Showing titles in History

 Elixir tells the story of Edouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent, the son of a perfumer and a fellow aspiring chemist, who met on the Left Bank while pursuing their passion for science. Spurned by the scientific establishment, the pair ended up working out of Edouard's family perfume shop, Laugier père et fils. By day they prepared the revitalizing elixirs and rejuvenating eaux it was famous for, but by night using the ingredients of the perfumery and the principles of alchemy, they pursued the secret of life itself.

Brought to you by Penguin. How did an architect help pioneer blood transfusion in the 1660s? Why did eighteenth-century dentists buy the live teeth of poor children? And what role did a sausage skin and an enamel bath play in making kidney transplants a reality? We think of transplant surgery as...

A rollicking history of the life and work of an unheralded genius: Dr. Solomon Snyder, whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped change the way we think about the causes and treatments of schizophrenia. This program is read by the author. In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing...

A respected physics professor and author breaks down the great debate over the Big Bang and the continuing quest to understand the fate of the universe. Today, the Big Bang is so entrenched in our understanding of the cosmos that to doubt it would seem crazy. But as Paul Halpern shows in Flashes...

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW STATESMAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A DAILY TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW REPUBLIC BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A TIME MAGAZINE TOP 10 NONFICTION BOOK OF 2013 From ambitious scientists rising above the clouds to analyse the air to war generals floating across...

We love to believe in a meritocracy of ideas - that genius is always recognised, innovation always seized upon and rewarded. Yet so many of the people we now recognise as the world's great creators initially got little traction for their work. It faded out, and it was only later, often much...

Hoof Beats transforms our understanding of both horses and humanity's ancient past and asks us to consider what our relationship with horses means for the future of humanity and the world around us.

Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don't? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength - and the greatest reason we can trust it.

Atomic weaponry is widely understood as a story of American scientific achievement—but scientists working in Britain played a vital role in its development. Including Nobel Prize winners and Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, these scientists have long since been forgotten. But without their expertise, Robert Oppenheimer's research at Los Alamos would never have succeeded. Gareth Williams unearths the true story of the top-secret British atomic program, codenamed "Tube Alloys," established in 1940.

This ""valuable and entertaining"" (New York Times Book Review) book explores how scientists are adapting nature's best ideas to solve tough 21st century problems. Biomimicry is rapidly transforming life on earth. Biomimics study nature's most successful ideas over the past 3.5 million years...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 25 scientific pioneers who have shaped the development of science over 500 years.

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience," typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements—both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides—there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation. Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation.

The discovery of the quantum - the idea, born in the early 1900s in a remote corner of physics, that energy comes in finite packets instead of infinitely divisible quantities - planted a rich set of metaphors in the popular imagination. Quantum imagery and language now bombard us like an endless stream of photons. Phrases such as multiverse, quantum leap, alternate universe, the uncertainty principle, and Schrödinger's cat get reinvented continually in cartoons and movies, coffee mugs and T-shirts, and fiction and philosophy.

Vor 100.000 Jahren war der Homo sapiens noch ein unbedeutendes Tier, das unauffällig in einem abgelegenen Winkel des afrikanischen Kontinents lebte. Unsere Vorfahren teilten sich den Planeten mit mindestens fünf weiteren menschlichen Spezies und die Rolle, die sie im Ökosystem spielten, war nicht größer als die von Gorillas, Libellen oder Quallen. Vor 70.000 Jahren dann vollzog sich ein mysteriöser und rascher Wandel mit dem Homo sapiens.

Financial economist George G. Szpiro here tells the fascinating stories of the pioneers of mathematical finance who conducted the search for the elusive options pricing formula. From the broker's assistant who published the first mathematical explanation of financial markets to Albert Einstein and other scientists, Pricing the Future retraces the historical and intellectual developments that ultimately led to the widespread use of mathematical models to drive investment strategies on Wall Street.

In this extensive sequel to Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, Dr. Richard Carrier explores the social history of scientists in the Roman era. Was science in decline or experiencing a revival under the Romans? What was an ancient scientist thought to be and do? Who were they, and who funded their research? And how did pagans differ from their Christian peers in their views toward science and scientists?

An epic story of courage, genius and terrible folly, this is the first history of how the Soviet Union's scientists became both the glory and the laughingstock of the intellectual world. Simon Ings weaves together what happened when a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs bound themselves to a failing government to create a world superpower. And he shows how Stalin's obsessions derailed a great experiment in 'rational government'.

The periodic table of elements, first encountered by many of us at school, provides an arrangement of the chemical elements, ordered by their atomic number, electron configuration, and recurring chemical properties, and divided into periodic trends. In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Eric R. Scerri looks at the trends in properties of elements that led to the construction of the table and shows how the deeper meaning of the table's structure gradually became apparent with the development of atomic theory.

Like F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises moved beyond economics in his later years to address questions regarding the foundation of all social science. But unlike Hayek's attempts, Mises' writings on these matters have received less attention than they deserve. Theory and History, writes Rothbard in his introduction, "remains by far the most neglected masterwork of Mises". Here Mises defends his all-important idea of methodological dualism: one approach to the hard sciences and another for the social sciences.

Evocatively read by the author, Tom Chatfield. 'Powerful, profound and completely engrossing, a meditation on not only technology but also history, culture, ideas, ethics, psychology and, above all, what it means to be human.' – Michael Bhaskar, co-author of The Coming Wave Wise Animals...