Author: Andrew Pickering
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226667997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
Widely regarded as a classic in its field, Constructing Quarks recounts the history of the post-war conceptual development of elementary-particle physics. Inviting a reappraisal of the status of scientific knowledge, Andrew Pickering suggests that scientists are not mere passive observers and reporters of nature. Rather they are social beings as well as active constructors of natural phenomena who engage in both experimental and theoretical practice. "A prodigious piece of scholarship that I can heartily recommend."—Michael Riordan, New Scientist "An admirable history. . . . Detailed and so accurate."—Hugh N. Pendleton, Physics Today
Author: Yoichiro Nambu
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814338028
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
The book explains in a precise and complete manner how elementary particle physics has evolved over the past 50 years. The historical development of the ideas that have shaped our thinking about the ultimate constituents of matter is traced out. The author has been associated with some of the originators of elementary particle theory and has made significant contributions to the field. Here, he gives a first-person description of some of the main developments leading to our present view of the universe.
Author: Daphne Patai
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231508697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 739
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Book Description
Not too long ago, literary theorists were writing about the death of the novel and the death of the author; today many are talking about the death of Theory. Theory, as the many theoretical ism's (among them postcolonialism, postmodernism, and New Historicism) are now known, once seemed so exciting but has become ossified and insular. This iconoclastic collection is an excellent companion to current anthologies of literary theory, which have embraced an uncritical stance toward Theory and its practitioners. Written by nearly fifty prominent scholars, the essays in Theory's Empire question the ideas, catchphrases, and excesses that have let Theory congeal into a predictable orthodoxy. More than just a critique, however, this collection provides readers with effective tools to redeem the study of literature, restore reason to our intellectual life, and redefine the role and place of Theory in the academy.
Author: Kyungsik Kang
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 981456933X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 414
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Book Description
These proceedings are the culmination of the First Yanbian Workshop on Modern Physics, an epoch making event in Korean history that took place in Yanbian, China during 15-18 July, 1990. The meeting was instrumental to bring the active practitioners in the frontier physic together from many parts of the world including for the first time, those from North Korea. This volume contains the most important lectures by experts in Particle Physics, Conformal Field Theory, High-Tc Superconductivity, Phase Transitions, Medium Energy Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology.
Author: Tim Newton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134211511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
This book engages with, and contests, the ‘new sociology of nature’. It moves beyond existing debates by presenting new social theory and working across current fields of interest, addressing the debate on new genetics and genomics, taking human biology seriously, and the issues of interdisciplinarity that are likely to arise in longer term attempts to work across the social and natural world. Nature and Sociology will be of great interest to students of a variety of disciplines including sociology and social science, human geography, social and biological anthropology, and the natural sciences.
Author: Richard C. Brown
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9812835245
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
This book is a history, analysis, and criticism of what the author calls ?postmodern interpretations of science? (PIS) and the closely related ?sociology of scientific knowledge? (SSK). This movement traces its origin to Thomas Kuhn's revolutionary work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), but is more extreme. It believes that science is a ?social construction?, having little to do with nature, and is determined by contextual forces such as the race, class, gender of the scientist, laboratory politics, or the needs of the military industrial complex.Since the 1970s, PIS has become fashionable in the humanities, social sciences, and ethnic or women's studies, as well as in the new academic discipline of Science, Technology, and Society (STS). It has been attacked by numerous authors and the resulting conflicts led to the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s. While the present book is also critical of PIS, it focuses on its intellectual and political origins and tries to understand why it became influential in the 1970s. The book is both an intellectual and a political history. It examines the thoughts of Karl Popper, Karl Mannheim, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, David Bloor, Steve Woolgar, Steve Shapin, Bruno Latour, and PIS-like doctrines in mathematics. It also describes various philosophical contributions to PIS ranging from the Greek sophists to 20th century post-structuralists and argues that the disturbed political atmosphere of the Vietnam War era was critical to the rise of PIS.
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309173663
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Dramatic progress has been made in all branches of physics since the National Research Council's 1986 decadal survey of the field. The Physics in a New Era series explores these advances and looks ahead to future goals. The series includes assessments of the major subfields and reports on several smaller subfields, and preparation has begun on an overview volume on the unity of physics, its relationships to other fields, and its contributions to national needs. Nuclear Physics is the latest volume of the series. The book describes current activity in understanding nuclear structure and symmetries, the behavior of matter at extreme densities, the role of nuclear physics in astrophysics and cosmology, and the instrumentation and facilities used by the field. It makes recommendations on the resources needed for experimental and theoretical advances in the coming decade.
Author: Andrew Pickering
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226668258
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
This ambitious book by one of the most original and provocative thinkers in science studies offers a sophisticated new understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical, and engineering practice and the production of scientific knowledge. Andrew Pickering offers a new approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the extraordinary number of factors—social, technological, conceptual, and natural—that interact to affect the creation of scientific knowledge. In his view, machines, instruments, facts, theories, conceptual and mathematical structures, disciplined practices, and human beings are in constantly shifting relationships with one another—"mangled" together in unforeseeable ways that are shaped by the contingencies of culture, time, and place. Situating material as well as human agency in their larger cultural context, Pickering uses case studies to show how this picture of the open, changeable nature of science advances a richer understanding of scientific work both past and present. Pickering examines in detail the building of the bubble chamber in particle physics, the search for the quark, the construction of the quarternion system in mathematics, and the introduction of computer-controlled machine tools in industry. He uses these examples to address the most basic elements of scientific practice—the development of experimental apparatus, the production of facts, the development of theory, and the interrelation of machines and social organization.
Author: Laurie Mark Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521100731
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 768
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Book Description
Editors Laurie Brown, Max Dresden and Lillian Hoddeson have assembled a prestigious group of physicists and historians of science to present a broadly balanced picture of this exciting scientific era that witnessed the coming of age of particle physics and its development into 'big science'. The historical studies and analyses provided in the volume are unique in their scope and level of detail. Major topics and developments addressed include the important experiments and their theoretical explanations, the design and construction of scientific instruments and the establishment of major research centres - especially the national laboratories that played a key role in the transformation of particle physics into 'big science'. These essays also range from sociological analyses of the particle physics subculture and the political aspects of research funding to discussions of symmetry and axiomatic field theory.
Author: Stewart E. Kelly
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
ISBN: 1433673630
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
For philosophy and theology students, Truth Considered and Applied examines the leading theories of truth in relation to postmodernism, history, and the Christian faith. Author Stewart E. Kelly defends Christianity in the face of postmodernist challenges that would label such religious faith as merely one version of truth among many in a pluralistic world. Likewise, in looking at Christianity as a historical faith, Kelly supports the need for Christians to develop a hermeneutic that does justice to the biblical texts and our informed understanding of the past in general; because if a genuine past cannot be recovered in some meaningful sense, the claims of Jesus being incarnate and risen from the dead are seriously jeopardized.
