beginnings at the turn of the 20th century, the science of education has been regarded as a poor relation, reluctantly tolerated at the margins of academe. In this history of education research, Condliffe explains how this came to be.
Book Synopsis The Fringes of Belief by : Sarah Ellenzweig
Download or read book The Fringes of Belief written by Sarah Ellenzweig and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fringes of Belief is the first literary study of freethinking and religious skepticism in the English Enlightenment. Ellenzweig aims to redress this scholarly lacuna, arguing that a literature of English freethinking has been overlooked because it unexpectedly supported aspects of institutional religion. Analyzing works by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, she foregrounds a strand of the English freethinking tradition that was suspicious of revealed religion yet often strongly opposed to the open denigration of Anglican Christianity and its laws. By exposing the contradictory and volatile status of categories like belief and doubt this book participates in the larger argument in Enlightenment studies—as well as in current scholarship on the condition of modernity more generally—-that religion is not so simply left behind in the shift from the pre-modern to the modern world.
Book Synopsis The Fringe of the Unknown by : L. Sprague de Camp
Download or read book The Fringe of the Unknown written by L. Sprague de Camp and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 1983-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a fascinating study by L. Sprague de Camp of controversial and often little-known happenings in science and technology, with an emphasis on the wayward activities of those who dabble in fringe science. The Fringe of the Unknown is in three parts. The first, "Our Ingenious Forebears," examines some of the mysteries and oddities surrounding ancient technologies. Occultists and pseudoscientists often attribute extraordinary knowledge and wisdom to "the ancients," crediting them with inventions and discoveries that have generally been accepted as accomplishments of recent centuries. De Camp refutes some of these claims, but goes on to show that the ancients, starting from a much lower base of general knowledge, nevertheless achieved some remarkably ingenious results. In Part 2, "Beasts of Now and Then," the author explores a number of oddities and controversies in biology, such as the curious adventures and ramifications of the elephant family, the never-ending efforts to prove that monsters from former eras still roam the earth, the celebrated sighting of a sea serpent by H.M.S. Daedalus in the South Atlantic in 1848, and the many speculations about the great waves of extinction that have, from era to era, impoverished the earth's faunas. In Part 3, "Scientists, Mad and Otherwise," de Camp tells of the behavior of some scientists, from the merely eccentric to the certifiably insane, and examines the differences between real science and pseudoscience. This wide-ranging work is a treasury of entertaining accounts of history and science.
Book Synopsis The Folk of the Fringe by : Orson Scott Card
Download or read book The Folk of the Fringe written by Orson Scott Card and published by Orb Books. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Orson Scott Card's classic apocalyptic science fiction novel The Folk of the Fringe, only a few nuclear weapons fell in America--the weapons that destroyed the nation were biological and, ultimately, cultural. But in the chaos, the famine, the plague, there existed a few pockets of order. The strongest of them was the state of Deseret, formed from the vestiges of Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. The climate has changed. The Great Salt Lake has filled up to prehistoric levels. But there, on the fringes, brave, hardworking pioneers are making the desert bloom again. A civilization cannot be reclaimed by powerful organizations, or even by great men alone. It must be renewed by individual men and women, one by one, working together to make a community, a nation, a new America. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Book Synopsis Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities by : Lenny A. Ureña Valerio
Download or read book Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities written by Lenny A. Ureña Valerio and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire. Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.
Download or read book Superior written by Angela Saini and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 Best-Of Lists: 10 Best Science Books of the Year (Smithsonian Magazine) · Best Science Books of the Year (NPR's Science Friday) · Best Science and Technology Books from 2019” (Library Journal) An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences. Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists. At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.
Book Synopsis The Signals Are Talking by : Amy Webb
Download or read book The Signals Are Talking written by Amy Webb and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Webb is a noted futurist who combines curiosity, skepticism, colorful storytelling, and deeply reported, real-world analysis in this essential book for understanding the future. The Signals Are Talking reveals a systemic way of evaluating new ideas bubbling up on the horizon-distinguishing what is a real trend from the merely trendy. This book helps us hear which signals are talking sense, and which are simply nonsense, so that we might know today what developments-especially those seemingly random ideas at the fringe as they converge and begin to move toward the mainstream-that have long-term consequence for tomorrow. With the methodology developed in The Signals Are Talking, we learn how to think like a futurist and answer vitally important questions: How will a technology-like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars, biohacking, bots, and the Internet of Things-affect us personally? How will it impact our businesses and workplaces? How will it eventually change the way we live, work, play, and think-and how should we prepare for it now? Most importantly, Webb persuasively shows that the future isn't something that happens to us passively. Instead, she allows us to see ahead so that we may forecast what's to come-challenging us to create our own preferred futures.
