Author: Dashun Wang Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108492665 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
This is the first comprehensive overview of the exciting field of the 'science of science'. With anecdotes and detailed, easy-to-follow explanations of the research, this book is accessible to all scientists, policy makers, and administrators with an interest in the wider scientific enterprise.
Author: DK Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1465439277 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 735
Book Description
Now in Paperback! Take science to a whole new level. Created in partnership with Prentice Hall, the Big Idea Science Book is a comprehensive guide to key topics in science falling into four major strands (Living Things, Earth Science, Chemistry, and Physics), with a unique difference — a website component with 200 specially created digital assets that provide the opportunity for hands-on, interactive learning.
Author: Julia I. Lane Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804781605 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 658
Book Description
Basic scientific research and technological development have had an enormous impact on innovation, economic growth, and social well-being. Yet science policy debates have long been dominated by advocates for particular scientific fields or missions. In the absence of a deeper understanding of the changing framework in which innovation occurs, policymakers cannot predict how best to make and manage investments to exploit our most promising and important opportunities. Since 2005, a science of science policy has developed rapidly in response to policymakers' increased demands for better tools and the social sciences' capacity to provide them. The Science of Science Policy: A Handbook brings together some of the best and brightest minds working in science policy to explore the foundations of an evidence-based platform for the field. The contributions in this book provide an overview of the current state of the science of science policy from three angles: theoretical, empirical, and policy in practice. They offer perspectives from the broader social science, behavioral science, and policy communities on the fascinating challenges and prospects in this evolving arena. Drawing on domestic and international experiences, the text delivers insights about the critical questions that create a demand for a science of science policy.
Author: John Horgan Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465050859 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.
Author: Jeremy J. Baumberg Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691174350 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
A revealing and provocative look at the current state of global science We take the advance of science as given. But how does science really work? Is it truly as healthy as we tend to think? How does the system itself shape what scientists do? The Secret Life of Science takes a clear-eyed and provocative look at the current state of global science, shedding light on a cutthroat and tightly tensioned enterprise that even scientists themselves often don't fully understand. The Secret Life of Science is a dispatch from the front lines of modern science. It paints a startling picture of a complex scientific ecosystem that has become the most competitive free-market environment on the planet. It reveals how big this ecosystem really is, what motivates its participants, and who reaps the rewards. Are there too few scientists in the world or too many? Are some fields expanding at the expense of others? What science is shared or published, and who determines what the public gets to hear about? What is the future of science? Answering these and other questions, this controversial book explains why globalization is not necessarily good for science, nor is the continued growth in the number of scientists. It portrays a scientific community engaged in a race for limited resources that determines whether careers are lost or won, whose research visions become the mainstream, and whose vested interests end up in control. The Secret Life of Science explains why this hypercompetitive environment is stifling the diversity of research and the resiliency of science itself, and why new ideas are needed to ensure that the scientific enterprise remains healthy and vibrant.
Author: Diarmid A. Finnegan Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press ISBN: 0822988399 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 285
Book Description
For many in the nineteenth century, the spoken word had a vivacity and power that exceeded other modes of communication. This conviction helped to sustain a diverse and dynamic lecture culture that provided a crucial vehicle for shaping and contesting cultural norms and beliefs. As science increasingly became part of public culture and debate, its spokespersons recognized the need to harness the presumed power of public speech to recommend the moral relevance of scientific ideas and attitudes. With this wider context in mind, The Voice of Science explores the efforts of five celebrity British scientists—John Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley, Richard Proctor, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Henry Drummond—to articulate and embody a moral vision of the scientific life on American lecture platforms. These evangelists for science negotiated the fraught but intimate relationship between platform and newsprint culture and faced the demands of audiences searching for meaningful and memorable lecture performances. As Diarmid Finnegan reveals, all five attracted unrivaled attention, provoking responses in the press, from church pulpits, and on other platforms. Their lectures became potent cultural catalysts, provoking far-reaching debate on the consequences and relevance of scientific thought for reconstructing cultural meaning and moral purpose.
Author: Patricia Fara Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191655570 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 782
Book Description
Science: A Four Thousand Year History rewrites science's past. Instead of focussing on difficult experiments and abstract theories, Patricia Fara shows how science has always belonged to the practical world of war, politics, and business. Rather than glorifying scientists as idealized heroes, she tells true stories about real people - men (and some women) who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, and who trampled down their rivals in their quest for success. Fara sweeps through the centuries, from ancient Babylon right up to the latest hi-tech experiments in genetics and particle physics, illuminating the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and publishing enterprises that have made science the powerful global phenomenon that it is today. She also ranges internationally, illustrating the importance of scientific projects based around the world, from China to the Islamic empire, as well as the more familiar tale of science in Europe, from Copernicus to Charles Darwin and beyond. Above all, this four thousand year history challenges scientific supremacy, arguing controversially that science is successful not because it is always right - but because people have said that it is right.
Author: James Davison Hunter Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300196288 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
Why efforts to create a scientific basis of morality are neither scientific nor moral In this illuminating book, James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky trace the origins and development of the centuries-long, passionate, but ultimately failed quest to discover a scientific foundation for morality. The "new moral science" led by such figures as E. O. Wilson, Patricia Churchland, Sam Harris, Jonathan Haidt, and Joshua Greene is only the newest manifestation of that quest. Though claims for its accomplishments are often wildly exaggerated, this new iteration has been no more successful than its predecessors. But rather than giving up in the face of this failure, the new moral science has taken a surprising turn. Whereas earlier efforts sought to demonstrate what is right and wrong, the new moral scientists have concluded, ironically, that right and wrong don't actually exist. Their (perhaps unwitting) moral nihilism turns the science of morality into a social engineering project. If there is nothing moral for science to discover, the science of morality becomes, at best, a feeble program to achieve arbitrary societal goals. Concise and rigorously argued, Science and the Good is a definitive critique of a would-be science that has gained extraordinary influence in public discourse today and an exposé of that project's darker turn.
Author: Bruno Latour Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674792913 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
From weaker to stronger rhetoric : literature - Laboratories - From weak points to strongholds : machines - Insiders out - From short to longer networks : tribunals of reason - Centres of calculation.
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Author: Dashun Wang
Author: DK
Author: Julia I. Lane
Author: John Horgan
Author: Jeremy J. Baumberg
Author: Diarmid A. Finnegan
Author: Patricia Fara
Author: James Davison Hunter
Author: Jay Ingram
Author: Bruno Latour