Addressing a field that has been dominated by astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, the contributors to this collection raise questions that may have been overlooked by physical scientists about the ease of establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. These scholars are grappling with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity if an information-rich signal emanating from another world is detected. By drawing on issues at the core of contemporary archaeology and anthropology, we can be much better prepared for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come.
Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology. Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world. The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration. When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.
First published in 2004.Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) -- German Jesuit, occultist, polymath - was one of most curious figures in the history of science. He dabbled in all the mysteries of his time: the heavenly bodies, sound amplification, museology, botany, Asian languages, the pyramids of Egypt -- almost anything incompletely understood. Kircher coined the term electromagnetism, printed Sanskrit for the first time in a Western book, and built a famous museum collection. His wild, beautifully illustrated books are sometimes visionary, frequently wrong, and yet compelling documents in the history of ideas. They are being rediscovered in our own time. This volume contains new essays on Kircher and his world by leading historians and historians of science, including Stephen Jay Gould, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Grafton, Daniel Stoltzenberg, Paula Findlen, and Barbara Stafford.-
A unique collection of thirty experiments ranging from ancient astronomy to cosmology, each containing one or more challenges for the reader. The progression here is from the Earth outward through the solar system to the stellar and galactic realm. Topics include the shape of the sky; Stonehenge as a stone-age abacus; determining the size of the Earth; the distance of the moon, stars and planets; planetary mass, density, temperature and atmosphere; the speed of light; the nature of the quiet and active sun; photometry and spectroscopy; star clusters and variable stars; and fundamental properties of stars.
This monograph contributes to the scientific misconduct debate from an oblique perspective, by analysing seven novels devoted to this issue, namely: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1925), The affair by C.P. Snow (1960), Cantor’s Dilemma by Carl Djerassi (1989), Perlmann’s Silence by Pascal Mercier (1995), Intuition by Allegra Goodman (2006), Solar by Ian McEwan (2010) and Derailment by Diederik Stapel (2012). Scientific misconduct, i.e. fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, but also other questionable research practices, have become a focus of concern for academic communities worldwide, but also for managers, funders and publishers of research. The aforementioned novels offer intriguing windows into integrity challenges emerging in contemporary research practices. They are analysed from a continental philosophical perspective, providing a stage where various voices, positions and modes of discourse are mutually exposed to one another, so that they critically address and question one another. They force us to start from the admission that we do not really know what misconduct is. Subsequently, by providing case histories of misconduct, they address integrity challenges not only in terms of individual deviance but also in terms of systemic crisis, due to current transformations in the ways in which knowledge is produced. Rather than functioning as moral vignettes, the author argues that misconduct novels challenge us to reconsider some of the basic conceptual building blocks of integrity discourse. Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Science communication, as a multidisciplinary field, has developed remarkably in recent years. It is now a distinct and exceedingly dynamic science that melds theoretical approaches with practical experience. Formerly well-established theoretical models now seem out of step with the social reality of the sciences, and the previously clear-cut delineations and interacting domains between cultural fields have blurred. Communicating Science in Social Contexts examines that shift, which itself depicts a profound recomposition of knowledge fields, activities and dissemination practices, and the value accorded to science and technology. Communicating Science in Social Contexts is the product of long-term effort that would not have been possible without the research and expertise of the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) Network and the editors. For nearly 20 years, this informal, international network has been organizing events and forums for discussion of the public communication of science.
This book features high-quality research papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Pattern Recognition (CIPR 2021), held at the Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, West Bengal, India, on 24 – 25 April 2021. It includes practical development experiences in various areas of data analysis and pattern recognition, focusing on soft computing technologies, clustering and classification algorithms, rough set and fuzzy set theory, evolutionary computations, neural science and neural network systems, image processing, combinatorial pattern matching, social network analysis, audio and video data analysis, data mining in dynamic environments, bioinformatics, hybrid computing, big data analytics and deep learning. It also provides innovative solutions to the challenges in these areas and discusses recent developments.
Mind Myths shows that science can be entertaining and creative. Addressing various topics, this book counterbalances information derived from the media with a 'scientific view'. It contains contributions from experts around the world.
This book is one of the five basic works that make up the Codification of Spiritism, and is the author’s most scientific work. It deals with themes regarded as incontestable by religion in the light of the immortality of the soul, unifying Christian thought and cientific discoveries. It offers a unique opportunity for the reader to know and study themes of universal interest, discussed in a logical, rational and revealing manner. It is divided into three parts: The first part analyses the origin of planet Earth and avoids mysterious or magical interpretations about its creation. The second part analyses the question of miracles, explaining the nature of the fluids and the extraordinary phenomena contained in the Gospel. The third part focuses on the prophecies in the Gospel, the signs of the times and the new generation, whose advent will be the beginning of a new era for humankind based on the practice of justice, peace and fraternity. The subjects presented in its eighteen chapters have as their basis the immutability of the grand Divine Laws.
