Physics, Nature and Society
Physics, Nature and Society

Author: Joaquín Marro

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-08-23

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783319349732

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This wide-ranging and accessible book serves as a fascinating guide to the strategies and concepts that help us understand the boundaries between physics, on the one hand, and sociology, economics, and biology on the other. From cooperation and criticality to flock dynamics and fractals, the author addresses many of the topics belonging to the broad theme of complexity. He chooses excellent examples (requiring no prior mathematical knowledge) to illuminate these ideas and their implications. The lively style and clear description of the relevant models will appeal both to novices and those with an existing knowledge of the field.

Freedom and Evolution
Freedom and Evolution

Author: Adrian Bejan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-12-06

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 3030340090

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The book begins with familiar designs found all around and inside us (such as the ‘trees’ of river basins, human lungs, blood and city traffic). It then shows how all flow systems are driven by power from natural engines everywhere, and how they are endlessly shaped because of freedom. Finally, Professor Bejan explains how people, like everything else that moves on earth, are driven by power derived from our “engines” that consume fuel and food, and that our movement dissipates the power completely and changes constantly for greater access, economies of scale, efficiency, innovation and life. Written for wide audiences of all ages, including readers interested in science, patterns in nature, similarity and non-uniformity, history and the future, and those just interested in having fun with ideas, the book shows how many “design change” concepts acquire a solid scientific footing and how they exist with the evolution of nature, society, technology and science.

Science, Society and the Environment
Science, Society and the Environment

Author: Michael R. Dove

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1134740417

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In an era when pressing environmental problems make collaboration across the divide between sciences and arts and humanities essential, this book presents the results of a collaborative analysis by an anthropologist and a physicist of four key junctures between science, society, and environment. The first focuses on the systemic bias in science in favour of studying esoteric subjects as distinct from the mundane subjects of everyday life; the second is a study of the fire-climax grasslands of Southeast Asia, especially those dominated by Imperata cylindrica (sword grass); the third reworks the idea of ‘moral economy’, applying it to relations between environment and society; and the fourth focuses on the evolution of the global discourse of the culpability and responsibility of climate change. The volume concludes with the insights of an interdisciplinary perspective for the natural and social science of sustainability. It argues that failures of conservation and development must be viewed systemically, and that mundane topics are no less complex than the more esoteric subjects of science. The book addresses a current blind spot within the academic research community to focusing attention on the seemingly common and mundane beliefs and practices that ultimately play the central role in the human interaction with the environment. This book will benefit students and scholars from a number of different academic disciplines, including conservation and environment studies, development studies, studies of global environmental change, anthropology, geography, sociology, politics, and science and technology studies.

Science and Nature
Science and Nature

Author: Carolyn Merchant

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 1351620665

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Science and Nature brings together the work and insights of historian Carolyn Merchant on the history of science, environmental history, and ethics. The book explores her ideas about the interconnections among science, women, nature, and history as they have emerged over her academic lifetime. Focusing on topics such as "The Death of Nature," the Scientific Revolution, women in the history of science and environment, and partnership ethics, it synthesizes her writings and sets out a vision for the twenty-first century. Anyone interested in the interactions between science and nature in the past, present, and future will want to read this book. It is an ideal text for courses on the environment, environmental history, history of science, and the philosophy of science.

Extreme Events in Nature and Society
Extreme Events in Nature and Society

Author: Sergio Albeverio

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-02-18

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 354028611X

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Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crisis, epileptic seizures, or material rupture, are the topics of Extreme Events in Nature and Society. The book, authored by foremost experts in these fields, reveals unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact. The chapters converge towards the difficult problem of anticipation: forecasting the event and proposing measures to moderate or prevent it. Extreme Events in Nature and Society will interest not only specialists, but also the general reader eager to learn how the multifaceted field of extreme events can be viewed as a coherent whole.

Critical Mass
Critical Mass

Author: Philip Ball

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2006-05-16

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 1466806834

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Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society. Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs. Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.

Critical Transitions in Nature and Society
Critical Transitions in Nature and Society

Author: Marten Scheffer

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1400833272

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How do we explain the remarkably abrupt changes that sometimes occur in nature and society--and can we predict why and when they happen? This book offers a comprehensive introduction to critical transitions in complex systems--the radical changes that happen at tipping points when thresholds are passed. Marten Scheffer accessibly describes the dynamical systems theory behind critical transitions, covering catastrophe theory, bifurcations, chaos, and more. He gives examples of critical transitions in lakes, oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, climate, evolution, and human societies. And he demonstrates how to deal with these transitions, offering practical guidance on how to predict tipping points, how to prevent "bad" transitions, and how to promote critical transitions that work for us and not against us. Scheffer shows the time is ripe for understanding and managing critical transitions in the vast and complex systems in which we live. This book can also serve as a textbook and includes a detailed appendix with equations. Provides an accessible introduction to dynamical systems theory Covers critical transitions in lakes, oceans, terrestrial ecosystems, the climate, evolution, and human societies Explains how to predict tipping points Offers strategies for preventing "bad" transitions and triggering "good" ones Features an appendix with equations

Why Trust Science?
Why Trust Science?

Author: Naomi Oreskes

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0691212260

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Why the social character of scientific knowledge makes it trustworthy Are doctors right 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 so many of our political leaders don't? 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. Tracing the history and philosophy of science from the late nineteenth century to today, this timely and provocative book features a new preface by Oreskes and critical responses by climate experts Ottmar Edenhofer and Martin Kowarsch, political scientist Jon Krosnick, philosopher of science Marc Lange, and science historian Susan Lindee, as well as a foreword by political theorist Stephen Macedo.

Science and Society
Science and Society

Author: Eric S. Swanson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-09-25

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 3319219871

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This undergraduate textbook educates non-science majors—our future policy makers—on how science works, the rules that underpin our existence, our impact on nature, and nature's impact on us. The book provides a concise, historically based, non-mathematical treatment of modern physics relevant to societal issues. It challenges readers to examine the problems we face (and their own beliefs) in light of the scientific method. With a narrative structure, Science and Society explains the scientific process and the power it brings to dealing with the natural world. The reader will gain a deeper understanding of scientific results reported by the media, and thus the tools to develop a rational, fact-based assessment of energy and resource policy. Praise for Science and Society: "Anyone who thinks society can be managed without science should think again, or better: read this book. Eric Swanson explains how science permeates society, and with simple examples of the scientific process he shows its special power in dealing with the natural world. This is a must read for the world's seven billion scientists." F.E. Close, OBE, Oxford University, author of, among others, "Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy", "The Infinity Puzzle", and "Neutrino"