Showing results for "first" in History & Philosophy

America’s favorite astrophysicist has written the most entertaining and universally appealing book of his stellar career: a practical guide for dealing with Alien visitors, an exploration of how it might happen, and a cultural history of our fascination with extraterrestrials. “Ever since...

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist explains what happened at the very beginning of the universe, and how we know “Science writing at its best.” ―New York Review of Books Our universe has been growing for nearly fourteen billion years. But almost everything about it can be traced back to what...

Always help, or at least do no harm." Following this simple yet revolutionary idea, Hippocrates laid the foundation for modern medicine over two millennia ago. From the Hippocratic Oath to the human genome, from Pasteur's germ theory to the worldwide eradication of smallpox, Medical Firsts brings to life 2,500 years of medical advances and discoveries. Organized chronologically, the book describes each milestone in a vivid capsule history, making it a fascinating and wonderfully listenable resource for anyone interested in medicine's past progress and future promise.

Griffins, cyclopes, monsters, and giants - these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? Through careful research and meticulous documentation, Adrienne Mayor convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact - in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.

By calling everything into doubt, Descartes laid the foundations of modern philosophy. With the celebrated words "I think therefore I am," his compelling argument swept aside ancient and medieval traditions. He deduced that human beings consist of minds and bodies; that these are totally distinct "substances"; that God exists and that He ensures we can trust the evidence of our senses.

Science and politics have collaborated throughout human history and science is repeatedly invoked today in political debates, from pandemic management to climate change. Leading policy analyst Geoff Mulgan here calls attention to the growing frictions caused by the expanding—and unsolicited—authority being heaped upon science. As science increasingly competes with politics, a defined plan of cooperation is urgently needed.

Christmas, 1859. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter. He had expected criticism; in fact, letters were arriving daily, most expressing outrage and accusations of heresy. But this letter was different. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his predecessors, of taking credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others. Darwin realized that he had made an error in omitting from Origin of Species any mention of his intellectual forebears.

Today, the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 "winning" the race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the solar system. Moreover, the notion that America "won" the Space Race at the end of the 1960s overlooks just how competitive the Space Race actually was in launching people into orbit.

A brilliant ensemble of the world’s most visionary scientists provides twenty-five original never-before-published essays about the advances in science and technology that we may see within our lifetimes. Theoretical physicist and bestselling author Paul Davies examines the likelihood that by...

In 1938, a young German rocket enthusiast named Wernher von Braun had dreams of building a rocket that could fly him to the moon. In Ray, North Dakota, a young farm girl named Mary Sherman was attending high school. In an age when girls rarely dreamed of a career in science, Mary wanted to be a chemist. A decade later, the dreams of these two disparate individuals would coalesce in ways neither could have imagined.

The first human organ transplant in 1950 at a suburban hospital is the focus of The Graft: How a Pioneering Operation Sparked the Modern Age of Organ Transplants. The book examines the controversies the operation generated and the progress medicine has made in organ transplantation.

Discover a fascinating look into the lives of six historic trailblazers in this World War II-era story of the American women who programmed the world's first modern computer. "Kleiman’s persistence in sleuthing out the story of the ENIAC 6 programmers has resulted in an admirable contribution...

America's First Great Eclipse takes listeners on a thrilling historical journey, revealing that 19th-century Americans were just as excited about a total solar eclipse as we are today...and, like us, were willing to travel thousands of miles to see it.

In 1869, the Atlantic Monthly magazine published a new novella in serial form. This bizarre tale, The Brick Moon, was written by a historian (and Unitarian minister) named Edward Everett Hale, who had already written several well-received novels and articles. However, this was something completely different today, as it was in the genre of what is today considered science fiction. Many people compared the new work to the previous novels of French writer Jules Verne, including From the Earth to the Moon, but Hale’s work was presented as a genuine account of a previous experiment.

Observing the observed is not as simple as the physics and geometry of billiard balls on a table. The synchronicity of causality is not so coincidental as random effects spanning an unknown amount of time. How much impact the observer has on determining the outcome of the observed is a journey for the quantum engineer.

At 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969, time stood still throughout the world as thousands converged on the Kennedy Space Center and millions tuned in on live television. At that instant, the first rumbles began to shake the ground, as a small spacecraft attached to the giant Saturn V rocket several hundred feet tall started lifting off. Apollo 11 was on its way to a historic first landing on the Moon.