History of science
Showing 1–16 of 23 results
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A brief history of black holes
£10.99A brief history of black holes
Black holes are the universe’s strangest and most fascinating objects. In A Brief History of Black Holes, Dr Becky explores the mysteries and realities of this misunderstood phenomenon – and that nearly everything you know about them is wrong.
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Comet madness
£21.99Comet madness
In Comet Madness, author and historian Richard J. Goodrich examines the 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet and the ensuing frenzy sparked by media manipulation, bogus science, and outright deception. The result is a fascinating and illuminating narrative history that underscores how we behave in the face of potential calamity – then and now.
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Every living thing
£25.00Every living thing
In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic, ever-changing swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible – how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life’s diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity’s role in shaping the fate of our planet, and on humanity itself. The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today.
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How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon
£25.00How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon
The Victorians invented the idea of the future – it was an undiscovered country, ripe for exploration and colonisation. To get us to the future, the Victorians created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilisation of the resources of Empire – and revolutionised science in the process. Iwan Rhys Morus tells the story of how the future was made. From Charles Babbage’s dream of mechanising mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Burnel’s tunnel beneath the Thames, from George Cayley’s fantasies of powered flight to Nikola Tesla’s visions of an electrical world, it is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures – a rich tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world beyond recognition and ultimately took us to the moon.
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Inside the stargazer’s palace
£25.00Inside the stargazer’s palace
Step inside the dazzling world of the sixteenth-century scientist.
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Into the groove
£12.99Into the groove
The story of recorded sound – the technological developments, the people that made them happen and the impact they had on society – from the earliest inventions via the phonograph to LPs, EPs and the recent resurgence of vinyl. While Thomas Edison’s phonograph, the first device that could both record and reproduce sound, represented an important turning point in the story of recorded sound, it was really only the tip of the iceberg, and came after decades of invention, tinkering and experiment. ‘Into the Groove’ tells the story of the birth of recorded sound, from the earliest serious attempts in the 1850s all the way up to the vinyl resurgence we’re currently enjoying. This book celebrates the ingenuity, rivalries and science of the modulated groove.
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Magus
£10.99Magus
At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks. Anthony Grafton’s wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and – by some measures – credulous or worse. The historical Faust, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa are all fascinating characters, closely linked to monarchs, artists and soldiers and sitting at the heart of any definition of why the Renaissance was a time of such restless innovation.
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Nothing
£8.99Nothing
What is ‘nothing’? What remains when you take all the matter away? Can empty space – a void – exist? This Very Short Introduction explores the science and history of the elusive void: from Aristotle’s theories to black holes and quantum particles, and why the latest discoveries about the vacuum tell us extraordinary things about the cosmos.
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Our accidental universe
£22.00Our accidental universe
The BBC presenter of ‘Sky at Night’, and Gresham Professor of Astronomy, Chris Lintott, takes us on an astonishing tour of bizarre accidents, big characters, and human error to tell the story of some of the most important astronomical events of the past hundred years.
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Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy
£17.95Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy
A new biography of pioneering scientist Robert Hooke, from method to influence.
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Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction
£8.99Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction
This book explains the philosophical and historical concepts that shape current debates about science and religion. It also considers some of the themes and issues that have become more prominent in the past decade, such as science denial, climate change and environmentalism, and religion and public health – including responses to Covid-19.
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Sleeping beauties
£11.99Sleeping beauties
Why do some of nature’s marvels have to wait millions of years for their time in the sun?
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Sun And The Other Stars Of Dante Alighieri, The: A Cosmographic Journey Through
£25.00Sun And The Other Stars Of Dante Alighieri, The: A Cosmographic Journey Through
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is the story of a journey across the Universe as it was known in the Middle Ages, a work of science fiction ante litteram. Dante had an encyclopedic mind, no doubt, and his poem is the most widely read book after the Bible. He was a master of the astronomical knowledge of his time, and used astronomy in his work to indicate places, to measure time, and to exemplify beauty. Indeed, in the Convivio, he wrote that science is ‘the ultimate perfection of our soul’ and ‘astronomy ? more than any other science ? is noble and high for a noble and high subject.’We propose a reading of the Divine Comedy through astronomy with a journey starting from the Earth, proceeding to the Moon, the planets, and to the outermost edges of the Universe. The way in which Dante connects ancient astronomy with modern conceptions of the cosmos will astonish readers more than 700 years later.
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The apothecary’s wife
£25.00The apothecary’s wife
A revelatory history of medicine, ‘The Apothecary’s Wife’ challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth. Drawing on a vast body of archival material, Karen Bloom Gevirtz depicts the extraordinary cast of characters who brought about this transformation. She also explores domestic medicine’s values in responses to modern health crises, such as the eradication of smallpox, and what benefits we can learn from these events.
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The battle of the beams
£10.99The battle of the beams
Summer 1939. War is coming. The British believe that, through ingenuity and scientific prowess, they alone have a war-winning weapon: radar. They are wrong. The Germans have it too. They believe that their unique maritime history means their pilots have no need of navigational aids. Flying above the clouds they, like the seafarers of old, had the stars to guide them, and that is all that is required. They are wrong. Most of the bombs the RAF will drop in the first years of the war land miles from their target. They also believe that the Germans, without the same naval tradition, will never be able to find targets at night. They are, again, wrong. In 1939 the Germans don’t just have radar to spot planes entering their airspace, they have radio beams to guide their own planes into enemy airspace. War is coming, and it is to be a different kind of war.
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The biggest ideas in the universe. 2 Quanta and fields
£16.99The biggest ideas in the universe. 2 Quanta and fields
‘Luminous and straightforward.’ Carlo Rovelli
£16.99