History of Science

Cosmology is in crisis. The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A phi...

First published in 1986, this is the story of the analysis of starlight by astronomical spectroscopy. Beginning with Joseph Fraunhofer's discovery ...

Constructing Race helps unravel the complicated and intertwined history of race and science in America. Tracy Teslow explores how physical anthropo...

Science in the Arctic changed dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century, when early, scattered attempts in the region to gather knowle...

Gold Award Winner, 2024 Nonfiction Book AwardsRunner-up, 2024 History category, San Francisco Book FestivalRunner-up, 2024 General Non-Fiction, New...

The present book discusses the prizes in physiology or medicine 1963-65. The 1963 prize recognized milestone discoveries in the field of neuroscien...

This book examines the interplay between astronomy and dynastic power in the course of ancient Egyptian history, focusing on the fundamental role o...

From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Terracotta Army, ancient artifacts have long fascinated the modern world. However, the importance of some discover...

The forgotten story of a surprising anti-imperial, nationalist project at the turn of the twentieth century: a grassroots movement of Russian Jews ...

The astronomical observations of William Herschel (17381822) made him question the accepted model of the clockwork universe. This volume explains t...

Challenging traditional accounts of the origins of astrophysics, this book presents the first scholarly biography of nineteenth-century English ama...

Ockham's razor, the principle of parsimony, states that simpler theories are better than theories that are more complex. It has a history dating ba...

The Cavendish Laboratory is arguably the most famous physics laboratory in the world. Founded in 1874, it rapidly gained a leading international re...

The advent of sensitive high-resolution observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation and their successful interpretation in terms of t...

The advent of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in the early 1970s was one of the most important events in twentieth-century science. This book examines...

The conceptualization of the vital force of living beings as a kind of breath and heat is at least as old as Homer. The assumptions that life and l...

The large-scale structure of the Universe is dominated by vast voids with galaxies clustered in knots, sheets, and filaments, forming a great 'cosm...

It is now forty years since the discovery of AIDS, but its origins continue to puzzle doctors, scientists and patients. Inspired by his own experie...

This is the story of one of the most far-reaching human endeavors in history: the quest for mental well-being. From its origins in the eighteenth c...

Beginning in the 1870s, migrant groups from Russia's steppes settled in the similar environment of the Great Plains. Many were Mennonites. They bro...

This is the first single volume about the collapse theories of quantum mechanics, which is becoming a very active field of research in both physics...